Printed in the Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Nicholson, Shirley "Time and Timelessness" Quest 112:2, pg 26-32
By Shirley Nicholson
Kronos [Chronos] stands for endless (hence immovable), Duration, without beginning, without an end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space.
—The Secret Doctrine, 1:418
In his Confessions, St. Augustine said that he knew what time was when no one inquired but did not know when he was asked to explain it. If someone asks us, what is time? we, too, may feel bewildered. We have intimate knowledge of it as calendar time, time for dinner or an appointment, how long it takes to write a letter or get to work. We know time as waltz time, time out, the years of our lives, the ages of history. We have heard of the immensity of light years in astronomy and the fleeting nanoseconds of nuclear physics. Our experience of time passing is familiar and pervasive, yet we seldom stop to consider what time really is. Past, present, and future are built into our conception of the world; we assume that they describe time. But we are apt to take these at face value without probing their true nature.
H.P. Blavatsky says that “our ideas . . . on duration and time are all derived from our sensations according to the law of association”; they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge.” This, she feels, is inadequate to express the nuances and subtleties of time as presented in esoteric philosophy. Past, present, and future are gross categories produced by our minds by which we experience events in succession, “the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness.” These three are divided from one another, “compound” only in relation to the phenomenal plane, “but in the realm of noumena have no . . . validity.” In the transcendent noumenal world, time in the sense of our sequential experiences does not exist. There is no movement from past to present or into the future, for “the Past Time is the Present Time, as also the Future, which, though it has not yet come into existence, still is” (Secret Doctrine, 1:43‒44).
Such an idea of all events existing simultaneously in a timeless state may be incomprehensible to our finite minds. We will consider the concept later and make HPB’s teaching more explicit, as well as exploring its relation to modern physics. For now, it is enough to realize that time, like space and motion, has roots in the noumenon, where its guise is very different from its appearance in our familiar world. HPB equates time with space and both with the nonmaterial Reality that underlies all being. “Space and Time are one. Space and Time are nameless, for they are the incognizable That” (Secret Doctrine, 2:612). Nameless though the source of time may be, she nevertheless gives it a name—Duration.
HPB conceives time in the manifested world differently from the linear, one-way flow produced by our minds. She repeatedly speaks of cycles, of the periodic coming and going of universes and beings that go through stages of development, then return to the starting point, only to repeat the pattern, as can be illustrated by flowering and seed making. This cyclic view, typical of Eastern philosophy, appears again and again in The Secret Doctrine, which views manifestation at all levels as periodic, recurring, rhythmic outflow and return. All nature— from universes and galaxies to fireflies and cells—works on this principle, and it is also the pattern for human growth and development.
Time: Linear and Cyclic
However, our ordinary experience of time contrasts with the all-encompassing timelessness of Duration as well as with the cyclic view. For us time seems like a river that flows out of the past into the future. Events seem to occur in an unending succession of moments which move past us. The immediate present seems to have appeared out of the past and to be vanishing into the future, always in the same direction—forward. Past-present-future are further divided into discrete intervals, packets of time which differentiate the uniform, linear flow and make it more manageable. We measure these segments with clocks and calendars and regulate our lives and activities accordingly. We are dominated by the clock more than we realize. We fragment ourselves into units of measured time.
Subconsciously we feel the river of time must flow at a constant rate. This concept, based on Newton’s view of the universe, insidiously influences our attitude toward life. We may feel that time is running out and we must hurry to get it all done, crowd it all in, even to the point of claustrophobia, a feeling of oppression at the shortness of time. This sense of urgency speeds body processes—heart rate, breathing, production of certain hormones, rise in blood pressure—and can result in what Dr. Larry Dossey calls “hurry sickness”—heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, or depression of the immune system, which leads to infection, even cancer. There is no doubt that time-related anxiety can kill (Dossey, chapter 8).
According to linguist Benjamin Whorf, the Hopi Indians have quite a different view of time, one which is more in harmony with the timeless character of Duration. They have no noun for time and no concept of anything flowing forward or divided into segments. According to Whorf, instead, there is a general concept of change, of things enduring, of one event following another, of growing later, a concept much like that of Henri Bergson, who conceived time as an unsegmented flux: “True time, non-chronological time, consists of an evermoving, eternally flowing present which contains its own past” (quoted in Wood, 48). In this view time is a continuum in which lines of demarcation between past, present, and future are dissolved. Whether tied to linguistic concepts or not, a sense of flow allows us to transcend the pressures of time units and enter a stream of time in which our life can move harmoniously. It reflects the wholeness of Duration.
