Time as a Scanning Illusion

A diagram of stellar evolution — a visual metaphor for sequences created by scanning a totality that itself does not move.

 (from lecture of Guruji at Andhra University on 5th of April 1988):

Consider a Book A, a two-dimensional object, being scanned along a line; consider its sections.

Imagine the scanning line S, moving through time, on which some points are selected and labeled 1, 2, 3, etc.

At “S1”, there is no section of the book.
At “S2”, the book is in the womb, and it is born shortly after.
At “S3”, it has grown to a maximum size.
Between “S3” and “S6”, it is moving down.
After that, it is dwindling in size.
At “S7”, it is dead.
After that, at “S8”, it is no more.

The illusion of birth, growth, movement, death of the book are all created by the scanning process.

For us, three-dimensional beings, who can see the whole book, it will be ridiculous to say that the book is born at “B” and is dead at “D”.

Moreover, if we changed the scan line, we would see a different birth and death and a different interval of life for the same book.

We, who don't see the evolutionary picture created by the limitation of scanning, see and experience a far richer “book” compared to an individual section of it, even though it is not moving.

Its lack of movement does not imply a lack of richness of experience.

The book has become immortal; it does not move.

There is no motion, no evolution, no flow; yet, also no lack of experience.

The totality of experience exhibits the characteristic of no motion.

Yet, it implies all the dynamics of the world, and more importantly, all possible dynamics of the world, seen from many, many points of view.

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Vira Chandra: Guruji is pointing to this:

Birth and death are not absolute events.

They are effects of how we look.

If you only see thin slices of reality, one after another, it looks like things start, change, and end.

But if you could see the whole at once, nothing is actually appearing or disappearing.

It simply is.

The scanning line is like human perception.

We move through moments.

We cannot see the whole structure of existence in one view.

So we conclude:

“I was born.”
“I am aging.”
“I will die.”

From a larger vantage point, those are descriptions of slices, not of the whole.

From the whole-view, existence is not moving through time.

Time is moving through existence.

This is the key inversion.

When Guruji says the totality has no motion, he does not mean nothing happens.

He means:

All possible happenings already exist as part of a complete field.

Like pages in a book.

You read page by page, but the entire book exists at once.

In this vision:

You are not a traveler inside time.

You are the field in which time appears.

This dissolves existential panic.

Not because “you will live forever” as a person.

But because what you truly are was never born in the first place.

No birth.
No death.
No interruption.

Only appearances changing within an unmoving totality.

Quiet.