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"Temporal extents like one year do exist in the mind, but these extents are our way of holding together in our perceptions a reality which in nature is not an extent but only a flow. Our temporal measuring, our chronometrics, would be pure fiction, unrelated to physical reality, unless prior to chronometrics there is real chronos, real time existing in nature with its own proper mode of physical being. Real distinction of earlier and later, and so real temporal number, exists in physical reality in the indivisible, flowing now. Natural time exists in the flowing now's distinction of before from after. No more of time need or can exist naturally. Successive beings have their being in their proper indivisible principle."1
Alberts Magnus, AKA, Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists. 1200? – 1280 A.D.
Natural Time: What Is It?
Time, simplified, is a construct by which people measure their lives. In the not so distant past, humans lived in synchronicity with the cycles of nature. We still carry this pattern in our cellular memory. An easy resonance with natural cycles has been droned out, however, by round-the-clock access to electricity, the Internet, banking, and the media. These modern conveniences offer the dubious opportunity of never having to rest.
Today, we live by Mechanical Time where the clock outside of us rules. We force our bodies to function as machines, producing on demand and faulting ourselves when our bodies tire.
This mechanistic view of time removes the value of rest as an integral part of the whole creative cycle. Natural Time – a frame of reference that allows us to resonate with the cycles of nature — helps us recover this healthy regard for rest and learn how to predict times when we might need more rest.
It is this predictive value of Natural Time that is most beneficial to us in our work and family lives. When we know in advance that we can expect to feel a natural depletion of energy we are not surprised — and do not fight it — when it comes.
If you are interested in working with natural time, one cycle that you can start paying attention to is your best time of day.
Best time of day
Many people find that their best time of day relates to the time of day they were born. For instance, someone who is born at 5:00 PM works against her own innate energy by forcing herself to be highly functioning early in the morning.
The first step is to recognize if you are working with your inner energies, or working against your inner energies. Do not worry if your outer circumstances do not support your optimum inner sense of timing right now. Awareness is the first step. Allowing for the possibility that change can work in your favour is the next step. Then, making a commitment to explore what a change would involve is the next step. Coming into alignment with Natural Time is a layered process that only requires taking one step at a time.
Recognizing that your best time of day and your work responsibilities may not be in sync can also serve to explain certain current frustrations or difficulties in your life. Know that good change can happen. It starts with awareness.
Is Natural Time the same as biorhythms?
This is a question that I am often asked in my work with Natural Time. The answer is "No!" Biorhythms are based on mathematical formulas that hypothesize cycles of 23, 28, and 33 days as resonant with our physical, emotional, and intellectual lives, respectively.
Natural time is based on our resonance with the cycles of nature, some known, others unknown. Natural Time addresses the weave of cycle upon cycle and the interplay of collective and personal cycles. While some cycles of Natural Time are easily predictive, other cycles require an individual to do his or her own tracking of personal rhythms in order to identify a cycle.
My work with Natural Time is based on helping people attune to their own natural rhythms, erase artificially imposed separation between inner and outer sense of time, and work through challenges that modern life presents in honouring Natural Time. This is a slow, yet highly rewarding, process. The benefits of this work can include increased productivity, more contentment, and a deeper reliance on intuition — the life tool for now.
© 2000-2001 Samten Williams
Efficient Encoding of Natural Time Varying Images Produces Oriented Space-Time Receptive Fields (1997) (Make Corrections) (3 citations)
Rajesh P.N. Rao, Dana H. Ballard
Abstract: The receptive fields of neurons in the mammalian primary visual cortex are oriented not only in the domain of space, but in most cases, also in the domain of space-time. While the orientation of a receptive field in space determines the selectivity of the neuron to image structures at a particular orientation, a receptive field's orientation in space-time characterizes important additional properties such as velocity and direction selectivity. Previous studies have focused on explaining the... (Update)
Context of citations to this paper: More
.... localized receptive fields similar to those of simple cells in the primary visual cortex from natural image inputs (see [ Rao and Ballard, 1997a ] for more details) Although Kalman filters have previously been used in computer vision (see, for example, Blake and...
.... small transformations which can be modeled by extending the MDL error metric to include additional terms, as summarized in Table 1 [ Rao and Ballard, 1997; Rao and Ballard, 1996a; Rao and Ballard, 1998a ] Feature Metric Shift Invariance jjI Gamma Ur Gamma Jxjj 2 Spatio...
Modeling the Self-Organization of Directional Selectivity.. - Farkas, Miikkulainen (1999)
Model of Predictive Coding Based on Spike Timing - Ballard, Rao, Zhang (Correct)
An Optimal Estimation Approach to Visual Perception and Learning - Rao (1999)
from http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/83710.html
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