Spiritual concepts
Time
Do you know what time is? Stephen Hawking wrote a whole book about its history. But that is only the start. Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact there are many sorts of time. For a start there is ‘conventional time’ and there is ‘spiritual time’ and I think it is worth exploring these two aspects with respect to perceptions.
Conventional time
Time as we measure it in the physical world is measured using the planets, the sun and the moon. We measure time relative to the movements of these bodies. This is thus 'physical' time [if we can call it that] a useful means of providing a common point of reference for humans. We assume they are fixed in terms of their relative motions to us – which in itself has its problems as Einstein pointed out.
But this rather crude mechanism enables us to stamp any event with a number we might all recognise as having some meaning and it is a means for us to co-ordinate our actions. When we say we would like to meet our friends for coffee at 10.00 and we all have synchronised physical time measuring devices then we are able to do it.
We make a lot of assumptions about the relative motions of the bodies we use for time measurement, but given the overall stability they have showed in the period in which we have been measuring they have ended up being quite a useful point of reference.
Even conventionally measured time can use different systems.
We may think that when we specify a certain date and a time as measured using our watches that this must be ‘time’. But even using the planets and the sun and the moon, there are different systems in operation.
First there is Universal time and Ephemeris time, then there is the tropical year and the sidereal year, there is the synodic month, the sidereal month and the calendar month. Then there are weeks which seem to be weeks…
Jeff Mayo - Astrology
The next unit of time is the week, which with its 7 days comes to us from ancient Babylonia, even the names of the days can be traced back to the planetary gods. The length of the week corresponds roughly to one of the four phases of the Sun Moon cycle or lunation.
Finally, there are days and then there are days ……….
Jeff Mayo - Astrology
The fourth basic unit of time is the day. This is the period of the Earth’s rotation on its axis. It may be measured with respect to the stars (sidereal day), the true Sun (apparent Solar day) or the mean Sun (mean Solar day).
So our measuring of time is relative only to other things, if those things changed our time measurement would be affected, we might appear to be living longer or not so long...
The Spiritual world is ‘timeless’
In contrast, the spiritual world is to all intense and purposes ‘free of time’. The reason it is free of time is it is beyond perceptions. It is only our perceptions that provide us with a sense of what time is. The flicker rate of our eyes produces a sort of log that our software of the mind uses. If we go beyond our perceptions then we have no time reference.
In other words the log is just a log. The past and the present are just entries in the log and are all as accessible to us if we are completely spiritually open as any other moment in time.
So why do we persist in thinking time exists? What makes us think that there is such a thing as time? It is because of the log. We look back through the log so we have a concept of the past from our perspective and we look forward by creating simulations of what might happen creating a log of possibilities.
The future is what we simulate to happen by executions of the programs of the universe that exist now. But of course if those programs change, the future will look totally different. The future in reality does not exist. It is a simulation of the mind.
We look back and conceive of the past as the events in the log. The past only exists because the log exists. Wipe out the logs and you have wiped out history. For people with brain damage, unable to access the log and their memory, only the present exists.
We take snapshots of events at a specific rate. Under normal circumstances, they tend to get replayed back to us when we search our perception log at that same rate. Our perception of the passage of time is dependent on this replay speed.
But a dog or a mouse has what is called a different 'flicker rate', it captures events at different speeds to ours. For a dog his lifetime may seem the same as our lifetime relatively speaking. He might feel he has packed in a huge amount in his brief life, because his flicker rate is so much faster. And a little gerbil, whose life is in our terms so short, may have a flicker rate 10 times fast than ours, so again he feels he has packed vast quantities of experience into his brief life.
And what of an oak tree? We do not know how trees record perceptions but let us assume they do. They may only record snapshots at less frequent intervals relative to us.
Now let us imagine we have the oak's log, the dog's log, the mouse's log and our log side by side and we are going to replay all these logs, but we are going to replay them at our flicker rate. What perceptions would we get?
In the first place, it is more than possible that all the things would start to appear as though they behaved like us. Remember the wonderful 'Life of Plants' David Attenborough films? When speeded up a plant appears to be more like us, it lives its life at a similar pace. The little gerbil too, may appear to be less frantic and manic with a more leisurely life style. Our little dog may appear even more laid back than we thought. In the end we might get the impression that the dog, the oak, the mouse and we all have exactly the same life span, because relatively speaking the images would appear to coincide ‘in time’.
But this of course is false. Their time is different from our time. Logs are 'out of time'. So all time is relative.
