Perspective - Absolute stillness, or Becoming?

Today I was reading some book reviews on Amazon. I will not say what the book was because I have not yet read the book and do have some doubts about it, but I read a very interesting comment in the reviews. The criticism was that the book talked both about the Absolute Stillness and unchanging non-duality of the Universe, but in the next few chapters it started describing how things evolve, and that there is an unfolding to the Universe. The commenter exclaimed that the book must be nonsense because it contradicted itself. How can the Universe be this stillness and at the same time be evolving?

My immediate thought was, "This is a criticism?"

It really all depends on what perspective you are talking about. Physicists rely on perspective all the time to talk about relativity. Is there any problem doing that with spiritual matters? I think it's essential.

The Universe contains everything and exists everywhere so it exists both inside and outside of time. So I can think about the Universe from both of those perspectives. If I think about it from outside of time, the Universe is Absolute Stillness/non-duality. That non-duality contains everything there is. This includes time. Granted, ALL of time, from beginning to end exists in this non-duality as one eternal moment. Perhaps when thinking about it like this, it's more apt to call time a dimension, just like length, height, and depth. It's all there, all at once. It doesn't move. When I'm standing in the Absolute Stillness, that is Reality regarding time and the Universe. There is no change. There is no evolution. Everything just is.

Now shift perspective to inside of time. Naturally, this is a much narrower perspective because it can only contain things that exist in time: things with beginnings and endings. Nevertheless, our minds live in this perspective so it's the easiest one for us to grasp. Within the perspective of time, the Universe DOES change and evolve. There is Becoming. There is an unexplainable urge to go somewhere and do something, to Become, to Change.... or to fight against those changes, depending on where you are. Movement through time is an effect. It is not an absolute. Our perspective creates the movement.

Look up the Doppler Effect. You have experienced this when a car in oncoming traffic beeps its horn. As the car moves toward you, the pitch of the horn seems to go higher, and as the car moves away, the pitch of the horn drops. Is the pitch of the horn REALLY doing this? It depends. For you, from your perspective, it is. From the perspective of the person beeping the horn, it is not, because they are moving with the sound waves and they experience no change in pitch. Reality can look very different from different perspectives, even scientifically.

The same is true about the nature of the Universe.