From my Swamp Ranger office I've now been cleared by all time councils to share core mechanics of time travel in a first draft (with deliberate omissions and incompletions): not to discount any other disclosures, as the relationship among all will be obvious, but just to spark this spacetime locality with sufficient minimal data to move events along. I often speak tongue in cheek about this, and will continue to be light-hearted, but the topic is also deadly serious and so this primer is in earnest.

Before we discuss time and travel, we must manage expectations about what you want them to be and do. Ultimately the simplest answer is that we want it, or us, to be and do anything, namely we want to be God. This universe is neatly set up such that this one axiom, "being God", is the only undefinable; so it is not revealed if any creature can ever "be God", or not. Mathematically, while Other remains, Self is not God. So, exploring that desire, it turns upon being and doing subsets of what God is and does. In that sense perhaps anything is communicable. We must specialize; and people basically desire two variations, experiencing the improvement of this universe, and experiencing the improvement of other universes.

What is experience? Any interaction between a conscious self and spacetime: and consciousness is the ability to reflect a spacetime subset inside self. (For simplicity we focus on human consciousness; self is itself a subset, allowing also self-consciousness.) Experience has the attribute of continuity in a path of experiences (which we will later show as timelike) that together comprise self. The path is naturally polarized into two directions, "from" and "to", by virtue of the thermodynamic law that one of two directions in any path will have the greater entropy, thus the greater complexity and thus the greater capacity to reflect (i.e., an increase of consciousness from one experience to the "next"). The state where a person has less complexity registered in the brain and mind is the "from" direction, and the greater state is the "to" direction. Improvement is generally understood as the self not just increasing in consciousness capacity, which is natural, but also increasing in the power, resonance, and harmony of the consciousness, since increased complexity might tend either to harmony (detectable order) or to disharmony. Disharmony defers desire.

Because of this risk, time travelers have a duty to take the time traveler's oath, a simple form of which is, "I vow to use my powers only for good." Those who pledge this find their pledge rewarded; others fall prey to ever-increasing tolls of disharmony.

Now then.

Any instant of your present experience is a processing event in a path with a "from" side in which your complexity is lesser and a "to" side in which your complexity is greater. These two general directions are called past and future, and they are isomorphic to negative and positive rays just as the present is isomorphic to the zero point. This naturally allows time to be treated as a fourth dimension measurable similarly to any reference triad of relative spatial dimensions. At any instant the map of the past is called memory and the map of the future is called anticipation. Neither map is perfect. There is a difference, since the past map is of events from Other to Self and the future map is of events from Self to Other. (It's not possible to remember with perfect empathy what happened to someone else, or to anticipate with perfect empathy what someone else will do; these features only work upon Self, and in opposite directions.) Other is by observation the larger of the two, so it's more natural to repeat and retrace that which Other has delivered than it is to repeat and retrace that which Self will deliver, leading to the perception that memory is more accurate than anticipation. However, this is largely illusory, since mentally reviewing a sentence 100 times via memory after it is said has essentially the same effect as mentally reviewing a sentence 100 times via anticipation before it is said. Anticipation is constantly pouring into memory.

Time then is the primary dimension of experience, mapped from past and future but experienced as a present. Change is the experiencing of continuity upon the path in the direction that complexity and entropy increase. One map of the human takes him from the standpoint of the present, as if in a still frame of a movie. Another map of the human is from the standpoint of all time, as if a movie reel full of still frames. Both are equally valid standpoints, and isomorphic, but they affect language; for instance, the movie reel is static and does not "change", but a path from one still frame to another does involve "change".

Travel is change. You are already a time traveler and always have been, which is why I told you about the oath. In one standpoint you are always time-traveling, and in another equally valid standpoint you undergo no time travel at all. These can be called temporal and eternal, even if those are etymologically misleading. For now we are studying the temporal, in which you are traveling at the default rate of one second per second (one second-hertz). Recognizing the travel is your first task as a traveler.

Some have objected here that this much theory is boring because it describes things people are already doing. They neglect to realize that knowing the foundation of what one is doing already is what gives one the power to do things one isn't already doing. The study of linguistics may seem parched from the viewpoint of describing speech, something any child has mastered; but when it becomes a vehicle for the totality of human and divine self-revelation its potential excites inexhaustibly. So patience is required as one learns and masters one's godlike powers: any realizable result can be reached in spacetime by time travel (or in fact by the other isomorphic superpowers).

Your next task is over-unity travel, namely forward travel through time at faster than one second-hertz. It is indeed true that a second-hertz measurement is identical to a dimensionless measurement, but it's handy to use a unit to distinguish two kinds of seconds. Dynamic time (chronos) is measured in clock ticks, heartbeats, or wavelengths, via motion of objects with predictable speeds. Philosophers have long also recognized the different nature of perception time (kairos), which can use the language of "seconds", but is actually measured in the volume of mental activities (perceptions) occurring. Einstein described perception time: sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour, sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute, that's relativity.

So the human already has limited built-in kairos modification. The process is deliberative increase or decrease in awareness (mindfulness, awakeness). Future time travel, over-unity, simply means experiencing more than one dynamic second for each perceived second. Reciprocally, this is caused by releasing awareness, which Einstein hints happens naturally via ecstasy (standing outside of oneself). Enjoying life does result in faster approach of the future, by a factor of five or ten, because one is not focused on the moment but is literally extending it via time dilation. Besides the ecstatic state, another dilator is the release of memory, namely the suspension of detail with respect to constantly shoehorning the present into mental patterns to be retained and decompressed later. When one releases one's position in the universe and one's earnest retention of events in memory, one is most of the way to the basic unconsciousness of sleep, in which speed towards the future can be measured in thousands of second-hertz. Surprise! If you've ever slept, you've experienced future-directed accelerated time travel. The same is true when you are "in the zone" and flowing with a task.

