Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Abdill, Ed "Memories of Dora Kunz" Quest 112:2, pg 40-43

By Ed Abdill

I met Dora Kunz at the very first member meeting of the Theosophical Society I attended. I had been told that Dora was clairvoyant, and never having met a clairvoyant, I was fascinated. Dora and I soon became friends, and our friendship lasted until her death at age ninety-five in 1999. Dora and I got along well together, and we enjoyed a similar sense of humor.

In 1959, when I joined the New York Theosophical Society (NYTS), members ate dinner in our lecture hall before Wednesday night meetings. This was at 5:30 p.m. Dinner consisted of a vegetarian casserole, a salad, and dessert. In 1959, the cost for the dinner was $1.50. A meditation led by Dora followed dinner at 7:00 p.m., and the meeting began at 7:30. The casserole was prepared at home, one week by Dora and the next week by Emily Sellon. The two women lived next door to each other in Port Chester, a suburb of New York. After transporting dinner all the way to our lecture hall, on the train or by car, they would heat it in time for dinner.

Once I was in the kitchen with Dora when she dropped the casserole face down on the floor. Immediately she said, “Close the door.” I did, and she scooped it up, careful not to take the part that touched the floor. She put it back in the dish, and we all happily ate the scooped-up casserole, no one being the wiser.

Dora was born Theodora Sophia van Gelder in Java, Dutch East Indies, in 1904. She lived an isolated life on her father’s sugar plantation, with no playmates other than her brothers. Her mother was also clairvoyant, so when Dora saw a nature spirit or someone who’d recently died, so did her mother. It wasn’t until Dora grew older that she realized that others couldn’t see what she or her mother saw.

Dora’s experience was similar to that of a clairvoyant boy in nineteenth-century England who kept a diary. No one in his family had a clue about clairvoyance. Portions of the boy’s diary have been published anonymously in a book entitled The Boy Who Saw True. Portions of it are quite funny. Neither the boy nor his family had any words to describe what he saw.

One night, he wrote that he’d asked his mother why her “lights” (aura) turned pink when she kissed him goodnight. He added, “Mother looked at me strangely and said she would take me to the eye doctor next morning.” Another time, he saw his dead uncle sitting on a chair in their home. Someone was about to sit there, and the boy exclaimed, “Don’t sit on Uncle!” His parents reprimanded him for speaking in such a way about the dead.

Even as a child, Dora said whatever she decided to say, often shocking people with her bluntness. She told me that one day when she was in elementary school in Java, a teacher asked each child in her class what religion they were. When it was Dora’s turn, she said, “I’m a heathen.”

Dora told us her parents never cared what she ate, but they did care that she meditated. We asked how she meditated as a child. At five years old, her mother took her to the meditation room in their home and said, “Let’s just sit here and think about how much we love one another.”

When she was eleven, the prominent clairvoyant Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater (often called CWL) asked Dora’s parents if he could take her to Australia to a young people’s group he had started. I believe he wanted to train clairvoyants and other psychic children for Theosophical work. Dora’s parents left the decision up to her, asking her to go to the meditation room and meditate on the proposal.

Dora was very shy at the time and spoke no English. Her parents were sure she wouldn’t go, but she surprised them by saying yes. She thought it was the right thing to do. Her parents kept their word and allowed her to travel to Australia with Leadbeater

 CWL and the children lived on the outskirts of Sydney in a large building called the Manor. (Incidentally, when my wife, Mary, and I first traveled to Sydney, we stayed at the Manor, and Mary took a bath in a tub once used by Leadbeater.) The Manor training program took place at the time of the First World War. Many Australian soldiers were killed during the war, and mothers who knew about Leadbeater’s clairvoyant ability frequently sent him letters asking if he could contact their deceased sons and report back on how they were doing on the other side.

Leadbeater got so many of these letters that he couldn’t answer them all, so he turned them over to Dora and asked her to look up the dead and write to the mothers. She took on the job and wrote to the mothers. Typical of Dora, she called the task “writing about the Deaders.”

