The Three Strata of Temporality: Transcendental Circulation, Emergent Duration, and the Projection Boundaries of Time

The Quantum Blueprint Formalism faces an apparent paradox: the admissibility condition (A2) guarantees a minimum circulation Ωₛ ≥ Ωₘin > 0 on the pre-coherent space Mₛ, implying that temporality is structurally eternal—it can neither begin nor end. Yet the empirical time of our universe began 13. 8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, and is locally suspended at black hole horizons. This paper resolves the paradox by establishing a rigorous three-stratum theory of temporality. Stratum I (transcendental temporality) is the circulation parameter λ on Mₛ, which is unbounded and has no beginning or end (Theorem 2. 1). Stratum II (projected empirical time) is a functional t_Θ = ∫ |π_Θ*Ωₛ| dλ that begins when projection activates and is finite for any finite λ-interval (Theorem 3. 1). Stratum III (local temporal suspension) occurs at projection boundaries where Cₚroj = 0 and the projected time degenerates (Theorem 4. 1). The three strata are unified by the Projection-Time Functional T (Theorem 5. 1), which encodes the full structure of temporality in a single mathematical object. The resolution: the empirical time is not the time that flows; it is the shadow that the flowing circulation casts onto the projected world. The transcendental temporality is eternal; the empirical duration is contingent. Their apparent contradiction is a projection artifact, analogous to a coordinate singularity in general relativity. Implications for consciousness and identity persistence across projection boundaries are derived.