The Mind’s Time
HPB, along with many philosophers, saw that time as succession of events, as sequence, is at least as much a property of our minds as it is a part of reality. We perceive serially and classify into past, present, future, while events simply “are.” Time is a generalization, a concept which we abstract from concrete experience. We then give to it a life of its own, a reality on its own account, as though it had an existence apart from our experience of events. In contrast with the notion that time flows past us, who remain stationary, “left behind” by the succession of events, HPB says that “‘time’ is only an illusion produced by the successive states of our consciousness as we travel through eternal duration” (Secret Doctrine, 1:37; emphasis added). Our strong tendency to order things in sequence works on our perceptions of the world, and our sense of linear time cuts up nature’s unbroken panorama of intermingling changes, which is perceived more truly by the Hopi.
When we dream or fantasize or are lost in thought, time can be stretched out or telescoped, so that minutes or seconds may seem like hours or hours pass in a flash. The sense of time passing quickly or slowly can result from such physical factors as body temperature, temperature of the air, coffee, tea, alcohol, as well as from psychological factors like boredom or interest. How often we feel the work week drag by while the weekend flies! The “ordered and military progression of measured time” is very different from the “unlimited time of the mind,” to use Bergson’s phrases. To some people, time habitually seems to flow more slowly than to others, and every day each of us fluctuates in our perception of time’s rate of flow. There are moments when time is like a stream rushing down the mountain, and then again it is like a lazy river that meanders through the plain. Neither rate is “right”; time has no absolute speed. But too much of the “rushing” can be harmful, and the slower pace can be healing.
Children are at home in nonlinear time; in play they seem to abolish measured time. Through biofeedback, meditation, creative play, and related techniques, we too can alter our sense of time and slow it down, and it has been found that biological processes are then also slowed in a healthful way.
Hurry sickness can be reversed by expanding our perception of time from a chronic, hectic view of an inexorable flow to a stretched-out time sense. This can be done through “time therapies,” as Dr. Dossey calls them, such as visualization and imagery, biofeedback, hypnosis, and meditation. In such experiences, past, present, future merge into a freedom from time’s pressures, and for the moment the self-imposed domination of time over our lives is broken. These practices also tend to change our linear concept of time as relentlessly moving forward. We can learn to break its linear grip and experience an “eternally flowing present,” perhaps sensing something of the timelessness of Duration.
When no longer dominated by clock time, by linear time, we live more in harmony with time in its cyclic guise. With people who live close to nature, the cycles of nature—the seasons, day and night, phases of the moon, spring floods—and the cycles within us—waking, sleeping, breathing, menstruation—play an important part in life. Time sense for such people is fashioned by recurrent events, their lives regulated by natural rhythms such as planting, harvesting, and milking, rather than by clocks and artificial segmentation of time. To them time appears as a never-ending dynamic process which continually returns upon itself, a spiral rather than a river. The natural rhythm of living in cyclic time is in keeping with the principle of cycles, vast and small, that Theosophy and Eastern philosophy see as circling through all of manifested reality. To live in harmony with cycles is to be in harmony with the nature of the universe.
Relativity
It is not only our perception of time that varies; time itself is inconstant. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that time is not absolute; it speeds up and slows down. Massive bodies are known to warp space and bend light and also slow down time. The enormous gravitational pull associated with black holes causes time to move slower and slower until time stops altogether at the surface of the “hole.”
The effect of gravity can be calculated on earth by atomic clocks which measure accurately to one second in a million years. It has been found that these clocks run a bit faster high on a building than at sea level, where the pull of gravity is greater. Motion also affects time: at high speeds, time slows down. Einstein pointed this out in his famous thought experiment, in which one brother speeding around the universe in a spaceship ages far less than his twin at home on earth. This is borne out by the fact that subatomic particles moving near the speed of light live longer than their slower counterparts. These changes in time’s rate are not just psychological, nor does anything change in the clockworks. Time is actually relative to motion and to space warps.
Time also depends on the velocity and position of the observer or reference body. The relativity of time is well established in high-energy physics. As particles moving near the speed of light interact, an event may appear to occur earlier from a frame of reference nearby, later from a more distant one. The sequence of events will vary depending on the length of time it takes the light from the event to reach the observer or reference point. The concept of time speeding up and slowing is thought-provoking. It confirms our subjective experience that time does not flow at a rigid, determined rate but is variable, depending on circumstances.
Boundless Duration
Relativity theory came after HPB’s time. Expounding esoteric philosophy, she viewed time as multidimensional, with many aspects depending on our level of observation. Our ideas about time, derived from our sensations, are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” (Secret Doctrine, 1:44) and such ideas will vanish when we evolve to the point of seeing beyond phenomenal existence.
