The Present Creates Past and Future: Spacetime Is Observed Into Being

The Present Creates Past and Future: Spacetime Is Observed Into Being is a thesis of Beyond-the-Algorithm thinking concerning the nature of time, advanced to answer the question, “Does time really divide into past, present, and future?” The thesis holds that time and space are not pre-given containers but conceptual scales observed into being, and that in their essence they carry no order of before and after. What is genuinely prior is the present that lies before our eyes; both past and future are readings projected outward toward either end from the fulcrum of that present. Its original formulation runs: “It is only because everything is here before your eyes that there comes to be any so-called past and future. You are forever choosing a fulcrum, and in doing so creating different pasts and futures.”

The Present as Fulcrum

This thesis inverts the everyday intuition of time. Common sense holds that the past gives rise to the present and the present leads on to the future, cause and effect flowing like river water from upstream to down. Against this, the order is reversed: it is only because all of this is here before our eyes that there comes to be any so-called past and future. In other words, the past is not the cause of the present but the product of it. Standing on the fulcrum of “now,” a person arranges a coherent past behind and extrapolates a possible future ahead, and both are readings projected out from that fulcrum rather than entities existing independently beyond it.

From this follows the crucial act of “choosing a fulcrum.” A person is “forever choosing a fulcrum, and in doing so creating different pasts and futures”: once the fulcrum shifts, the past and future projected toward either end shift with it. This means the past is not a single version locked in place but a different version regenerated according to where one stands in the present. This account is structurally of one source with Effect Precedes Cause: The Event Casts Its Blueprint Backward: both place the “effect / present” before the “cause / past,” letting what comes after reach back to define what comes before.

Spacetime Is a Scale Observed Into Being

Why can the past and future be created by the present? The Beyond-the-Algorithm premise the thesis offers is this: time and space are not in themselves an objective, pre-given framework, but conceptual scales observed into being. As the note puts it, “Time and space are observed into being; for us this is a scale of concept we have grown familiar with, and so in essence there is no such thing as before and after.”

There are two key points here. The first is that spacetime is “observed into being”—it stands only by virtue of the act of observation; without observation there is no spacetime to serve as a scale. This stance is the extension of Observation Creates Reality: Measurement Collapses It into the dimension of time, and it is rooted in the overarching premise of Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring: since all phenomena are manifested by the Awaring, the spacetime that measures those phenomena is naturally no exception. The second point is that “before and after” is merely a convention internal to this scale—a graduation that people, through familiarity, mistake for something native, rather than a property of the real itself. At the level of the real, so-called “before” and “after” are no more fundamental than so-called “left” and “right”: all of them are only coordinate labels handed down by one particular way of observing.

Frame-Reality and Wholeness

The “frame” serves as a model to depict this observed time. The matter is entered through the experience of gazing up at the stars: “At this very moment I look at a star, and that star and I are one whole… We can choose different frames, and in each frame there is a corresponding reality.” In this picture, the observer and the observed object are not, at the moment observation occurs, two separate ends; they are two faces of one and the same whole—the person looking at the star and that star are, within that frame, a single body.

From here comes a crucial transfer by analogy: if “distance” between objects in space is only a relative appearance within a given frame, why should “distance” in time (the nearness or remoteness of past and future) not be just the same? The question is pressed: “Why should this be true only of the distance between objects? Is it not the same in time as well?”—and this is precisely to carry the relativity of space across into time, thereby dissolving any absolute before and after in time.

Each frame corresponds to “a fixed reality,” yet with one stress: “this reality cannot be perfectly expressed in language.” This qualification carries forward the general verdict on language: language is a tool that comes after the real and cannot fully bear the whole-making reality within each frame. What a person can do is choose between one frame and another, and each choice settles into a concrete reality that nonetheless can never be exhausted by language. As for what threads these discrete frames together so that they appear to be one coherent life, the answer given is cause and effect—cause and effect is the law of connection that strings frame after frame of reality into a continuous narrative, and this dovetails with the view of causality in Every Stirring Thought Creates Cause and Effect: The Causal Web.

