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 Ω_s ≥ Ω_min > 0 on the pre-coherent space M_s, 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 M_s, which is unbounded and has no beginning or end (Theorem 2.1). Stratum II (projected empirical time) is a functional t_Θ = ∫ |π_Θ*Ω_s| dλ that begins accumulating when irreversible dissipation activates within the eternally active projection, and is finite for any finite λ-interval (Theorem 3.1). Stratum III (local temporal suspension) occurs at projection boundaries where C_proj = 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 identity persistence across projection boundaries are derived in an appendix.