Time (like wavelengths, and even hexagons) doesn’t really exist except that matter, from moment to moment, clings to it. Time, admittedly, is not a shape or a pattern — at least not three-dimensional — but matter does form itself around time from moment to moment. Matter takes form again and again around time just like the cells of our body regenerate over and over again, replicating themselves almost without mutation according to our genetic pattern.
Time, then, is qualia. It is another construction — a mental construction although we didn’t really invent it — which helps us understand the order of things. As with most complex scientific concepts, nature seems to conform to them.
At some point, those of us with a qualiadelic consciousness come to wonder if some of our own, human inventions, will bend the constructions which have evolved “naturally” to order the universe. But it seems that, if the concept is not already a part of the universe, it won’t bend the system much – no more, perhaps, than epigenetics effects DNA. Epigenetics only effects gene expression, and our ideas only affect the way the forces of nature express themselves so that we can sense them.
What we can sense is what we think we know, and all we know is a distortion of the Tao. We know landscapes, and we find that landscapes are unreliable, and even dangerous. We have evolved with landscapes, and so we live in the stream of time – what we know, what our senses and thoughts tell us, is to be cautious, wary, and fearful.
If we can step out of the stream of time we can be happy. If we can move beyond landscapes, and into ecosystems, we can be happy. If we can let go of matter, and put our faith in qualia, we can be happy.