Observations
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- Agassiz, Louis – Essay on Classification – Proof of a Mind acting in conformity with a Plan laid out beforehand and sustained for a long period
- Albrecht Dürer – 13 Death
- Alice in Wonderland - Ch 07 - 1 A Mad Tea Party
- Aristotle - Meteorics - On evolution
- Atharvaveda - XIX 53 from Prayer to Kala [Time]
- Auden, W H - As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street
- Aurelius, Marcus - Meditations - Destiny, the ordered universe and time
- Beddoes, Thomas Lovell - A Clock striking Midnight
- Bergson, Henri - Matter and Memory - Memory and perception
- Bergson, Henri - Matter and Memory - The cyclical nature of Perceptions
- Bill sees a space craft
- Blithe spirit - The vast moving sheet
- Bloomfield, William - The Dreame of Mr Blomefeild
- Boethius - Misc quote - Since the Creator hath always an eternal and present state
- Bridges, Robert - In Autumn moonlight
- Bruno, Giordano – Cause, principle and unity - 06 The Third Dialogue
- Bruno, Giordano – Cause, principle and unity - 10 The Fifth Dialogue
- Bruno, Giordano – Cause, principle and unity - Al principi di l'universo
- Burton, Sir Richard - THE KASÎDAH 01 2
- Carlyle, Thomas - Sartor Resartus - Ghosts!
- Carlyle, Thomas - Sartor Resartus - Light sparkles floating in the aether of deity
- Carlyle, Thomas - Sartor Resartus - The Centre of Indifference
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Ode to the Departing Year
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor - Time Real and Imaginary
- Corbin, Henry - Na-koja-Abad: a place outside of place
- Crowley, Aleister - Book of Lies - The Branks
- Custance, John - Adventure into the Unconscious - Argue with Socrates in Athens
- Dali - Exploding clock
- Daniélou, Alain – The Way to the Labyrinth – Time is an illusion
- Descartes, Rene - Time, energy and function execution
- Desnos, Robert - Demain
- Eddington, Sir Arthur - The Expanding Universe - Time
- Eddington, Sir Arthur - The Expanding Universe - Time and relativity
- Einstein, Albert - Time
- Eliot, T S - Four Quartets - 01 Burnt Norton I
- Eliot, T S - Four Quartets - 10 The Dry Salvages III
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Over-soul - On the senses
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Over-Soul - The spirit sports with time
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Self Reliance - On time
- Eriugena, Johannes Scotus - Homilia on the Prologue to the John Gospel – Time
- Eriugena, Johannes Scotus - Peryphyseon – Time
- Everything disappeared and was replaced by a bright white consuming light, in which was total peace, no pain, no thought, no time
- Ficino, Marsilio – Selected Letters - From a letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti
- Five year old goes out of body
- Frost, Robert - No speed of wind or water rushing by
- Frost, Robert - Poets know a lot. Never did I fail
- Genesis 01 - The Creation
- Hafez of Shiraz - Thirty Poems - Where is the news
- Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder and Risk of Suicide
- Hannibal Buress
- Hawkes, Jacquetta – A Land – Past lives
- Hawking, Stephen - A Brief History of Time - On time
- He had been in a bubble that seemed like a womb and that he just seemed to go back and back in time
- Heine, Heinrich - Who was it, please tell me, who was it who reckoned
- Hinton, Charles - The Fourth Dimension – Consciousness, the Higher spirit and Destiny
- Hinton, Charles - What Is the Fourth Dimension – The Matrix
- Hinton, Charles - What Is the Fourth Dimension – The threads of the loom
- Holderlin, Johann - Patmos
- Holmes, Oliver Wendell - A Parody on “A Psalm of Life”
- Hood, Thomas - The Sea of Death
- Huxley, Aldous - Misc. Quote - The exit portal
- Huxley, Aldous - On Birth
- Jung, C G - Memories, Dreams and Reflections - Timelessness
- Kant, Immanuel - Dreams of a Spirit Seer - 11 Chapter Two
- King, Martin Luther - 03 AUGUST 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail
- Lemaitre, Georges - Homogenous universe of constant mass and increasing radius - 01
- Lemaitre, Georges - Homogenous universe of constant mass and increasing radius - 02
- Lemaitre, Georges - Homogenous universe of constant mass and increasing radius - 03
- Lemaitre, Georges - Letter to Nature - The order of creation, Time and the physical came last
- Li Po - The Guild of Good Fellowship
- Linklater, Richard - On time and reality
- Lowell, James Russell - Still as a city buried ‘neath the sea
- Ludlow, Fitz Hugh - Loss of time
- MacLaine, Shirley - Shirley's own OBE
