Ti-Ming - The Theory of Everything (Reprint)

Perhaps as old as the universe itself, Ti-Ming accounts for a goodly portion of everything that exists. The discipline of Ti-Ming has been preached by many and practiced by few for thousands of years, in palace gardens and village hovels. Ti-ming is so important to life as we know it, that it has been given it's own dimension, right along with height width, and depth. And that is where the pity begins.

Timing is everything. It is an axiom of all life on earth, and expressed in various forms in every language. Every battle that has ever been won, or heart lost, has been at the whim of Timing, and acknowledged as the great decider yes or no, success or failure, even here or there. To say that it is a dimensions such as the width of an object is both misleading and belittling to something as valuable as timing, without which neither space nor substance could exist at all.

I have seen personal fates mortally altered by the dropping of a coin, and studied histories that came crashing down as the result of the act of an instant. Every instance is printed on the film of time, not a moment in the past but a version of right now that has already happened. It contains the depth and length of every moment, defining it as the container in which the other perceptions are locked, not a partner in their presence.

Without the timing of the seasons, or even the spin of the planet around the sun, it couldn't have happened at all. This is not obscure philosophy, but a statement of fact so basic that most would never notice it at all. And yet our very existence depends on not just one such instant of time, but an entire sequence of them stretching back to the moment of the Big Bang itself. Each one a direct and necessary result of the ones that came before it.

Without the element of time, there is no touch, no taste, no sense of cold or sound of the wind. Sound itself is a feature of something traveling directly across the field of time. The idea that even space could share equally in something as powerful as time is a mistaken impression of the very nature of time itself.

Light itself is helpless in the absence of time. there can be no movement, leaving light as frozen in an instant as if it didn't exist at all. Time defines the movement of the smallest particles, and the largest masses, it played a apart in the very act of creation in every way we have ever imagined. Without time, there can no creation, regardless of the form that creation may take. Nothing of which we have any concept at all exists outside of the container that is time. Nothing.

Length can be zero, as well as depth and width. Dimensions can be eliminated from the equation, narrowing down each variable until you reach a point in time where nothing exists. But that was a point in time, because even time could not be removed until there was nothing else left, and only then because time would become meaningless, not because it would cease to exist.

Time controls gravity, and regulates magnetism. It causes elements to decay, and unleashes both the fury of storms and the majesty of snow capped mountains.

Never forget that. Ti-Ming is everything. In Ti-Ming, all other things exist, but none can exist without it. The smallest instant is but a representation of the much larger fabric of time, which stretches to the very ends of space itself.