A facile objection is that sleep, unawareness, and other logy states are considered wasteful, but that is only because of the perception that some kind of work should have been done instead of the use of time dilation. In actuality, sleep and other phases assist with the necessary task of decompressing the memory, keeping it sharp and keeping the essentials findable by random access. Therefore there is a natural circadian rhythm (itself meta-adjustable by the same methods, incidentally) that compels humans from the womb to alternate periods of under-unity and over-unity time travel, and these different periods are complementary, not wasteful. One can pattern one's life to achieve an average speed below unity, and decreasing with (future) time, but it helps if one first appreciates the power to accelerate simply by making oneself unconscious under autonomous control. The soldier who masters the art of falling asleep rapidly on demand and autonomously becoming conscious again at any hour specified in advance knows this skill. If you are comfortable with your exploration of the power to move forward in time faster than one clock second for each perception second, we can move on.

The third task would be under-unity travel, or mindfulness. This can be begun by the artificial method of irritation; but whether or not one starts that way it can be mastered by practice of positive focus. At any moment one can simply choose to force oneself to more mindfulness, to bring the memory about to record as many details and mixed images of perceptions as possible. This is the state for competitive gaming and for focus upon significant events. One assistance with directing this mindfulness is focus upon the body's autonomous systems, particularly breathing and heartbeat. Since breathing is the simplest way by which Self communes with Other, there is a qualitative difference between unconscious breathing and a breathing focused on soaking up the Spirit of God in the universe. Many find this the first effective means of achieving desires via time travel because there is a clear short-term goal, namely the focus that tends to cause better interactions with critical situations. However, it is no less valid than the means of traveling at the default speed or at increased speed relative to clock time, as increased focus has its balance of burning more energy, just as decreased focus has its balance of resting the body, and these are given as complements, not as tensions.

The epitome of under-unity travel would be near-zero travel, and this being an advanced technique we will not force it upon the casual reader all at once. The classic use of near-zero time speed is called the life review and is commonly described in perception terms as "one's life flashing before one's eyes". This happens in critical events where the need for focus is pushed beyond any previous maximum as a fight-or-flight adrenalin mechanism. The phenomenon is that in one clock second one is experiencing possibly hours' worth of perceptions spread out over one's life, usually focused on the memory side. The perception still happens in forward-travel time and therefore is not identical with past travel, but the experience is the immediate environment being probed by the Self for any and all features that might resonate with anything in memory, and the totality of memory being presented at once in an attempt to meet an unprecedented need for focus. Typically a life review happens when a rapid emergency decision is required physically or nonphysically.

Therefore the fourth task would not be to force oneself to the critical event of a life review, but to anticipate and practice it. This can be done by regulating breathing as in preparation for mindfulness, and then to take a single focus feature of one's life and bring to mind flashes of all possible memories that can be brought to bear upon it; it's possible to bundle these memories up to about ten at a time, and then with more practice to begin bundling the bundles, such that one's actual kairos speed can go factors of magnitude below unity without reaching the crisis levels of the life review. Again, this is all still forward time travel, but is an example of the range of human receptivity to its different features.

Before moving on to discussing past travel and the multiverse, it is essential that some features noted with forward travel be emphasized. The continuity of a time path is associated with your human identity, as a different path would mean a different person; and the continuity of the universe's time path is associated with the one reified universe that we experience and not with another. There are several ways to talk about other universes that work, but their common feature is that they are not reified or experienced as reality. I find the simplest description is to say that other universes are imagined and experienced as imagination.

This leads to my frequent warning that many people seek from time travel the power to change the (past) universe. If you change it, it won't be itself, and the past you that was in that universe won't be continuous with the you that is doing the changing; so the desire is for a contradiction. When people think about what they mean, by contrast with weak time-travel fiction, they usually indicate that they want a multiverse, specifically a "shift" travel from one universe to a different one. We'll get to that, but it's about improvement of perception of other universes than this one.

The primary mechanism we have for experiencing whatever is truly "real" about alternate universes is then our experience of imagination: sufficient for most purposes, and, as shown, when insufficient the reason being usually the contradictoriness of the thing being asked. Someone asked to use my time machine to "see" the Big Bang, except that the Big Bang was invisible because too hot to emit light originally; and even then it could only be "seen" not by being there (in our present bodies anyway) but from a safe distance. So be careful what you ask for.

The application is then that in discussing past time travel we must distinguish between gaining more information and experience of interaction with the past, and "changing" it (which would be defined as experiencing a plurality of alternate universes). Again, people don't want to have to build an entire second universe from scratch when they ask this, they just want "simple" tweaks made to the past of what is effectively this universe, while ignoring the butterfly effect (an advanced study). The best approach to this is to gain more and more experience of the alternate universe by imagination, as that is the best method so far shown to reify any multiverse.

So when we continue our lessons we will take up past time travel, which would include topics such as the time-travel properties of inanimate objects as they affect the past, whether zero-speed travel is real, the limitations of negative-speed travel, and the use of entangled (wormhole) travel.