On Time

First some questions: What is time? In a physical sense? In psychological terms? What does time do? How does it work? Can it be transcended? Time in many ways is like space. In physics, time and space are woven together, like a fabric upon which all matter lies. At the limits, near the speed of light, movement in time is yoked to movement in space. As spatial speed increases, temporal speed slows. Recent quantum physics, in the area of non-local phenomena, suggests that both time and space are not as they appear on our scale of existence. It appears that particles, separated in both space and time, interact, in a simultaneous manner. Indeed, in one of the strangest experimental effects, the future may causally impact the past (the implications of that one will make your head spin). Distant particles are somehow connected, are somehow not distant. It is as if the space and time between did not really exist, nor the proposed distinction. Rather, these physicists (cf. Yakir Aharonov, Jeff Tollakson, and Menas Kafatos) suggest that perhaps there is an underlying singularity or unity to matter, across both time and space. Many spiritual traditions, philosophies, songs, and so on have suggested similar ideas - "We are one, heartache to heartache....love is a battlefield" - Pat Benatar.

Beyond funny ‘80's rocker references, such notions are at the heart of spiritual practices, across the various world traditions, even mainstream Christianity which proposes that God exists outside the bounds of time. This is why my Christian friends have already been forgiven for sins not yet committed. I like this belief of a god outside of time. Indeed, the practice of stepping outside the bounds of space and time, of opening consciousness to grasp the infinite, of allowing the infinite and the singular to fold into an infinitely increasing and decreasing wave, beyond the notion of quantity itself - embracing the unity of the infinite.... I think this is where meditation may lead (I don't meditate myself, so I can't tell you with any certainty).

So what is time? On a psychological level, time is quite malleable as well. When life speeds up, time slows down, such as at moments of great threat - traumas that require a slower arena for the will to act. If you are about to be hit by a car, time should slow down for you, allowing you perhaps to jump or duck (if there is time of course). Anyone with panic disorder will tell you that their 10-15 minute long panic attacks actually feel eternal. Of course things are not that simple. Time goes slowly when one lacks meaning as well. Think back to the old clock on the wall of your last class of the week back in high-school.

Like most of the things we discuss in this blog - time is experienced in a fractal manner, as is space. Searches across (memory-based) time and space tends to be carried out in fractal (branch-like) patterns. For example: If I asked you to search memory for happy times in your life, you could answer based on a year-by-year basis (ah yes! To be 18 again...), a month-by-month basis (October was a great month for me this past year), week-by-week (last week was a good one here), day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and so on (this minute is not as good as one I had 10 minutes ago). Psychotherapists count on this in their work everyday, as therapy unfolds within relational time - exchange-by-exchange, on the quarter-hour, session-by-session, and across the phases of treatment.

I don't know what time is, beyond a mysterious self-similar backdrop upon which we lead our lives. It is intricately woven across the scales of observation - from the quantum level to the phenomenological time of cultural revolutions. I do also know, on a deeply practical level, that each moment in time carries the potential for great integrity within our lives. If we can become aware of moments as they flow by, focusing our intention on just that awareness, we can connect to a thread beyond time: A thread of meaning that attaches moments together, moments separated in a branchlike way through fractal time. This thread may be strengthened, like a rope that holds an anchor of security within a complex world. I am me, right now, and also the sad 5 year-old boy who had to put his frog back in the pond on a family camping trip, and the teen-ager at a good concert, and the young man doing my first official session of therapy on my own, and I am me on my wedding day, with the ring on my middle-aged finger the same as the one being placed upon my hand. Across fractal time, we are more truly ourselves. Perhaps this is what we experience on our way to death? The weaving of our personal quilts of moments in time, big and small, all bound together. Perhaps time slows into death, approaching an asymptote, unyoking itself from our current experience of time and reaching down into the timelessness of quanta, some quantum afterlife? Perhaps it is this singularity that the physicists grasp when they look at the edges of scale - of huge and tiny. Perhaps they are glimpsing in their experiments what the wise shamans have known all along through a different means? A oneness at the bounds of existence, beyond the veil of the infinite pile of ticks and tocks that we use to structure our existence.