Two Cycles and One Gaze - Why Time Exists Only When There Is Difference

Time is not something that flows — it is something that is compared.

Every temporal experience is born from the difference between two cycles and the presence of an observer.

1. The Starting Point — Time as a Relationship

Physicist André often reminds us that time is always tied to gravity.
In relativity, time is not absolute — it bends, stretches, or contracts depending on the gravitational field.
But gravity is only one way of creating differences between cycles.
Time, in essence, emerges when two rhythms fail to coincide, and something — or someone — measures that difference.

When we look into the cosmos, distant galaxies appear duplicated or distorted.
Gravity bends light, and this curvature creates two distinct optical paths.
The same event (a galaxy) reaches us with two different times.
The observer, upon receiving these two signals, perceives the interval between them — and it is within that interval that time appears.

But we don’t need a black hole to see this.
Simply look through two glass panes separated by air: light reflects and refracts in slightly different ways, creating duplicated images.
Again, we have two propagation cycles and one observational point that integrates them both.

Thus, time is neither substance nor line nor clock — it is relation.
It arises between cycles, through comparison, within difference.

2. Time as a Phenomenon of Interference

Every physical or biological system knows time only because it receives signals from distinct trajectories.
In physics, this appears as wave interference: in the double-slit experiment, the luminous pattern directly results from the phase shift between two possible paths of the same particle.
In the brain, something remarkably similar happens all the time.

Each cortical area oscillates in its own rhythm — alpha, theta, gamma.
Consciousness is the field in which these rhythms reference one another.
What we call “now” is the moment when multiple neural cycles temporarily synchronize — a fleeting coherence between differences.
When coherence breaks, we feel time passing.

In EEG, this appears as synchronization and desynchronization between regions.
In NIRS, as hemodynamic fluctuations delayed relative to the electrical signal.
Neural time is literally the difference between physiological energy pathways — electrical and optical — measured from a common reference point: the conscious observer.

3. Turning, Breathing, Accelerating — Human Experiments of Time

Our body is a living laboratory of relativity.
There are simple — and safe — experiences that demonstrate how time depends on cyclic references and the bodily point of observation.

a) Spinning on one’s own axis

When we spin for a few seconds, the fluid in the inner ear (endolymph) keeps moving even after we stop.
The brain, seeking coherence, switches reference frames: now it interprets the room as spinning.
Spatial time inverts — the world seems to move while the body seems still.
The observer and the observed exchange places, and time changes its perceptual direction.

b) Tunnel vision

At extreme speed or under acute stress, the body enters a state of narrow focus.
Peripheral vision fades; attention compresses toward the center.
The brain increases its sampling rate — more frames per second — and subjective time slows down.
The “now” elongates because there are more internal cycles per unit of external time.

c) Breathing

Inhaling and exhaling are humanity’s oldest biological clocks.
Each breath marks the tempo of attention.
Slow breathing synchronizes brainstem rhythms with cortical theta oscillations; subjective time expands, and the present deepens.
Under anxiety, the pattern reverses: shallow breath, rapid cycles, and time slips away.
To breathe is to recalibrate the clock of consciousness.

d) Stress and dopamine

Dopamine regulates expectation — it marks when to anticipate pleasure.
Under stress, noradrenaline dominates — speeding the heart, narrowing focus, multiplying cycles.
Under pleasure, dopamine regulates prediction intervals, making time feel smooth.
Each molecule acts as a metronome — a chemical beat of experience.

4. Time as an Attentional Phenomenon

Attention is the space where time is built.
Each conscious focus lasts about 200–400 milliseconds — the interval of a Tensional Self, as explored in Math Hep.
Within this window, the brain integrates multiple cycles: visual perception, heartbeat, respiration, short-term memory.

In the mind, each attentional focus differentially amplifies our senses and memories, selecting distinct bodily cycles linked to those perceptual pathways. Thus, the time of consciousness is never singular — it fragments and recomposes itself according to the senses and memories the body chooses to amplify.

When these rhythms align, time disappears — we enter flow (Zone 2).
When they diverge, time fragments — urgency, boredom, or distraction arises.
Attention is, therefore, the internal observer of the body’s cycles.
It creates subjective time by comparing its own fluctuations.

5. Physical, Biological, and Cognitive Time

These three forms of time coexist and mirror one another.

These levels interlace like waves.
A fast-beating heart alters cognitive perception.
An intense emotion shifts biological time.
A gravitational distortion, if perceived, reshapes mental time.
Everything reduces to relation — to cycles and to the choice of reference.

6. The Observational Point and the Creation of Time

The observer is more than the one who sees: it is the one who chooses where to measure.
The moment a fixed point appears, a scale is born — before and after, inside and outside.
Time, therefore, is a form of consciousness.
It exists so the mind can distinguish movement from permanence, change from stability.

When we shift our point of reference, we change our time.
Spinning on the axis, breathing slowly, watching the sky, feeling the heartbeat — each act alters time because it relocates the observer.
Just as a double glass pane or a gravitational field creates two optical paths, consciousness creates two perceptual trajectories: the body that feels and the world that is felt.

7. Synthesis – Time as a Relational Phenomenon

Time is not an entity that flows outside us.
It is the space between cycles, the echo between trajectories, the interval where perception is born.

In physics, two light beams curved by gravity reveal cosmic time.
In biology, two electrical pulses reveal bodily time.
In the mind, multiple attentional foci reveal the time of consciousness.

At every level, time is comparison.
It arises from contrast — the measured difference between rhythms, always from a point that observes.

8. Conclusion – The Time We Are

When we understand that time is relational, we stop searching for it in clocks and begin to feel it within the body.
Time is the space between inhalation and exhalation, between heartbeat and thought.
It is the gap between the gaze that sees and the gaze that understands.
Just as galaxies curve under gravity, we bend under meanings.

Every difference we perceive is a fold in the fabric of time.
And every consciousness that recognizes itself as a point of observation becomes the very clock of the universe.

“Two cycles and one gaze — that’s all the cosmos needs to begin telling the story of itself.”