After she came to the United States to marry Fritz Kunz, an American, Dora learned American history from A to Z. She believed she should know the history of the country in which she lived. Politically, Dora and Fritz were both Democrats. Dora wrote frequent letters to her congressional and state representatives. Once, during a politically controversial time, she proffered some advice. She said we shouldn’t get angry while listening to a politician with whom we disagreed, but instead we should think of what we believe to be right.

Dora knew the damaging effects of anger and gave practical advice on how to overcome it. She was extremely practical and had common sense. If someone wanted to know the color of their aura, or something about their future, Dora was apt to say, “Don’t be an idiot,” and she’d walk away from them. If, however, someone was seriously ill, psychologically or physically, Dora would do whatever she could to help them. She never took money for her service. If anyone insisted on paying, she would tell them they could donate to the Theosophical Society.

Dora had an enormous vocabulary, but her strength wasn’t in words. In fact, she seldom finished a sentence and would frequently say, “You know what I mean,” even though the other person often didn’t. Also, Dora was Mrs. Malaprop personified. She would mix metaphors such as, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and, “the acid test.” It would come out as, “That’s the acid pudding.” Dora had a keen sense of humor, and she could laugh at herself, especially when someone pointed out something like “the acid pudding” to her.

She also had the unique ability to see an individual’s potential almost at first clairvoyant glance. When Dora became president of the Theosophical Society in America, she asked me if I’d fill out her unexpired term as president of the NYTS. I agreed and was later elected president.

One day, Dora called me from the national headquarters to ask me if I would speak at the upcoming convention. She said I would have to talk for about twenty minutes, and I would be presenting with a lovely woman from the CIA. She knew I always cooperated with her, so when my response was no, I could almost hear her shock.

After a pause, I said, “Dora, I could never speak with someone from the CIA.”

She realized her mistake. She’d meant the CIIS—California Institute of Integral Studies—and she burst into her characteristic cackle of laughter. Of course, I agreed to do the talk, and it went well.

An amusing incident occurred at the NYTS many years ago, when Dora still lived in New York. We had an extremely difficult member who would follow anyone’s remarks with, “You said, but Theosophy clearly teaches . . .” The woman made the meetings so unpleasant that people didn’t want to attend, and attendance soon dwindled to three or four people.

One evening, Dora was upstairs in the library just above the lecture hall. The woman was at the meeting downstairs, once again pontificating. Although no one argued or raised their voices, people were very irritated with her. At the height of the tension, Dora came into the hall and defused the situation. I later asked her what had brought her downstairs at the precise moment we needed her. Dora said, “Well, I was sitting there and noticed a lot of prickly stuff coming up through the floor, and I thought, ‘Is that a Theosophical meeting going on down there?’”

Dora met Fritz Kunz in Australia, where they fell in love. They traveled to the United States to be married, and their wedding was hardly a traditional, joyous occasion. Both came to the wedding from different cities. A justice of the peace was to perform the ceremony. Apparently Dora was in a foul mood, so much so that the officiant stopped the ceremony and asked her, “Do you really want to get married?”

Of course she did, and the two of them made a delightful couple. They had one son, Johnny, and they remained together until Fritz died in 1972.

Dora had a habit of suddenly ending a phone conversation by simply hanging up. Here is an amusing report of a phone conversation she had with my dear friend, John Algeo, who passed away on October 13, 2019. John was a distinguished professor of English who also served as president of the Theosophical Society in America, and once as vice president of the international body.

Dora was a unique person. She made an indelible impression on almost everyone who knew her. For example, I remember with crystal clarity my first contact with Dora. It was over the telephone. I was sitting at supper one spring evening when the phone rang. I answered it, identified myself, and then the conversation went like this:

She: This is Dora Kunz calling from Wheaton.

Me: Oh, hello, how are you? It’s nice to . . .

