No time but space

The rug stretches in every direction further than you can see.

The colors of the rug form shapes, with each color fading into the one next to it. When you look closely at a piece of color, you see that the color is itself also made of patterns of colors fading into each other.

If you look even closer, you discover that at the very smallest scale, points of color randomly dot the rug without fading into each other in the way that colors do at larger scales.

The rug is so large that every possible combination of color exists somewhere on it. Everything that exists or could exist is just a smudge of color.

In fact, another way to understand the rug is that it is a display of every possible combination of colored shapes. If a shape cannot be found anywhere on the rug, the combination of colors is not possible.

The subtle rules about which colors can exist next to any given color on the rug are what determine the structure of all the shapes of color on the rug.

Here the important point is that every pattern of color on the rug always exists. The rug has no beginning and no end. The rug never changes. The rug is the totality of all that is possible, excluding the totality of all that is impossible. Everything that has happened or will ever happen is on the rug, always.

Now imagine an ant on this rug. As an ant, you have certain limitations. You can only see a small section of the rug.

While nothing prevents an ant like you from taking any path you please on the rug, at each point some directions are more likely than others.

Some directions are so unlikely that you would almost never take them, even if many opportunities existed to do so.

The likelihood of going directly backward is closer to zero than you can imagine. Time does not unfold in reverse, even though in principle it could.

Your path as an ant never passes over the same point on the rug twice.

At least one of your little ant-legs is always firmly planted on the rug. You never leap from region to region.

The trail that every ant draws across the rug reveals how probabilities are configured.

There is no reason or cause for one direction to be more probable than another, just as there is no reason or cause for what is possible on the rug.

Although you as an ant are aware of surrounding regions, the focus of consciousness itself is a single point of the ant-path. Consciousness is too limited to include the entire ant-path.

That single point creates the sense of "here-now". The here-now point only knows itself, but all here-now points exist on the rug, just as all possibilities exist.

Time and consciousness are figments of each other. Consciousness is the choice of a single path. Time is a single chosen path. Without consciousness, time is only the rug, a vast field of possibilities.

In fact, the tale is even stranger. There is no ant, only a trail, and the trail itself has no substance; just an imaginary curve cutting across the rug, a possible way of seeing how one place on the rug connects with another.