Reflections On Time During End Times

It’s fitting, at the beginning of a new year, to reflect on the meaning of time, and timelessness. At the core level in consciousness, what is the relationship between thought and time, and between death and timelessness?

Science cannot give insight into time, because time is not an objective reality but a psychological construct. There is no such thing as time beyond the human mind’s conception of it.

The “arrow of time” is a misnomer. The universe is continuously unfolding, and in its unfolding creation is recapitulated. The measurement of time is something humans invented, a useful tool that made all other tools possible.

The first people who possessed the cognitive capacity for someone to point at the sun, then point to the spot where the group was standing, and lastly point to where the sun would be late in the afternoon (thus conveying the thought ‘let’s meet here then’), invented time.

The construct of time was therefore the first requirement for the division of labor, which is as old as man. As others have said, “The key cognitive breakthrough with tool use is not simply carving a tool out of obsidian stone, but having the conceptualization to say, I’m going to use this at some point in the future. I’m going to create this. I’m going to store it because it will come in handy. That’s the cognitive breakthrough that, at some point, we achieved.”

Indeed, and failing to understand it, which is to say, failing to understand that thought and time are essentially the same thing, a cognitive adaptation that humans achieved 100,000 or more years ago, man has been decimating the Earth, slowly at first but now out of control. In our entire evolutionary history as a species, there is now the most urgent necessity to understand the limits and place of ‘higher thought’ and time, and bring about a breakthrough in human consciousness.

It’s true that “the evolution of human culture and civilization has tracked the creation of more and more sophisticated clocks, going back from sundials to hourglasses, to water clocks, to mechanical clocks, pendulum clocks, quartz crystals, and today, atomic clocks.” And that “human civilization has been accompanied by this endless quest to measure time with more and more and more accuracy.”

That has made us prisoners of time however, even as we venerate thought-time as “mental time travel,” and fantasize about real time travel.

Even at the physical level, time is problematic. A light year – the distance that light, which travels at 186,000 miles a second, traverses space in a year, doesn’t exist apart from human measurement. A year, after all, is the time it takes our Earth to complete an orbit around our star, the sun. Time is relative.

And the measurement of physical time becomes nonsensical when speaking about the galaxies that the Webb telescope is glimpsing. Astronomers sometimes say things like, “ It took the light from that galaxy 10 billion years to reach us,” when the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old!

In addition, the high priests of popular science, the neuroscientists, are asked inane questions such as, “Let’s imagine there are no human beings, there are no animals, the universe just cold and dead. What is time in that universe?”

The neuroscientist starts out plausibly: “Things are dynamic, even in the cold universe, particularly if it’s in the initial part of the universe. Things will be dynamic and changing and expanding. So time exists in the sense that the universe is undergoing a change.”

But then he slides right back into anthropocentrism: The universe is a clock, in a manner of speaking.” No, the universe is not a clock, in any manner of speaking.

What about other animals, do they have a rudimentary ability to ‘tell time,’ or is time a psychological construct possessed only by humans?

It’s true that some “animals have the ability to anticipate what’s about to happen and make cause-and-effect relationships, like when they hear a sound, that sound might reflect a predator, or prey hidden in the bushes.”

But it’s pure projection to say, “All animals have this ability to anticipate and predict time and be aware of time on this short scale.” And it risible to declare, “Because the brain of most animals is not particularly good at linking cause and effect across large periods of time, agriculture wasn’t invented by other animals.”

Time is a cognitive trait of humans, the cornerstone and hallmark of the movement of conscious and subconscious memory in thought. The smartest animals may have thoughts, but they don’t live in the shadow of the past, and they don’t construct a purportedly permanent self that gives rise to a fear of death. Psychologically, time is division, fear and sorrow.

The human brain cannot completely understand the human brain anymore than it can completely understand the universe. But it can and must understand the mechanism of thought and time, which are fragmenting the Earth and humanity all to hell. Above all, the brain can be attentively silent, and stand in communion with the numinous mystery that pervades the Earth and cosmos.

The key insight is that spiritual development is inversely related to time-bound existence – the more tied to time as becoming that we are, the less inward space and growth we have.

Therefore the vaunted idea of “mental time travel” is antithetical not only to meditation, but to growing as a human being.

When the mind of thought falls silent in undivided watchfulness, time ends. Therefore thought and time are essentially synonymous. Thought generated the psychological reality of time, and the subconscious movement of time became the prison of human consciousness.

Consequently, an adequate response to the climate crisis and decimation of biodiversity at man’s hands is not a better use of our cognitive abilities, which are based on the construct of time. The right response is to understand thought-time, seeing when to use it and when to be inwardly still, rather than assume we must always operate in terms of thought and time.

Finally, living in terms of the illusion of time is ultimately the primary way we keep the actuality of death away, at arm’s length until the end. Gaining insight into death is a matter of ending time, which allows the ever-present actuality of death to be clear, and allows us to make a friend of death while fully alive.

Planning is necessary, but the present is the portal to the infinite. To cross the threshold, one has to end, through passive awareness and non-directed attention, the suffocating movement of memory, thought and time.

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