We all know that the idea of a phenomenal self is altogether dependent on memory. From memories the notion has been built up, as a house is constructed of bricks.
Memory is a series of records - photographs if you will - of sense perceptions of past presents. Therefore it is subject to Time. Without Time there could be no memory, outside Time the notion of memory makes nonsense for there could be nothing to remember (since one cannot remember an absolute present).
The unreality of Time was realised by several of the Greek philosophers, and, in our civilisation, by Immanuel Kant, who recognised it as a fabrication of our receptive apparatus. Modern science has arrived at this conception and has linked it with Space. The Enlightened, of all races and ages, could not fail to know this, and it is implicit, where it is not explicit, in their teaching.
Time is basically a spatial concept, and is essentially the measure of movement. Ouspensky saw it as our interpretation of the limiting dimension. We, or quadripeds, reptiles or birds, can only see the superior dimension, that which lies beyond those to which our senses are attuned, in series, as one thing after another, and so in movement which, in the sense in which we use the term habitually it measures, or can be used to measure by means of mechanical appliances. It is, therefore, ultimately a measure of Space-interpreted-as-movement.
Analysing the matter still more closely, the notion of Movement may be an interpretation - erroneous in a sense, and so a misinterpretation - of angles in the superior dimension, and what the senses perceive, or appear to perceive in our mind-made universe, is dependent on angles - straight lines and circles being theoretical only. If we care to imagine a duodimensional being encountering an angle, such angle necessarily being in the third (superior) dimension, he would presumably be dumbfounded, and as he approached it the object would appear to move (though it would be himself who was in fact in movement).
Starting from the notion of a self or ego we have reached the origin of this concept, tracing it from notion to notion, each notion derived from another, through five degrees of interpretation until we arrived at a direction of measurement of Space inaccessible to our sense-perceptions and interpreted as Movement of which Time is the measure. But Space itself is a notion, and a direction of measurement is only a geometrical conception. It is a column of smoke in which the only reality is the 'I' which poses the question.