She: I understand you can talk.

Me: Well, I do so from time to time. I’m not . . .

She: Can you come this summer to the convention and talk?

Me: Well, I suppose I could, though I hadn’t . . .

She: I understand you can talk on the Bhagavad Gita.

Me: Well, yes, I have done so at the Atlanta Lodge, but . . .

She: Fine, you’ll come then. (Click. The phone went dead.)

Of course, I went to convention and talked on the Bhagavad Gita.

For years, every telephone conversation I had with Dora went more or less like that one; it was not something Dora invented especially for me. It was her usual telephonic style. In fact, it was not until I had been in the president’s office at Olcott, the national headquarters of the TS in America, for about four years that I had a telephone conversation with Dora that she ended by saying, “Goodbye” before the inevitable click let me know the conversation was irrevocably over. I was so amazed by her goodbye that I went around the rest of the day telling people about it. And no one believed me.

Dora did not intend to be rude. She was just a remarkably focused person who had no small talk. She used to say of herself, with a cock of her head and wide-open eyes, “I’m a prrrractical girl.” Chitchat was just not in her line, not part of her modus operandi. If she ever found herself in a situation where the discourse veered toward what she considered the inane, her glance would dart about, she would give a twitch or two, and then, before anyone realized it, she would be gone. She seemed, in fact, just to dematerialize. 

I learned to meditate in the weekly meditation class Dora conducted before the NYTS members’ meeting. Dora had a way of stimulating something within people that, for lack of a better expression, raised their consciousness. It wasn’t what she said, but what she did silently.

For me, meditation has been the pearl of great price. Through meditation, many thousands, including myself, have identified with the inner self. The awareness of the inner self does not come as soon as one begins a regular practice of meditation. A sense of peace is the first step. For most, it takes months or even years before a shift in consciousness arises, and when it does, suddenly there is only eternity. Out of necessity, we must revert to brain consciousness to live in this world. Yet we never forget that shift in consciousness. We can inhere in the eternal.

For inspiring me to meditate, I owe Dora a debt that I can only repay by helping others to learn to meditate. I facilitate meditation workshops and help individuals who ask my advice about meditation. Meditation changed me. Over the years I became more patient, did not panic as often, and became able to let anger and anxiety go more quickly.

When I first consulted Dora about a personal problem, she took one look at my aura and said, “Your experiences in the army disgusted you, didn’t they?” I didn’t need a clairvoyant to tell me that, but I was astounded at how quickly she recognized it, especially since I had never told her anything about my experiences in the army.

Dora had an uncanny ability to spot thought forms in the aura. Habitual thought patterns remain in the aura and are visible to a gifted clairvoyant. Clearly she saw my thoughts of unpleasant experiences in the army.

On another occasion, years later at our Theosophical camp in upstate New York, I consulted Dora about the possibility that I had prostate cancer.

Before she addressed my question, she said, “You’re depressed. You don’t want to do anything now, do you?”

I hadn’t even realized I was depressed, but no sooner had she said this, I knew she was right. She told me to look at the trees once I got home and notice how beautiful they were. I followed her advice, and a few days later, I saw her at the NYTS. She looked concerned, but quickly smiled and said, “Eddie, you look so much better.” I didn’t look any different physically, but my aura—my emotional and mental nature—had improved. I said, “Of course I do, Dora. I did what you asked me to do.”

When the Roman Catholic Church began saying mass after noon and before midnight, members of the Liberal Catholic Church (LCC) wanted to know why Bishop Charles Leadbeater, one of the church’s founders, stated that the mass should not be recited during those hours. Bishop Vreeda contacted Bishop Pitkin, who officiated in the NY LCC and authorized him to invite Dora to witness a mass held at 5:00 in the evening. Dora consented, and before the mass, she asked Bishop Pitkin what he wanted to know.

