Consciousness, Meditation, and the Illusion of Linear Time by Sorelle Miller

Why Seeing Our True Reality Might Just Kill Us

"If we saw reality as it truly is, we wouldn’t survive." Donald Hoffman, Cognitive Scientist

What If the Way We See the World Isn’t Real?
Most of us trust our senses, sight, sound, time ticking on a clock ,as reliable. But cutting-edge science and ancient shamanic teachings agree on something far more confronting:
Reality as you know it is not the truth. It’s a survival shortcut. This idea, rooted in the evolutionary cognitive science of Dr. Donald Hoffman, isn’t just theoretical. It has real implications for how we live, lead, heal, and evolve.

Indigenous cosmologies -from the Aboriginal Dreamtime to the Andean time maps taught by Marcela Lobos and Alberto Villoldo , the Yogi’s, the Buddhists, have known it all along.

The Science: Perception Isn’t About Truth. It’s About Fitness.
In his book The Case Against Reality (2019), Hoffman demonstrates through mathematical models and neuroscience that evolution didn’t shape us to see the truth. Instead, we evolved to see what helps us survive, not what is.


"Seeing reality accurately would be like trying to manage files by seeing all the binary code. It would kill us with complexity." Donald Hoffman
Science has proven those species that do delve into seeing the complexity of reality often become extinct. In other words:
- You don’t see atoms.
- You don’t feel electromagnetic fields.
- You don’t perceive time as it actually flows.
You see icons on a desktop…simplified, filtered representations of a deeper, invisible code.

“Evolution doesn’t favor seeing the truth. It favors fitness, whatever perception helps a species survive, even if it’s false.”

(Hoffman, 2019, The Case Against Reality)

The Illusion of Linear Time
One of the most convincing illusions in our interface is linear time. The belief that time moves in one direction, from past to future underpins everything:
- Psychology (you are shaped by your past)
- Business (strategy happens in quarters)
- Medicine (cause leads to effect)
- Culture (progress is a straight line)

Indigenous knowledge systems have always challenged this.

The Western Illusion: Time as a Line, Self as a Container
In the West, we treat time like currency, something to manage, measure, and waste. The past is our story, the future is our fear, and the present is a productivity zone. We ask, “What happened to me?” not “What is becoming possible through me?”

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues this perspective is not only limited… it’s false. In his Interface Theory of Perception, Hoffman proposes that our experience of space and time is no more real than the icons on your computer desktop. They’re useful, not true. Evolution shaped us to survive, not to see reality.

"We have been shaped to see what helps us pass on our genes, not what’s actually there." Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality (2019)

To Hoffman, time is part of the headset. It’s not fundamental to reality. It’s a user illusion. But what if… instead of dismissing that illusion, you could step outside it?

"Reality is an interface, not the truth." — Donald Hoffman

In Western culture, time is treated like a deadline. In Indigenous culture, time is often treated like a doorway. The Western mind divides time: past vs. future, birth vs. death, trauma vs. healing.

But what if time doesn’t divide?

"Come on, flap your little doctor wings and heal someone in India." Marcela Lobos (quoting an Andean elder)

"Information is knowing water is H₂O. Wisdom is making it rain." Alberto Villoldo

"The Dreaming is always now. It is the all-at-once." Aboriginal Elder David Mowaljarlai

The Shamanic View: Four Kinds of Time and the End of Homo Sapiens
Shamanic traditions don’t just reject linear time — they map its alternatives. In the teachings of Marcela Lobos, time isn’t one-dimensional. It’s layered. Dreamed. Sacred. Shamans of the Andes speak of four distinct kinds of time:

1. Linear Time (Serpent): Physical reality, biological decay, clock-time.
2. Elastic Time (Jaguar): Emotionally perceived time — pain stretches it, bliss collapses it.
3. Dream Time: Non-ordinary reality, ancestral contact, soul retrieval.
4. Sacred Time (Hummingbird): Infinite presence, where quantum healing and destiny creation occur.

In times of planetary crisis, like the Fifth Extinction Event we’re now living through, shamans say something extraordinary happens: evolution accelerates. We don’t evolve between generations -we evolve within them. In other words, you are the species upgrade.

Alberto Villoldo: From Data to Destiny
Dr. Alberto Villoldo began in the lab, studying neurobiology and energy medicine. But he left academia when he realized the lab couldn’t measure soul retrieval or track synchronicity. He journeyed into the Amazon and Andes to apprentice with shamans and brought back not beliefs, but tools.

