One additonal thought. In a real sense with regard to consciouness itself, there is no such thing as non-existence, because non-existence must be defined in terms of the existing. By itself non-existence cannot stand alone, it means nothing at all…it is, like all knowledge, a semantic construct of the consciious which relates only to the existing universe….

Complete parentheses

previous, not precious!

When I recall that experience, I wonder if death might be like that – the ultimate temporal discontinuity. When you are dead, any finite amount of time will pass instantaneously. Twenty billion years or eight hundred googleplex years, it doesn’t matter. As far as we know, consciousness ends permanently at death, effectively erasing time and pulling the plug on the universe. As long as it’s finite, the universe will be over and gone as if it had never existed. A brief dream, and a dream without a dreamer has no chance of being remembered. On the other hand, if time extends infinitely into the future…”

The only reason this experience made an impression on you was that time for the universe as observed and measured by others, and eventually and indisputably noted by you, had continued, while your “plug had been pulled”.

You had enough perpective on what happened to be kind of shocked by becomming a mini-Rip Van Winkle. I was overseas for 10 solid years (and fully conscious!) but when I came back home to the USA had a very similar kind of (shocking) experience. Street corners didn’t even look the same. Buildings were gone. Other new buidings had been constructed. Even the mentality of the country had changed. I won’t even discuss the changes in technology. I still perfectly remembered the procedures for operating my business, but none of what I “knew” was appropriate any more…I had to re-learn everything.

This business of consciousness is a very practical matter. Lets look at it another way. Your consciousness never really ceased at all. Time ceased, so now if anybody asks you whether there are places in the universe which are timeless, you can say yes…you know of a place by experience.

I liked your saying that the universe seemed to cease to exist. That has an element of truth, but you were only able to make that observation because you had two different frames of reference (before and after) in which you had roughly the same level of consciousness to compare.

In death there is no passage of time, nor “rest”. Consciousness, the collective consciouness of all living is as eternal as the universe. Your consciouness is no different. This is where the geometry of the universe becomes important. Einstein points to a marginally closed space time.

If Einstein is right, and we sure have some powerful experimental verification of his concept!) after death you will not “awaken” with the full possession of your faculties so you can orient yourself and meditate on the nature of consciouness.

Rather, you will gradually become, after death, aware of your own childhood, with no rememberence whatever of your precious existence. Gradually, you will become almost identical to what you are now, but that will seem to be your “only” life…just as much as your present one. In a sense, we live in an eternal present…there is only “now”. As Einstein noted: “Time is an illusion”.

In fact this life, that one and the following ones IS your only life! You, like the universe itself, in an Einsteinian geometry have an eternal location in space and time…a UNIQUE location in space and time. When your invariant particulate coordinates come around in the momentum of General Relativity, there you are, forever. Only your scientific knowledge can help you establish a “memory” of the way the universe really is, and understand that from your 4D frame you are actually existing over and over again, forever.

If you, and all of us didn’t eternally exist, we wouldn’t be here talking about it, because we, and the universe would have ceased to exist long ago.

That is a good description of the past, given how much we really don’t know or remember of it. When my daughter was a baby, I had several flashbacks of my little sister at that age. I was four at the time and I remembered that at that age I still remembered being a baby.

Oftentimes it seems like life is a hall of mirrors and we see what we know, but occasionally something gets out of whack and everything is strange, then our instinct is to make it normal again. When this operates on the group level, it manifests as nationalism, religion, or other tribal clustering and the foreign is the other. Our minds like grooves, just sometimes they get too deep and become ruts.

Jeff,

What exists is the energy. Past, present and future are configurations of this energy.

This is reminiscent of the well-known opening sentence from L P Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between ].

This evocative (if somewhat nostalgic and gloomy) novel was later made into a film, starring among others Julie Christie and Alan Bates .

For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this opening, and not curious or energetic enough to click the Wikipedia link, it goes:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

However you subjectively measure it, there is only what there is. Yes, we register events after they happen, just as we see the light from distant stars eons after it’s emitted. The present doesn’t exist as a point, because it would be meaningless to describe a measurement of motion as a point. That would be like a temperature of absolute zero; The complete absence of motion. Although most motion is at the speed of light and our brains process information as frames/thoughts, otherwise it would all blur together, so we do think as a series of points.