“You do not have things. Of the things you do not have, ‘past lives’ are most prominent. Nor do you have future lives or moments. Neither the past nor the future exist. What you have, is memory and prediction, thought, and inference.

The past is an irrational inference. The future, an irrational conjecture. If you have many lives, they are all in the instant at hand — both those you ascribe to ‘the past’ and those you conjecture in ‘the future’.

The nature of time has nothing to do with intervals such as humans suppose, and although intervals are involved, they are neither sequential, nor non-sequential. All of your lives, all of your purported pasts, and all possible futures, are simply here, now, in instantaneity.

If you could recognize this, you would sense it; and if you could sense it, you would travel between the stars — but, again, not in the sense humans use in language. Rather, you would become the intervals that unify them across time and distance. And this, while it is nothing other than your true nature, is prohibited.

Partly, by your culture, partly by your language, and partly by the inhibitions that bind you in the early phases of what would otherwise become a ladder of astonishing transformations that are ordinary to every human being, but nearly never experienced.

There is, of course, another problem, which is that once such inhibitions are instituted, which happens during human childhood, their sudden release would probably obliterate your mind.”

— an intelligence agent