Outside of time: Ruickbie excerpt #23

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: “Something catches my attention,” recalled Dr. Bettina Peyton as she talked about her near-death experience. It is “twinkling light, like a tiny jewel,” containing her “entire experience, past, present and future, playing out simultaneously.” Her conscious viewpoint – her consciousness – was external to her own time and able to see all of it. She has not been the only one.

Fifty-five year-old anesthesiologist at the University of Texas Health Center, Dr. Gerard Landry had had a conventional twenty-seven-year career in medicine when he died of a heart attack on March 24, 1979. Surprised to find himself still conscious, he described being in “a dimension beyond sequential time” where “past, present, and future are all merged.”

There are so many more experiences that could be quoted in support of this. According to psychiatrist and near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, 75% described the afterlife as outside of time, and, in an earlier study, 53% of OBErs mentioned “timelessness.”

Many different terms have been used to describe the apparent ability to see into the future, such as clairvoyance, precognition, premonition, second sight, and life preview. Whilst the words differ, the essential elements remain the same. People can experience anything from physical and mental symptoms to actual visions, during dreams or wide awake, even whilst clinically dead, of things yet to come. 

If time is like an arrow, then the future has not yet come into existence, therefore nothing can be known about it. I might predict that tomorrow I will be sitting at my computer writing, because I was sitting at my computer yesterday and today, but this is obviously not the same thing.

The content of premonitions is fundamentally different to what we would normally predict based on past actions, that is usually what makes them stand out in the first place. So, we have to think again about the relationship between consciousness and the future, and the nature of the future, of time, itself. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.