What Time Is It? Looking at the Concept of Time Through the Hourglass of Eternity

Time, what is it?

When I write on a subject, I like to provide a definition for what we are discussing. And when I looked for a definition of time…..I found a plethora!! I decided on the Oxford Dictionary and according to that there are six definitions of time as a noun, and three definitions of time as a verb! But for the purpose of today’s discussion, here is the definition we are going with!

Time- “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole”.

Okay, that is a great definition for time, but what does it really mean? The “indefinite continued progress”…..well indefinite is not clear right? So if I translate this definition it says that time is the vague continued progress of existence itself. It also says that time takes events in the past, present and future and regards them as whole.

There are numerous views and theories on time.

The nature of it has been discussed and argued about by some of the greatest minds throughout history. And strangely our concepts and ideas of time haven’t changed much. Time can be viewed as cyclical, the belief that time is circular and infinite. There is no beginning and no end. Or time can be viewed as linear, a line. We are working our way from point a to point b; with point a being the past, point b being the future and somewhere in the middle is the present.

Early Greek Philosophers believed that time was infinite, with no beginning and no end. Ancient Indian philosophy texts, such as the Vedas, stated that the Universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth. This cyclical approach to time is still part of many eastern cultures today. The belief that, since time repeats itself it is important to understand the lessons of the past in order to make decisions in the present.

Western cultures take more of a linear approach to time. Around the Middle Ages, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish philosophers began to veer away from the concept of infinite time. Creationists believed in a beginning of time (the moment that God created the world), it follows that there would be a definitive end to time...what they defined as the end of days or the apocalypse.

Maybe the truth is somewhere in between and what we perceive as time is a little of both, cyclical and linear.

Let’s think about this. If you start walking today, just walking in a straight line…and you keep walking...your path will look linear. Right? Your starting point is behind you, there is always something in front of you and you, yourself, are somewhere in the middle. But if you just keep walking, and walking and walking, eventually you will end up where you started from. What was your starting point is now your destination in front of you and what was your destination is now behind you.

So maybe time looks linear as we traverse it, but in theory it truly is cyclical. But this is an interesting version of cyclical. More like semi-cyclical? Many of the ancient cultures that held to the cyclical concept of time believed that things repeated. They looked to the stars and the seasons to prove that. Every year spring always follows winter. Every day morning always follows night.

But it feels like something is missing there. No two springs look exactly alike. No two sunrises are the same. Every new season is a little bit different than it’s previous version, each day is unique.

Let’s look at our walking analogy again. When you got back to where you started from, you wouldn’t actually be back exactly where you had been. According to Google it would take 347 days of nonstop walking to walk around the world. In those 347 days, things will have changed. Trees will have fallen, plants will have died and new ones grown in their place. Your feet will never fit back exactly into your original set of footprints.

So maybe that is what we are looking for to define time? Time is something that looks like it is linear when you are in it, but actually functions in a semi-cyclical way?

When I asked for some guidance from Spirit, I received this answer, in my Team’s unique fashion, “Time is no”.

Okay, thanks!!!

“Time is no".…does that make it cyclical or linear? Well…..hmmm…….

I did some research and found an Awaken.com article from February 2018. The headline read “Time is NOT real: Physicists show EVERYTHING happens at the same time” the article states, “TIME is not real - it is a human construct to help us differentiate between now and our perception of the past, an equally astonishing and baffling theory states. The concept of time is simply an illusion made up of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW. That is the theory according to a group of esteemed physicists who aim to solve one of the universe’s mysteries.”

Sounds like we are making great strides in the study of time. Or are we?

We said that the early Greeks believed in a cyclical concept of time. But Greek philosopher Antiphon the Sophist theorized, in the fifth century BC, that time was not a reality. But, instead was a concept or a measure, not a substance. Really not a huge difference in the “astonishing and baffling theory” of physicists in 2018 and the equally baffling and astonishing theory of the fifth century BC!!

“Time is no.”

As Antiphon the Sophist theorized, time is not a substance. You can’t touch time. You can’t hold time. Heck, it’s even difficult to find one definition for time. So maybe, when Spirit tells me “time is no”, that really is the truth. Could it be that time is a human construct? It makes sense that while we are here walking this human path, we needed some way of being able to judge where we are on that path. And so, here comes the need for the concept of time.