The Coordinate System and the Awaring

In another body of notes, the “frame” is abstracted further into a coordinate system. The world is conceived as a multidimensional coordinate system in which “when one alters a certain ‘coordinate,’ the corresponding reality changes.” This is a more formal expression of “choosing a fulcrum” and “choosing different frames”: reality is not a fixed, single thing but a function of the values the coordinates take—change the coordinate and reality changes with it. The everyday temporal dislocation captured in a saying like “a day in heaven, ten years on earth” is here explained as a difference in the scale of time under different coordinate values, rather than as some kind of miracle.

But this coordinate-system model leaves one exception that is not folded into it: “the Awaring alone is not within this coordinate system, and yet it illumines it”—all realities, all pasts and futures, all the graduations of spacetime lie within the coordinate system and change along with the coordinates; the Awaring alone stands outside the coordinate system, the unmoving witness that beholds all the arising and passing within it. (See The Original Awaring: Ontological Consciousness vs. Ordinary Consciousness.) This distinction keeps the thesis from sliding into pure relativism: the spacetime of the phenomenal layer can be observed, chosen, and created, but there is a being—not within spacetime, and not created by it—that is always present. This position of the Awaring, “outside the coordinate system yet beholding what is inside it,” is also the Beyond-the-Algorithm ground that makes “freedom” possible in Before Awakening, Fate Is Fixed; After Awakening, There Is Freedom: that which can choose the fulcrum is precisely the Awaring, which no fulcrum can confine.

Probability as Multidimensional Paths

To regard spacetime as a multidimensional structure of selectable coordinates leads naturally to a rethinking of “probability”: “probability is only some of the paths to the destination in a multidimensional universe, and the good news is that there is always one path that reaches it.” Within a single linear timeline, probability means uncertainty, means the chance of coming up empty; but in the picture of multidimensional coordinates, what we call probability is no more than a few among the many paths leading to one and the same destination—and the destination itself does not vanish because one path proves impassable, for “there is always one path that reaches it.”

This inference gathers the foregoing chapters into a conclusion with a definite direction: since reality is a function of the coordinates, since the present can choose its fulcrum, and since past and future can be projected anew, “arriving” is no longer an accident left to fate but a matter of finding, among the multidimensional paths, the one path that can be walked. It runs along the same line of thought as Time Can Stretch Without Limit: Attention Is the Scarcest Thing of All, where “time can be stretched, and what matters is where attention is directed”—when time is no longer a hard constraint that flows by at a uniform rate, which fulcrum attention rests on, and which path it chooses, become matters more pressing than the mere length of time. The thesis makes no overreaching promise here: it asserts only that “there is always one path,” and as for how to find it, that is left to be considered together with the theses on the algorithm of life and on cause and effect; it is not forced to a close here.

Sources

Manuscript —“It is only because everything is here before your eyes that there comes to be any so-called past and future. You are forever choosing a fulcrum, and in doing so creating different pasts and futures.”
Manuscript —“Time and space are observed into being; for us this is a scale of concept we have grown familiar with, and so in essence there is no such thing as before and after.”
Manuscript —“At this very moment I look at a star, and that star and I are one whole… We can choose different frames, and in each frame there is a corresponding reality. Only this reality cannot be perfectly expressed in language. I wonder: why should this be true only of the distance between objects? Is it not the same in time as well?”
Manuscript —“We can choose different frames, and in each frame there is a corresponding reality. Only this reality cannot be perfectly expressed in language.”
Manuscript —“Probability is only some of the paths to the destination in a multidimensional universe, and the good news is that there is always one path that reaches it!”
Manuscript —“It is because when one alters a certain ‘coordinate,’ the corresponding reality changes… but the Awaring alone is not within this coordinate system, and yet it illumines it.”

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