We have a sense of continuity, which gives us what we call a sense of time. Through our ability to have remembrances of both what's coming and what's happening and what has happened, we begin to piece together a logical picture of the world.

It's very frustrating if you've never had an experience and somebody comes up to you and says, "I've just been on a flying saucer." Your tendency is to think, "Oh, this guy must be wacko, nuts, having an hallucination. None of that can be true because none of that has ever happened to me."

I read that Buddha was able to see all of his past lives, and I realized the only way any of these people could do that is by being outside of time.

We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.

To understand that, we have to begin to imagine what a universe would be like if there wasn't anything in it called Mind. If that was the case, according to quantum physics now, then every possibility would also come into existence as every other possibility.

I want to explain the new alchemy [in the "From Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind and Time"], which has to do with understanding what I call the subjective and objective qualities of existence.

The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer.