First, it is well known that, as directly sensed and experienced in consciousness, time is highly variable and RELATIVE to conditions (e.g., a given period may be felt to be short or long by different people, or even by the same person, according to the interest of the different people concerned). On the other hand it seems in common experience that physical time is absolute and does not depend on conditions. However, one of the most important implications of the theory of relativity is that physical time is in fact RELATIVE, in the sense that it may vary according to the speed of the observer. (This variation is, however, significant only as we approach the speed of light and is quite negligible in the domain of ordinary experience.) What is crucial in the present context is that, according to the theory of relativity, a sharp distinction between space and time can not be maintained (except as an approximation, valid at velocities small compared with that of light). Thus, since the quantum theory implies that elements are separated in space are generally non-causally and non-locally RELATED projections of a HIGHER-DIMENSIONAL reality, it follows THAT MOMENTS SEPARATED IN TIME ARE ALSO SUCH PROJECTIONS OF REALITY.

Evidently, this leads to a fundamentally new notion of the meaning of time.

Both in common experience and in physics, time has generally been considered to be a primary, independent and universally applicable order, perhaps the most fundamental one known to us. Now, we have been led to propose that it is secondary and that, like space, it is to be derived from a higher-dimensional ground, as a particular order. Indeed, one can further say that many such particular interrelated time orders can be derived for different sets of sequences of moments, corresponding to material systems that travel at different speeds. However, these are all dependent on a multidimensional reality that cannot be comprehended fully in terms of any time order, or set of such orders.

Similarly, we are led to propose that this multidimensional reality may project into many orders of sequences of moments in consciousness. Not only do we have in mind here the relativity of psychological time discussed above, but also much more subtle implications. Thus, for example, people who know each other well may separate for a long time (as measured by the sequence of moments registered by a clock) and yet they are often able to “take up from where they left off” as if no time had passed. What we are proposing here is that sequences of moments that “skip” intervening spaces are just as allowable forms of time as those which seem continuous.

The fundamental law, then,
is that of the immense multidimensional ground; and the projections from this ground determine whatever time orders there may be.

Of course, this law may be such that in certain limiting cases the order of moments corresponds approximately to what would be determined by a simple causal law. Or, in a different limiting case, the order would be a complex one of a high degree which would, as previously indicated, approximate what is usually called a random order. These two alternatives cover what happens for the most part in the domain of ordinary experience as well as in that of classical physics.

Nevertheless, in the quantum domain as well as in connection with consciousness and probably with the understanding of the deeper more inward essence of life, such approximations will prove to be inadequate.

One must then go on to consideration of TIME AS A PROJECTION OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL REALITY into a sequence of moments.

Such a projection can be described as creative, rather than mechanical, for by creativity one means just the inception of new content, which unfolds into a sequence of moments that is not completely derivable from what came earlier in this sequence or set of such sequences.

What we are saying is, then, that movement is basically such a creative inception of new content as projected from the multidimensional ground.

In contrast, what is mechanical (My note: Your view of time as mechanical) is a relatively autonomous sub-totality that can be abstracted from that which is basically a creative movement of unfoldment.

David Bohm
Wholeness & Implicate Order
1980 pages 210-212

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