The bishop asked her to psychically investigate whether or not an angel came when invoked at the beginning of the mass. He also wanted to know whether nine orders of angels appeared just before the prayer of consecration and whether the wafers of the Host were consecrated. He also asked her to interrupt the service if she thought that for any reason he shouldn’t continue.

Bishop Pitkin later told me that Dora sat through the entire service respectfully. When asked for her assessment, she said the angels did appear and the wafers were consecrated. However, at the breaking of the Host, the energy that’s supposed to flood the neighborhood in blessing was grounded through the people present. In other words, the energy may have helped those present, but the energy intended to help the neighborhood had been lost.

Years later, I asked Dora about it, and I suggested that perhaps it had something to do with the position of the sun at the time. She agreed.

For more information on clairvoyant observations of the sacraments, I recommend Leadbeater’s Science of the Sacraments. The book describes what he and others saw happening on the inner planes during the administration of the sacraments. As a young girl, Dora, along with four other sensitives, assisted in the investigations. Before Leadbeater included anything in the book, he required that all five sensitives agree they had seen what he saw.

That’s the mark of a scientist—one in spirit, at least.

Ed Abdill is former vice president of the Theosophical Society in America. This passage has been excerpted from his new book, Journey to the Real: Memoirs of a Theosophist (Lady Jane Press; available on Amazon). His other works include The Secret Gateway: Modern Theosophy and the Ancient Wisdom Tradition.

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

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings, Volume 12. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1980.

———. 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.

Suzuki, D.T., preface to B.L. Suzuki, Mahayana Buddhism. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Taimni. I.K. Man, God, and the Universe. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1969.

Wood, Douglas K. “Even Such Is Time.” Re-Vision 1, no. 1 (1978).

Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. New York: Morrow, 1979.

Printed in the  Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Savinainen, Antti "Rudolf Steiner on Karma" Quest 112:2, pg 36-39

By Antti Savinainen

The law of karma is a central teaching in the Eastern religions, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy. Moreover, it would be impossible to understand reincarnation without karma. The Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) delivered many lectures on karma from the perspective of his system of spiritual science (which included the development of abilities such as clairvoyance). Steiner emphasizes that his karmic examples come from the research of spiritual science.

Steiner’s last long lecture cycle, from 1924, dealt with karma in the context of the past lives of various people, some quite well-known at the time. However, this article chiefly addresses Steiner’s earlier lectures on karma. I will first discuss karma and its relationship with certain illnesses. Next, I will describe karma exercises aimed at enhancing understanding and acceptance of personal karma. Finally, I will address Christ as the Lord of Karma.

Karma and Illnesses

According to Steiner, karma works on many levels, since individuals, humanity, the earth, and the universe are all intertwined (Steiner, 1910). Although it is possible to observe a kind of instant karma in everyday life—for instance, someone can be caught lying and has to face the immediate consequences—the karmic consequences Steiner addresses are much slower, long-term processes.

In Steiner’s view, a person may need a certain disease to overcome a personality trait and develop healing forces that foster her spiritual growth. Thus karmically generated disease is not just about amending old digressions through suffering but an opportunity to develop forces that balance and refine the character. In this sense, a disease can be a great teacher.

Karmic effects can go on for several lifetimes. Steiner provides an example of a self-centered person who in kamaloka (the afterlife state in the astral world) has to live through her actions’ impact on other living beings. This experience imprints certain tendencies which, in the next incarnation, cause weakness in the inner character. A superficial character in one life causes a tendency to lie in the second life. Moreover, the tendency to lie causes incorrectly formed organs in the third life. In these cases, the moral weaknesses have reached all the way to the etheric body.

A weak I-consciousness and low level of self-reliance will affect the next incarnation as well, in Steiner’s view. This kind of person will unconsciously look for conditions, such as epidemics, which help to overcome this karmic weakness. More precisely, Steiner says this can be done by contracting cholera. On the other hand, one can compensate for an overbearing I-consciousness by contracting malaria.