"Information is knowing water is H₂O. Wisdom is being able to make it rain." Alberto Villoldo

Villoldo teaches that the Luminous Energy Field holds the blueprint of the soul, past, present, and future and it can be updated. Through practices that engage non-linear time, clients can release inherited trauma, transmute fate, and dream a new destiny.

In contrast to Hoffman’s lens (where time is illusory and agency is unclear), Villoldo embraces the illusion as a working interface /not to escape it, but to reprogram it from within. He and Lobos teach how to access sacred time to heal faster, age differently, and die consciously or not at all.

Dreamtime: The Law That Never Ends
Long before cognitive science or Peruvian prophecy, Aboriginal Australians held one of the most sophisticated cosmologies of time, one that’s still alive today.

The Dreaming (or Dreamtime) is not a mythical past. It is a living, continuous eternal present. It’s the place of ancestral creation, spiritual law, and human responsibility.

"In the Dreaming, the past is still present, the future is waiting to be walked, and the earth remembers everything." Yolngu Elder quote (oral tradition)

In Aboriginal knowledge systems:
- Time is non-linear, cyclical, and place-based.
- Songlines (dream tracks) connect land, story, and spirit.
- Healing happens by restoring right relationship to the land, the law, the ancestors.

In contrast to Western pathology models, Aboriginal healing often involves singing the person back into time, realigning them with the Dreaming, not dissecting their past.

This is where Marcela Lobos’ hummingbird meets the Aboriginal Songline: both are messengers of sacred movement. Both remind us, time doesn’t pass. It sings. And we must remember the lyrics.

The Real Question
If time is not a ruler,
If trauma isn’t a wound to fix, but a loop to re-tune...
If the past is singing and the future is listening...
Then the question is not What happened to you?
But what is this perception of time asking you to remember?

The Evolutionary Choice: Interface or Insight?
Here’s the twist: both science and spirit agree, you’re not seeing what’s real.

The shaman says: Don’t just survive in the interface. Learn to use it.
The elder says: Come back to dreaming. It’s still waiting.
The scientist says: Even space-time will soon be replaced in physics. It’s not real.

So you get to choose:
Stay in the interface- reacting, managing, optimizing… or
Step into consciousness- listening, co-creating, remembering.

Why Meditation Matters
Learning to meditate is one of the most accessible ways to begin reorienting your relationship with time and perception. It allows us to step outside of the narrow bandwidth of linear thinking and access deeper layers of presence, memory, and insight.

Meditation gives you the space to slow down and witness your own interface in action. It helps distinguish emotional time from objective time, and gives access to insight that lies beyond conditioned thought.

Practices like breathwork, visualisation, and body scanning train the nervous system to exit the stress-driven loops of linear time and enter a state of relaxed awareness, the gateway to what Marcela Lobos calls "sacred time."

Meditation: Bridging the Interface and the Infinite
Meditation offers a direct, embodied way to experience time differently. It slows the mental interface long enough to reveal other patterns of perception - emotional, intuitive, ancestral. In doing so, it becomes the living bridge between the Western model of time as linear, and Indigenous or shamanic understandings of time as cyclical, sacred, and responsive.

For example, while science may show that time is illusory, meditation makes that truth felt. The mind begins to observe rather than react. Breath replaces the ticking clock. Body awareness collapses future worry and past regret into present sensation.

In Indigenous practice, meditation is not necessarily silent sitting, but movement, song, breath, and connection to land. It is listening deeply. It is remembering. And in modern practice, whether through focused attention, Yoga Nidra, or stillness, we cultivate the same doorway into timeless presence.

This is where all the models converge: in the meditative state, we step beyond the interface. We enter the sacred. We rejoin the dreaming. And we remember that perception is not passive — it's participatory.

Final Thought
Time is not just a ticking clock. It is a beckoning mirror. A path you’re walking and a song you’re singing.

Want to Go Deeper?
- Read: The Case Against Reality (2019) by Donald Hoffman
- Explore: Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000) by Alberto Villoldo
- Listen: Marcela Lobos’ Time Master teachings (online)
- Respectfully engage: With First Nations elders and knowledge holders — their timeways are not metaphors. They are living law.
- Book: An Emergence Session with Pure Consciousness Meditations