The boundless Duration or timelessness beyond relativity is “unconditionally eternal and universal Time,” the noumenon of time, unconditioned by the phenomena which appear and disappear periodically (Secret Doctrine, 1:62). Duration is “endless (hence immovable) . . . without beginning, without an end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space” (Secret Doctrine, 1:418). It is that aspect of Reality which produces time as “the moving image of eternity,” as Plato said. The cycles of manifestation occur within this infinite Duration as the Timeless brings forth time. Thus, as with space and motion, our familiar world of divided time, of time with parts, is generated from this undivided, formless realm.
Duration embraces everything all at once, while experienced time must arbitrarily conform to our one-thing-at-a-time sequential view. It is hard to imagine all of reality present simultaneously in Duration, because our minds are part of the process of time. Timelessness escapes us. HPB gives analogies to aid our understanding. Explaining the eternal aspect of the world, she says: “The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in material form to its disappearance from the earth” (Secret Doctrine, 1:37). She compares these “sum-totals” to a bar of metal dropped into the sea. The present moment of a person or thing is represented by the cross section of the bar at the place where ocean and air meet. No one would say that the bar came into existence as it left the air or ceased to exist as it enters the water. So we drop out of the future into the past, momentarily presenting a cross section of ourselves in the present.
Modern physicists recognize this principle when they represent particles by world lines, diagrams of movement through space-time. Such a line shows the direction and speed of particles and gives a more meaningful picture than would a single point, indicating but a fleeting moment in the path of the particle.
Expanding on this concept to include the world, mathematician Hermann Weyl states that “a section of [the] world comes to life as a fleeting image in space which continually changes in time” (quoted in Dossey, 152). David Bohm, speaking from the perspective of the holographic model, says that the whole of time may be enfolded in any given period of time. Physicist Henry Margenau views a realm where everything that we experience sequentially exists all at once in a timeless essence or universal consciousness:
I believe that in a universal sense which is above time all events are present and real now . . . We move through the all, seeing it through a slit-like window which moves along the axis of time. Perhaps the mystic has no window and is exposed indiscriminately to the universal record of the all or, to use Whitehead’s phrase, to the treasure house of God’s universal memory. (Margenau)
These concepts, extrapolated from mathematics and theoretical physics, echo the timeless essence that HPB called Duration. In this realm past, present, future always are; they “enter into the stream of time from an eternal world outside,” as Bertrand Russell described it (quoted in Zukav, 313). Natural events exist concurrently in this “world outside,” but we encounter them through our time-bound minds in an ordered series of space-time slices. We cannot see the whole but only different parts one after another. I.K. Taimni, who wrote on Theosophical metaphysics, perceives that “it is this seeing of different parts of a whole in succession which produces the sense of time” (Taimni, 354). We might think of linear time as a way our finite minds break up the wholeness of Duration into segments which we can get hold of and manage.
The vision of past, present, future as always existing might suggest determinism, like a movie reel, which unrolls frame by frame in time but with the events rigidly foreordained. But this is not the implication intended. According to esoteric philosophy, existence remains fluid and dynamic, not set and predetermined. Another analogy might be a symphony, which exists complete in a timeless state. Mozart reported that his mind could seize a newly conceived composition “at a glance”—not its various parts in succession, but all at once in its entirety. We reenact music sequentially, a movement at a time, bar by bar, note by note, but each performance is unique. Conductors impose their individual interpretations. The tempo varies. The unforeseen happens: an orchestra member becomes ill and must be replaced at the last minute; a flute solo soars beyond any previous rendition; a drum loses the beat. There is no rigidly predetermined pattern of events in the performance, yet the symphony itself remains whole in its essential nature. Perhaps in a somewhat similar way, existence is enfolded in Duration all at once and unfolds sequentially in time, allowing the outcome some play, some freedom. It may be something like an archetype, a nonmaterial pattern or matrix which, though itself unchanging, can generate various forms, each unique but all reflecting the archetypal structure.
Transcending Time
We sometimes glimpse this timeless realm where past, present, and future blur into a unity, where the future “which, though it has not come into existence, still is” (Blavatsky, 1:43). The amazing accuracy sometimes found in prognostication, in precognition of future events, or in the occasional authenticated cases of past-life memory point to a world beyond our present time frame.
The mystery of synchronicity, as C.G. Jung called it—the simultaneous occurrence of meaningfully related events—also jars us into considering a wider view of time and causality. Two disconnected events, one inner and one outer, converge at a meaningful moment to give us insight and growth. Why should we accidentally meet an old friend who has been through the problems we face now, or happen across a book that holds the clue to the question we have been mulling over? These experiences make us feel that we do not live in a cold, mechanical universe but that our lives have meaning. As Jungian psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen says:
If we personally realize that synchronicity is at work in our lives, we feel connected rather than isolated and estranged from others; we feel ourselves part of a divine, dynamic, interrelated universe. (Bolen, 7)
Synchronicity is another way in which the timeless whole intrudes itself into the sequence of events we experience. For as the orientalist Ananda P. Coomaraswamy put it, the time we know, the finite, “is not the opposite of the infinite, but only, so to speak, an excerpt from it” (Coomaraswamy, 71).