If the physicists highlighted in the 2018 article are correct when they say that “everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW” then that would mean that the past, the present, and the future all actually exist at the same time. Mind-blowing? Not really. Let’s think about it.

Maybe the past and the future both exist in the now because we carry them with us. We carry the past with us so that we can access it as a tool to help us find answers to problems that we are experiencing today.

Or, we carry it with us as our version of a ‘whip’ to continue punishing ourselves for what we perceive as our mistakes.

Or we wield the past as a shield because we are comfortable with where we have already been. Change is scary, it is easier to keep doing what we’ve already done because we know the outcome

We carry the future with us as a shining bullseye that we can aim ourselves towards.

Or we view it as some kind of scary cliff up ahead that we hope never to encounter.

We carry the picture of where we want to be or where we don’t want to be. Whether it is later today, tomorrow, next week, ten years from now.

The past and the future, they really aren’t so blurry. They are pictures and memories, ideas and goals that walk with us in the now.

Is that what time is? Something that doesn’t really exist. Something that we have created to house our concept of where we are on our human journey. Something to mark those important milestones.

Important milestones like the day you were born. Birthdays. This might be a good time for me to tell you the story of the worst birthday I ever had.

About two weeks before my 25th birthday someone casually mentioned to me that if I lived to be a hundred then this coming birthday meant that a quarter of my life was over.

In came the gray clouds. That casually uttered statement hovered over me for the next two weeks and far beyond. After all, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to make it to a hundred-years old, so that meant that more than a quarter of my life was over.

I was only twenty-five and thanks to that comment, I was already figuring out how little of my life I had left!

It was right around that time that I came up with what I considered to be the greatest theory of my young adult life. Antiphon the Sophist had nothing on me…..I had discovered something truly important about time!

My great revelation? That time was God’s joke on mankind.

After all, when you are a child it seems to take years to get to your next birthday or to Christmas or to that trip with your family to Disney World. Then you get older. And the older that you get the faster time starts moving. It can’t already be Christmas again, didn’t we just celebrate that last month? The more time you have the slower it goes, the less you have the faster…….??? Monday morning we are wishing it is Friday and by Monday afternoon it suddenly is Friday. And then before you know it, the weekend is over and it is Monday morning again. I had the vision of this great divine power laughing and saying “well isn’t this what you wished for when you were 5?”.

If time is something measurable, then how is it possible that we can experience the same amount of time differently during different periods in our life?

Hmmm…..

How do we measure time?

Ancient cultures used sundials, obelisks and water clocks. In the Middle Ages they invented the hourglass. Today we have clocks and watches and many of us use our phones to keep track of what time it is.

We measure time in seconds, and minutes, hours and days, weeks and months and years. And yet has anyone ever noticed that time moves differently for different people. What seems like minutes to me, may seem like hours to you. A quote, credited to Albert Einstein as a simplistic way to explain his theory of relativity, states “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”

A 2011 New Yorker profile on David Eagleman, a professor of neuroscience who studies time perception, states “The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. 'This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,' Eagleman said -- why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

If Mr. Eagleman is right, then the key to time slowing down is not about putting your hand on a hot stove. It is about being present in the here and now. Actually paying attention to each moment and experiencing each facet of its uniqueness. It is about not living in the past or pining for the future, it is about learning and growing and keeping yourself engaged in what is right in front of you, no matter what your age.

So maybe that is the true answer to what time is.

Maybe the truth is that we, as humans, are the ones who are in control of time. If we invented it, or constructed it as a unit of measurement, then we certainly have control of how it manifests.

It really doesn’t matter if you see time as cyclical or linear.

It doesn’t matter if you believe time exists or doesn’t exist.

It doesn’t matter if you think that there are distinct lines between the past, present and future or if you believe that they are all merged together and happening at the same time.

What matters is that you understand that you have control of how you experience time.

When I was turning twenty-five a quarter of my life was over. Now I am in my mid-fifties and I feel like my life has just begun. The secret to time is that it is about making the most of the moment that you are in. This one right here. It is all about your perspective on whether your hourglass is half empty or half full!