The person disregarding the external world, with too strong a concentration on the inner life, can end up with a weakness of the soul that in the next incarnation exposes the body to an attack of measles late in life. This is a physical, karmic consequence of unbalanced concentration. In addition, there is also a psychic karmic effect: the next-life personality is subject to self-deception. On the other hand, if the person has developed the soul forces needed to overcome the tendency toward self-deception, there is no need to contract measles at a later age.

Preparatory Karma Exercises

Steiner formulated several exercises aimed at developing conscious encounters, objectivity, and understanding of other people and life events. In addition, he offered exercises that can help individuals recognize the forces of destiny in their biography and eventually reawaken memories of previous lives. Luigi Morelli (2015, 73) notes that Steiner did not bring these exercises to their ultimate form, as he did with the spiritual exercises offered in his masterpiece, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment (Steiner, 1918). Morelli organizes karma exercises provided by Steiner in three groups: preparatory karma exercises (Morelli calls these “preludes to the karma exercises”), lesser karma exercises, and greater karma exercises.

The first preparatory exercise is gratitude. Steiner advises us to look back at our lives and see the part played by our parents, relatives, friends, teachers, and other figures in our lives. This will lead us to realize how much we owe to others. When this exercise is repeated over time, an impression of important people in our lives will emerge, pointing to their deeper being.

Another version of this exercise involves bringing before the mind’s eye images of people who have acted, directly or indirectly, as hindrances and opposition. This exercise will develop an objective sense of our indebtedness. The point is to give space to another individual within our souls without emotional response. Admittedly, this is a demanding exercise, since feelings of hurt and anger are easily aroused when we are reminiscing about people who have opposed or wronged us.

The second preparatory karma exercise is learning to look back at an event in our lives as if we were spectators of ourselves. This will free us from the images that bind us to the past and unravel identification with our life experiences, which can sometimes be a heavy burden. Success in this exercise demands repeated practice.

Although Steiner does not say so in this context, the preliminary exercises seem to require forgiving others and oneself for all errors and wrongdoings. Forgiveness is an essential skill in the spiritual path. Moreover, genuine forgiveness has profound, even cosmic consequences: renouncing the recompense due to the iron law of karmic necessity liberates forces of the higher hierarchies, which will help Christ as a Lord of Karma (Prokofieff, 82–83). I will discuss Christ as a Lord of Karma later in this article.

The Lesser Karma Exercises

The first lesser karma exercise invites us to look back to one single event of life that seems to be due to chance. Another possibility is looking back to an event we did not wish to happen. The aim is to picture the event as something we had planned before our birth as if it had been designed by what Steiner calls the “second person in us.” Initially, this second person appears to be artificial, but with repeated practice, she grows and evolves within us. The exercise helps us remember that we actually wanted this event—for instance, an accident—to happen. This practice will develop peacefulness, acceptance, and a sense of purpose in life. We will learn to take responsibility for our destiny and cease to blame others for unpleasant events and failures.

Steiner’s karma exercise on joy and happiness is a bit peculiar. He states that it is erroneous to believe that joy and happiness are somehow earned; furthermore, this kind of thinking will lead to feelings of shame. By contrast, realizing that we have not earned happiness will lead to “a new feeling of peaceful security in the spirit and thankfulness toward the guiding powers of humanity.”

In the exercise of “contrary being,” we take a retrospective look at life and observe which tendencies have come naturally for us and which have not. What could not develop within us despite our desires to the contrary? What could we not avoid? With this exercise, the image of the “contrary being” is formed, and Steiner asks us to immerse ourselves in this being. This will help us to realize what is not the outcome of this life but comes from previous incarnations.

A related karma exercise concentrates on situations in which we were spared from something serious. Perhaps our departure was delayed by a few minutes, saving us from an accident. This exercise develops an ability to perceive chains of events guided by karmic forces.