- Madame d’Esperance - Shadow Land - 26 Going out of body towards the Light
- Masters and Houston - Split consciousness
- Masters and Houston - Time distortion
- Mayo, Jeff - The different ways of measuring time
- Mayo, Jeff - Time in reality is fictitious
- Meeting Morrison and God on the Moon by Rhythm King
- Meister Eckhart - Miscellaneous quotes - I am my own first cause
- Meister Eckhart - Selected writings - God the Father and the Son have nothing to do with time
- Meister Eckhart - Selected writings - The soul in its highest and purest part has nothing whatsoever to do with time
- Messing, Wolf - Moscow 1940 and the prophecy ‘Soviet tanks will roll into Berlin’ and in 1943, ‘the war will end in May 1945’
- Michael Donaghy - Time passing
- Michaux, Henri - Miserable Miracle Mescaline - Time
- Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov – Meditations on the Solidity and Liquidity of Bodies – Anticipating the loom
- Moody Blues - Dawn is a feeling
- Multiple out of body quotes
- Nabokov, Vladimir - Speak, Memory - Spirals and Eggs
- Nerval, Gerard de - Time
- North Whitehead, Alfred – 03 System, Processes, Functions and ‘becoming’
- North Whitehead, Alfred – 04 The immortality of an entity, the system of the universe, in time and outside time
- North Whitehead, Alfred – 05 Quanta
- North Whitehead, Alfred – 06 The impossibility of a Big Bang; the emergence of the ‘concrescence’
- North Whitehead, Alfred – 08 Time and perceptions
- Omar Khayyam - The Rubaiyat - How Time is slipping underneath our Feet
- On the subconscious ability to calculate the lapse of time
- Ouspensky, P D - Tertium Organum - On Time
- Paracelsus - On Time and healing illness
- Pauli, Wolfgang - Dream of 23rd January 1938
- Peter 3:2
- Plato - Timaeus - On time
- Priestley, J B - Margin Released – On Perceptions and Time
- Reichel-Dolmatoff – Amazonian Cosmos - The Yaje ceremony
- Revelations 10
- Richet, Charles Robert - Popular Science Monthly Volume 13 August 1878 - Hasheesh
- Robert Herrick - Hesperides - Gather ye rosebuds
- S'RÎMAD BHÂGAVATAM – Canto 11, Chapter 03 – End of the world
- S'RÎMAD BHÂGAVATAM – Canto 11, Chapter 09 – The Great Work
- Salvorin A - Gwyllm becomes Medusa
- Schrodinger, Erwin - Mind and Matter - Time
- Seeress of Prevorst, the - The Sun circles and the Eye of God
- Shaikh Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani - Irshad al-‘awamm - Wells and tunnels
- Shaivism - Concepts and symbols - Energy and matter
- Silesius - The Cherubinic Wanderer – 08 Time and Eternity 182
- Silesius - The Cherubinic Wanderer – 08 Time and Eternity 185
- Silesius - The Cherubinic Wanderer – 08 Time and Eternity 186
- Silesius - The Cherubinic Wanderer – 08 Time and Eternity 187
- Silesius - The Cherubinic Wanderer – 08 Time and Eternity 189
- Soddy, Frederick – The Order of Creation – Creation of Time and the Elements
- Sri Aurobindo - 03 Book III Canto II - 02
- Sri Aurobindo - 06 Savitri Book VI Canto I
- Suzuki, D T - Misc. Quote - God is not 'in time'
- Suzuki, D T - Misc. Quote - The enlightenment experience
- Swedenborg, Emanuel - The Infinite - Energy
- Swedenborg, Emanuel - The Infinite - Time
- Sylvie and Bruno - The Outlandish watch
- Tennyson, Alfred Lord - In Memoriam A H H - Be near me when the sensuous frame
- The Ceasing of Notions – 26 Emmon at last understands
- The Good Drugs Guide website - summary of effects of LSD
- Thoreau, Henry D - Walden - Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in
- Through the Looking Glass - Ch 06 - 2 Names and ages
- Tír na nÓg
- Turvey, Vincent – The beginnings of Seership – Down the rabbit hole or through the mirror
- VAISESIKA - On atoms
- Vaughan, Henry - The World
- Villoldo, Dr Alberto - The sub-levels of Earth - an overview
- Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse-Five
- Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry - Rain in Summer
- Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry - The Builders
- Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry - Thus the Seer
- Warner Allen, Herbert - The Timeless Moment – Thoughts on time
- Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass - I open my scuttle at night
- William - Out of time
- Wim Wenders on Painting and Film making and Time
- With lullay lullay like a child
- Wren-Lewis, John - THE DARKNESS OF GOD: A Personal Report on Consciousness - Transformation Through an Encounter with Death
- Yeats, W B - Anima Mundi - On death
- Yeats, W B - Selected poems - His Bargain
- Yerka, Jacek and Samuel Pepys - Diary 1665
- Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book I - Sutras 01 to 51