A universal characteristic of mystical experience is the transcendence of time, the feeling of liberation from temporality. In moments of mystic oneness, a person is lost in timeless depths which seem unbounded, which stand still. For such a person, this infinity of time exists in the immediate present, in an eternal now, not in a linear, sequential time that will run out, but in a “trysting place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity,” as the poet W.B. Yeats describes it.
In this experience of Duration, now and a thousand years from now are essentially the same; they are somehow both here and now in “the simultaneity of Eternity . . . in which no event has a ‘when,’ [but] is ‘always’ and ‘now’” (Prem and Ashish, 113). The whole is in each moment, as though the line of extended time had collapsed into a single point which enfolds every segment of the line. In such a moment “the Past and the Future, Space and Time, disappear and become . . . the Present,” as HPB says (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 12:618).
Mystics report that in communion with the Reality outside time, they feel enveloped by stillness. Time ceases to flow and move, and they feel suspended in an eternal and unchanging universe of timelessness, absorbed in the immutable nature of the transcendent Source. Though we can never grasp or understand this state with our sequential minds, there is in us, at the heart of our being, that which is beyond time. We have the ability to realize a timeless state, for we ourselves are essentially timeless. We issue forth from Duration and unfold our world lines in time and space. Yet at the core we are never apart from the “still point of the turning world,” as T.S. Eliot describes it. Even as we live out our days and go through the succession of events that make up our lives, “we are never in time at all, since even now we are in Eternity” (Prem and Ashish, 55). Through cultivating quiet, through meditation, we can come to realize our true, timeless nature and learn to reconcile it with the world of time rushing within us. As we quiet time’s flow, we glimpse our roots in the timeless One.
There are moments when motion, time, and space no longer seem separate and distinct and their unity becomes apparent. In the space shuttle, seconds can mean moving over several countries; measured moments show dramatically as motion through space. Or when we look up at the sky on a clear, moonless night, we know that the light from the stars we see has traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years from sources which may no longer even exist. Yet in a moment we can register the result of light moving through unimaginable distance and time. Time, space, and motion seem to be interrelated but different ways of looking at the same events.
Einstein showed the union of time and space in a four-dimensional continuum. The world line of particles illustrates this; their position in space depends on time and vice versa. Time and space are inextricably interwoven and interdependent; only a union of the two can have independent reality. This union can be known directly in meditation. The Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki said, “As a fact of pure experience, there is no space without time, no time without space; they are interpenetrating” (Suzuki, 33). Lama Anagarika Govinda, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, speaks of experiencing in meditation “a living continuum in which time and space are integrated” (Govinda, 116).
Motion, too, is an intrinsic part of this space-time unit. Time can have no meaning without something going on, without motion. The world in an unmoving state would be like the world of Sleeping Beauty, in which the people froze and time stood still.
Aristotle saw that time is a property of motion. To the physicist, time and space are coordinates of an event, of some form of movement. We have seen that time depends on the rate of motion. Near the speed of light, time slows down, and it speeds up for slower rates of motion. Time is the product of motion in space.
HPB, relating motion on the material plane to its noumenal aspect, the Great Breath, indicates this as the root of time. She speaks of the Great Breath as Absolute Existence. Thus motion is involved with boundless time, which, with infinite Space, she says, is the source of all existence. “Space and Time [are] simply the forms of that which is the Absolute all” (Secret Doctrine, 2:158). The rich variety in the world around us is spun out from the three intertwined strands of motion, space, and time. Everything that is depends on these three.
These are not abstract metaphysical principles divorced from our practical reality; they pervade our familiar world at every point. They operate constantly in our bodies and are the backdrop of all our mental processes. And within us, as within the universe, there are timeless, spaceless depths of stillness, for “at the very heart of our being is That which is beyond all space and time, That which was, is and forever will be” (Prem and Ashish, 59).
Sources
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———. The Secret Doctrine. Three volumes. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.
Bolen, Jean Shinoda. The Tao of Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Time and Eternity. Ascona, Switzerland: Asiae Artibus, 1947.
Dossey, Larry. Space, Time, and Medicine. Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1982.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika. Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974.
Margenau, H.S. Preface to Laurence LeShan, Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1969).
Prem, Sri Krishna, and Sri Madhava Ashish. Man, the Measure of All Things. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1969.
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