In an extended lesser karma exercise, Steiner advises observing everything that has occurred over the last weeks or months. All unpleasant events are observed, with no thought of injustice caused to us or with any self-justification of our shortcomings. We take full responsibility for everything that has happened to us. This will create a new relationship with the spiritual world and lead to the recognition of the role of the second person in arranging the events in our life. Although Steiner does not say this, keeping a diary before starting the extended lesser karma exercises could be helpful.

The Greater Karma Exercises

Morelli calls the first greater karma exercise the Moon/Saturn/Sun exercise. It can be about oneself or another person. All the layers of personality will be peeled away one by one in meditation. First, one disregards all external activity, profession, and living conditions. Second, the meditation concentrates on temperament, mood, and way of thinking. This will make transparent everything working in the will. Behind this, the spiritual Moon will start to shine.

In the next stage, everything coming from emotions and temperament will be disregarded. The focus is on the way a person thinks. This will make the rhythmic system transparent, and the spiritual Sun will start to shine. In the final stage, a person’s thinking will be disregarded, and the impulses from Saturn will be revealed. One begins to see the individual as a spiritual being and starts perceiving the karma of that individual. Perhaps it would be best to apply this exercise only to oneself, since knowing another person’s karma seems to require a specific reason.

The second greater karma exercise lasts for four days and three nights. This exercise is about “spiritual painting” of a life event by recreating all the impressions received by our senses in the greatest detail. If another person is related to the event, she will be recreated as well, including the way she moved, the tone of her voice, words, gestures, smells, and so on. Next, the event will be taken into sleep, where the astral body will give it a shape. This is repeated the following two days. This way, the image will be imprinted into the etheric body, which will continue to work on the image.

Steiner describes how the person will experience this memory as walking in a cloud, giving rise to the feeling of being part of the picture itself. The feeling will grow an objective picture that is related to the event in a previous incarnation that was the root cause for the event in this incarnation.

All of these karma exercises, especially the greater ones, require a great deal of concentration and skillful meditation. The aim of the lesser karma exercises is to take responsibility for our lives and accept all events, pleasant and unpleasant alike, as part of our biography. Indeed, according to Steiner, we did this joyously before we were born, when we had a preview of the main events and difficulties waiting for us. The greater karma exercises aim to gain knowledge from our personal karma.

Christ as the Lord of Karma

The karmic powers are known as the Lords of Karma or the Lipikas in Theosophy (Steiner was a member of the Theosophical Society between 1902 and 1912). Intriguingly, Steiner (1911, lecture 3) said, “Occult clairvoyant research tells us that in our epoch Christ becomes the Lord of Karma for human evolution . . . so that in the future it will rest with Him to decide what our karmic account is, how our credit and debit in life are related.”

This is a remarkable occult pronouncement, about which Theosophy usually remains silent. There is, however, one exception: the Finnish Rosicrucian Theosophist Pekka Ervast (1875–1934) talked about the same thing.

Steiner stated that before entering kamaloka, the individual will meet Moses as a bookkeeper for the karmic powers, who presents their records of sins. This is changing or has already changed to some extent, since people will more and more meet Christ Jesus as their karmic judge. Moreover, Christ will help individuals in balancing karma in a new incarnation:

We shall then have to encounter events through which our karma can be balanced, for every man must reap what he has sown . . . The balancing must be arranged so as to be in the best possible accord with the concerns of the whole world. It must enable us to give all possible help to the advancement of mankind on earth . . . In the future it will fall to Christ to bring the balance of our karma into line with the general Earth-karma and the general progress of humanity. (Steiner, 1911, lecture 10)

Many diseases Steiner mentioned in his lectures on karma have already been overcome as a result of the advancement of modern medicine (for instance, the latest smallpox case took place in 1975, thanks to vaccination). Steiner anticipated this progress. He stated that people will become externally healthier because of medical science and general improvements in living conditions. This means that karmic balancing must be sought from elsewhere. This is not without consequences: there will be an increasing feeling of inner emptiness, and people will have fewer incentives for inner progress, accompanied by a stultification of the soul. Perhaps this is an occult explanation for increasing depression and hopelessness, which is prevalent, especially among young people.

