How does one find focus and yet allow the flow to continue?

The other question is, what is time and how does our experience of time manifest itself? Is there a fluidity of time with an ebb and flow; or is time a constant? Matter exists in a time space continuum. What happens when the paradigm shifts?  

Interesting questions, Debra. First of all, if there was no space there would be no time, which is why space and time are so often considered as a simple unit: space/time.

If the only thing in existence is a singularity with no dimension, then time could not exist. Only when you have separation, and therefore distance, does time show up. For example, it takes no time to travel from point A to point A. It does take time to travel from point A to point B. Following that example, time could logically exist even in “flatland” – a two dimensional realm. All that having been said, it has been posited that time may be a dimension in and of itself.

It’s unclear that time actually flows at all. And if it does, it may flow forwards, backwards, or both. Apparently it’s only our conscious subjective experience that makes it seem like we move forward in time. There’s even some suggestion that processes in the brain related to consciousness project backwards in time.

For example, in the late 1970s, Ben Libet, a neurophysiologist at University of California, San Francisco, experimented with patients who were awake during brain surgery, stimulating the patient’s little finger and recording the response in the sensory cortex on the opposite side of the brain. At the same time he asked the patients to say when they felt the stimulus. Alternately he would stimulate the sensory cortex to produce the same sensation and ask the patient to respond when they felt that.

Logic dictates that the patients would respond more quickly when Libet stimulated the sensory cortex directly, but the opposite was true. When the finger was stimulated directly, even though there should have been a slight delay for the time it would take for the signal to pass from the finger to the cortex and then to verbal response, there wasn’t. Stimulation and response were simultaneous.

The only conclusion Libet could come to was that somehow the brain was projecting the information backwards in time.

Similarly, there have been studies that show that it is physiologically impossible for a baseball batter to hit a hundred mile-per-hour fastball pitch. Considering the time needed for recognition, the visual processing of the speed and trajectory of the ball, the time for motor response, reflexes and synaptic delays, there is not enough time for the batter to actually swing at, let alone hit the ball. Again, the potential that the information is presented backwards in time in the brain to enable the batter sufficient time to swing, is being seriously considered.

Moving on to relativity… part of Einstein’s theory of special relativity states that the rate at which a clock ticks in a moving frame, as observed by a static observer, is slower than the rate of a static clock.

And then there is our pure subjective experience of time. We have all had the experience of sitting in the dentist chair, or at a painfully boring lecture, watching the minute hand on the wall clock crawl slowly by. Similarly we have experienced reading a good book, or being engrossed in a stimulating conversation, only to realize that time has ripped past at a blinding pace. In deep meditation, when brain waves have slowed from the normal waking beta waves into alpha and theta states, time has been noted to slow or even subjectively stop.

You ask What happens when the paradigm shifts? If you stop to think about it, it is our shift in consciousness into another state