Who are we? We are the Organizers. We are the keepers of Time.

Einstein, on the eve of his death, is quoted as having said that "Time is a stubbornly persistent illusion." This is often taken to be the wishful thinking of a man whose own time was running out. But Einstein was smarter than most people.

Schopenhauer had earlier elaborated on his own related observations in writing "The World as Will and Idea." This may well be the illusion that Einstein had in mind.

Modern materialist thinkers have been calling this "the problem of consciousness."

The world exists. Each of us is very much aware of this perception. We take it to be unquestionable reality. It rarely occurs to us to consider whether this might be illusion, or a mere idea. But we may be given pause when we observe that our only conscious awareness of this reality seems to reside inside our own heads.

Until recently there was not much cause or even inclination for anyone to make this observation. It is not a notion that has contributed much to our physical survival. 

This is changing. Our video technology has brought us to the brink of a new era in our perception of reality. More and more of us, donning the headgear and finding ourselves immersed in a Virtual Reality experience, are brought to visceral awareness of the degree to which what we experience as real takes place inside our minds.

When you switch that VR headset from Virtual to Real, what changes? The world is still presented to you as images on a tiny screen.  If you take off the headset, all that changes is that you bypass the VR gear and rely on the tiny screens we call the retinas in our eyeballs to pass the images along to you. Either way, the world is presented to you by streams of photons, coming from electrons that are outside of your body.

Photons, electrons. Our whole world of experience boils down to these unimaginably tiny particles. At least, that is the modern materialist understanding. Photons and electrons. Not even close to the complex streaming computer code imagined to represent artificial reality in The Matrix and other movies intended to depict it. Just photons and electrons.

If that's all there is to reality, where does all the concern about our physical survival come from?

It's complicated.

That's it. That's the whole answer. It's complicated. Possibly infinitely complicated, by the mere fact that there are possibly infinitely many photons and electrons. Thus perhaps infinitely difficult to truly comprehend.

Those modern materialist thinkers are careful to not even think much about just how complicated it all is.  Each of them portions off a little piece to try to capture inside their own mind. If they find they need to think outside their little box, they look up a short summary of someone else's thoughts about that bit. Then reduce that if they can to a single thought that fits neatly into their box.

How complicated can this get? By last count there are close to ten billion people in the world. Those materialist thinkers are usually pretty careful not to give too much thought to how much actual complexity ten billion little boxes like their own would add up to. Already far too complicated. And that's just our one little world.

But give them credit. Each of these thinkers is doing their best to organize their own thoughts into a sensible pattern. After all, it's in the job description. In fact, it IS the job description. 

But wait, there's more.

Got time for a little math? Suppose each one of those ten billion little boxes is actually about one foot square by six feet high. A tight fit for some of us but easy for most. Then altogether they add up to about sixty billion cubic feet. That makes up a cube about four thousand feet on a side. Less than a cubic mile. 

Some enterprising individual could build such a box and convince all of our ten billion Organizers to jump in.  Put the lid on the box and drop it off somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where it will be out of the way. No more problems from those pesky buggers.
[I should credit Van Loon's Geography as my source for this idea. All I had to do was update the math a tiny bit.]

But wait! you remind me. There's more, right?

Yes there is. All those thoughts we packed away in that box seemed to have encompassed the entire universe as we know it.  But the universe is still there, isn't it? Of course. Only now it's all captured in the minds of other thinking beings; dogs, cats, rabbits, rats, what have you. We're not going to pack all of them up in boxes, are we?

No need. None of them are going to spare much time thinking about the infinite universe, or stirring up other kinds of imaginary trouble. They don't seem to be much inclined to think beyond their next meal. Still, it's pretty clear that they have to count among the Organizers, if only to make sure that next meal is available.

So let's cut to the chase. Those pesky people we put in the big box were not the only Organizers. Not even close. Even dogs and cats are newcomers to the scene. Who were the original Organizers? Not to put too fine a point on it, let's say atoms. In their own inscrutable way, those atoms came up with the idea of organizing electrons into a variety of useful arrangements. Which we can say was a first step on the way to organizing atoms into dogs and cats. And people.

Organizers. Keepers of Time. Remember Einstein? His stubbornly persistent illusion? What do you suppose he really meant by that? His whole big deal was Spacetime, the conceptualization of reality as a sequence of events. He identified some basic mathematical ideas about how the location of events in the dimensions of space evolve through the dimension of time. Where's the illusion in that? Ask your dog. 

Dogs live in the same world we do. They seem to know something about time. Most dog owners know that their pets have some kind of internal timekeeper that tells them what's supposed to happen next: walk time, meal time, couch time. But what is time to a dog other than a sense about how things are organized, including the sequence of events? Isn't that pretty much what it's all about? Pretty much.

We have a number of ways of referring to what we think of as records of the sequence of events. Chief among these is memory. We each have our own internal memories, remembrances of past events which we can bring to mind newly (with varying degrees of difficulty and uncertainty). 

We also have what we think of as physical records of events. We pick up a note or a book. We may think of this record keeping device as 'old', something we have kept from a time past. We can have a variety of objects, at hand or at some remembered location, each offering us some sort of information, to which we would assign different degrees of 'old'.  

But we need to be wary of such assigned ages. The artifact we hold in our hands is not old in any truly physical sense. It exists in present time right along with us. It continues to exist through time second by second, minute by minute, just as we do. The term 'old' relates an object to its own prior existence, a circumstance that no longer applies.

Think about that. We actually know nothing of a past. We know nothing of a future. All we know is Now. The rest is illusion, just as Einstein said. And all we know of Now is what we have in mind at this moment. Which Einstein might insist is just one event in an infinite spacetime.

Mind. Or Spirit if you prefer. It is the definition of our individual existence. And it comprises nothing more than the organization of our awareness of events into natural sequences and relationships. Identification of similarities and differences. A more or less logical progression from one to the next. Establishment of levels of organization.

Each of us, each individual, is an awareness occupying a point in Einstein's spacetime. Taken altogether, such awarenesses add up to a whole universe of awareness. We are the universe attempting to understand its own nature. We are the Organizers, the Facilitators, the keepers of the illusion of time. 

At every level, that is the intent. Putting the house in order. Step by step. Will and idea. 

Time is the illusion of the continuity and flow of this process. The stubbornly persistent illusion.