Should one, then, decline medical care? Of course not, but it is important to realize that spiritual aspiration and self-education are crucial in this regard as well. They have the potential to foster inner forces that certain diseases could have brought forth.

A reader coming from outside Anthroposophical or Theosophical circles might be baffled by the talk of Christ in the context of karma and reincarnation. Assuming that the law of karma is real, why is it alien to traditional Christianity? According to Steiner, teachings on karma and reincarnation could not have been given to Western civilization before it was ready to receive these teachings. Steiner (1909, lecture 10) even states that “it would have been detrimental to evolution if the present content of spiritual science . . . had been imparted openly to mankind a few hundred years earlier.”

There were Gnostic streams teaching reincarnation within early Christianity (see, for instance, Bean, 2020), but ecumenical councils later condemned these as heretical. In addition, some passages in the Gospels could be interpreted in the light of karma and reincarnation (such as the man who was born blind, John 9:1–4). Of course, Christian theology easily supplies explanations that do not include karma.

Steiner’s karma exercises provide much food for thought. For instance, looking back at pivotal points and people in one’s biography helps to understand one’s destiny. One may also recognize how one’s own actions have affected the course of life of other people. Accepting one’s life as it is, including unpleasant events, is essential. This can be achieved by gratitude and forgiveness toward those who have helped us to find our way, even when they have acted negatively from our perspective. After all, we have wanted these things to happen to us in our higher consciousness before we were born. This is by no means easy to achieve, especially if we have had to endure serious hardships in our lives.

I will conclude my article with inspiring words from Pekka Ervast, who described the attitude toward karma and hardships held by an individual who has reached contact with the spirit within oneself, or the kingdom of God, as it is called in the Gospels:

And when one is impossibly rich [when the person has received the kingdom of God] then how could one be anything else than happy and grateful for even paying the debts? For what are they anymore to one? What are the sufferings anymore? . . . The debt means nothing to one. One’s soul is filled with joy and happiness and bliss and peace. The sufferings, misfortunes, humiliations, they are all sheer happiness to one. (Ervast, 2018)

Sources

Bean, James. “Reincarnation in Gnosticism: Let the Gnostics Be Gnostic.” Medium, Aug. 19, 2020.

Ervast, Pekka. The Inner God and Happiness: Lectures in Helsinki, 1922. Original Finnish title: Jumala ja onni. Translated by Lauri Livistö. Helsinki: Aatma, 2018.

Morelli, Luigi. Karl Julius Schröer and Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy and the Teachings of Karma and Reincarnation. Milton Keynes, UK: iUniverse, 2015.

Prokofieff, Sergei O. The Occult Significance of Forgiveness. Essex, U.K.: Temple Lodge, 2016.

Steiner, Rudolf. The Gospel of St. Luke: Ten Lectures in Basel, 1909. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.

———. From Jesus to Christ: Ten Lectures in Karlsruhe, 1911. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.

———. Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. 1918. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.

———. Manifestations of Karma: Eleven Lectures in Hamburg, 1910. Available online at Rudolf Steiner Archive.

Antti Savinainen, PhD, is a Finnish high-school physics instructor who teaches both the Finnish national syllabus and for the international baccalaureate. He writes regularly on Theosophical and Anthroposophical themes, both in Finnish and English. He has been a member of the Finnish Rosy Cross, a part of the Finnish Theosophical movement, for over three decades.

Printed in the  Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Colon, Michael "The Beautiful Nature of Time" Quest 112:2, pg 34-35

By Michael Colon

The clock’s ticking sound plays the melody we all dance to in this life. Every decision we make is in harmony with the rhythm of the song we are meant to enjoy. We are all dancing and singing along until the lights go out; then it is someone else’s turn to step in tune with the recording life has ready for them. Time is neither right nor wrong; it just is, and it’s our job while we are here to take advantage of it.

