Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000

Phenomenization III Thrice Upon a Time

Time has three dimensions, as does space. We cannot ’see’ any of the time dimensions. A clock or calendar measures the ’passing’ of time equally well in all three, just as a rule measures distances in any of the three spatial dimensions with equal ease.

Any apparent conceptual problems and mysteries associated with imaginary time disappear when you realize that you can only experience one immeasurably small instant consisting of all three temporal dimensions.

Classical and Relativistic calculations and expectations and common sense model past and future events along the dimension of ordinary time, whilst Magickal and Quantum calculations and expectations model probabilistic events on the plane of imaginary time orthogonal to ordinary time.

The above represents the original intuition which eventually led to a rigorous model with testable predictions.

Commentary 42

Two dimensions (a plane) of imaginary time provides a field in which many possible pasts and futures can exist as probabilities. (They also provide unlimited possible parallel universes to the present moment which cannot interact with each other or us.) A single dimension of imaginary time would only allow a single possible alternative event.

Three dimensions of time also arise from general considerations of symmetry, and can also supply an explanation of the properties of so-called fundamental particles, as we shall show in the hyperwarp chapters.

We seem to have got that right more or less by intuition. The mathematical confirmation however proved time consuming and very painful.

The guess about universes parallel to the present not interacting did not prove entirely accurate. Quantum superposition provides a clear example of phenomena with the same spatial coordinates having slightly different coordinates in orthogonal (sideways or ’imaginary’) time.

Thus objects can apparently exist in two contradictory states simultaneously in the same place in space, but only because they exist in two slightly different ’places’ in sideways time.