Hi Jim, Thank You!
We use time that is divided into units of years days, etc. The concept of fractal time, if I understand it, says that these fixed periods are artificial, that you can divide any elapsed time period into 2 smaller periods, one longer and one shorter, according to the Golden Ratio. In nature, if you look at things displaying this sort of division, the larger part will have a similar division with the same ratio. The smaller divisions display aspects of larger divisions, or are self-similar.
The author Gregg Braden looked at some historical and personal experiences in his own life and he decided that time itself contains self-similar periods, so that events are likely to repeat according to a fractal pattern, like a fern leaf. One effect of this is that similar points of time become closer and closer together. If you enter 0 (which would be around the birth of Jesus) into the calculator, it will return 755AD as possible similar time. If you entered 1800, the period would be 100 years. In our lifetime, it shrank to 20 years, then 10. Where we are now, the self similarity dropping below 1 year, which means that we see more going on in 2009 alone than happened between 1AD and 755AD. He proposes that the time lines of our individual lives are also part of this self-similar pattern.
Somehow, ancient people were able to understand much longer time cycles than do we. This might be because they understood this fractal nature, whereas we cannot see the forest because of the trees, because of the acceleration.
I'm interested in this, but not completely convinced that the Golden Ratio underlies everything. Also, the book has some strange. math errors, and the theory itself is not provable. It's fun to think about, though.
I've heard that the Mayan Calendar is a calendar of one of these cycles that ends on the winter Solstice in 2012 and is not meant to be the prediction of the end of the earth but the end of a cycle. Maybe we're just over reacting. But maybe they were trying to tell us something and we don't have the same understanding of the universe that they had and we aren't getting the message. Time does seem faster so we will know soon enough.