We play with time because it’s a gift. How we honor this inheritance is entirely up to us. We can spend it on assumptions that create an illusion of progress. Or we can get on the dance floor and mingle with the essence which drives this reality. To explore the driving force of time is to dive off the board into the deep pool of our true selves, and it’s deeper than we think. In the web of reality, there are an endless amount of ways we can spin our storylines to interweave with others. In this world, billions of footprints walk around, creating conversation in the form of exchanging moments. This is a universal language all of us as one race share. As long as our heart beats and plays a sound that correlates to the dance, we can still say “I love you,” make amends with a friend, write that book, and answer the questions that disturb our soul. No matter if we don’t like the answer; even if it’s painful, it’s better to know than never to know at all.

The answers to questions have an expiration date, which means they mimic the nature of time. Everything is revealed when we look for it, but we have to be willing to look. It’s no use trying to turn back the hands of the clock: we will only break the instrument.

As time goes forward, expanding discoveries, we can consciously use what we gain from the past, with an outlook on the future, to determine how we handle the present. Sure, we may not be ready for something: that merely means that it’s not our time to have it, but it’s always the time to prepare ourselves for what we want.

Our conscious awareness can shift at any moment when we see time not from a chronological perspective, but in a more pliable way: for the benefit of living this life. We do this by making things last longer, savoring a good meal, or stretching out a good time with friends. We can also shorten what hurts us by quickly occupying our thoughts with positive tasks. Whatever the method, we can objectively work ways around the first-layer fundamentals of time. The years are not more valuable than the months. The months don’t speak ill of the weeks. The weeks don’t disregard the days. The days don’t look down on the hours. The hours don’t tell the minutes to hush. The minutes don’t try to kill the seconds. All hold an equivalent amount of meaning when we reach a destination.

Before we reach a goal, we only think of time in a pessimistic manner, because we haven’t gotten there yet, but when we do, it doesn’t matter how long it took, because we have finally arrived, with a reset judgment of where we are.

Our choices depend on time because if we had an unlimited amount of it, then the thrill of life would be nonexistent. It’s actually for our benefit that we don’t live forever, because then there would be nothing to gain from experience, and experience is what keeps us from being alone. We all see time through our unique viewpoints based on our path on this journey, so what may seem slow to one can be fast for another. What may be boring to someone will be fascinating for another.

Time can be seen clearly through the lens of open-mindedness and with the eyes of our hearts, which are a kind of spiritual sense enabling us to see and feel growth through time. When we grow, a hidden understanding reveals itself and reminds us that there are checkpoints in our life created by time for the simple reason that we were always meant to reach them.

Time is measured not just by the ticking sounds on a clock but by how we utilize the space between the beginning and the end. There is a saying that says, “Father Time is undefeated.” Yes, that is true. We cannot outlive the set departure date for the next phase, which goes on forever beyond our current understanding of time. Where is the next phase? Why is it forever? It depends on what you believe in. I believe that my spirit will ascend into heaven for eternity with God. We all have our own interpretations of what has been around before our existence.

In any event, life will go on without us and continue to write other stories. As soon as the ink hits the paper, it dries immediately, leaving a trail of memories for us to read and appreciate. What a great joy that our story will be on the bookshelf of life! This proves that we are never alone and our time here is not a waste. Material things wither away, but the impressions and tales we leave behind do last—not forever, but long enough to serve their purpose. We are all here now for a reason, which means we are not accidents. Nothing is by accident: time has a plan and a course it must follow.

Time itself must follow a set of laws, and if time must follow the rules, then it must have been ordered to do so. But by whom? Again, that all depends on what you believe in. Whether it is dictated by God or the laws of science, the nature of time is beautiful.

Michael Colon was born and raised in New York City. He says, “My mission is to use my craft to impact the lives of many. I look forward to sharing more of my work through the beautiful form of written art.”