Time doesn't pass. That's just a human myth. Time's all round us, like some kind of jelly. It's just human life that passes. - Brian Aldiss

One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.

When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he molded and complicated his tools, so they molded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern; the pattern is all the universe, creator and created.

What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?