I want my readers to approach this post with the understanding that I am writing on this topic with my limited understanding. I am certain that as I evolve, I might express paradoxes, which essentially stem from concepts we may not fully comprehend due to our limited perception in the face of vast existence, and our perceptions change as we evolve.
Coming to the topic;
I set my clock to 7 am last night so that I could wake up on time the next morning. My alarm buzzed, I snoozed, and I slept again. When I woke up at 9 am, the first sentence I uttered was, ‘Darn, I lost 2 hours!’ This might be equivalent to 2 seconds or 200 years for someone who lives millions of light-years away from our planet outside of the Milky Way. But what made me think is, did I really lose 2 hours? What is time? Is it real? Many believe it is, and many believe it isn’t.
What is real? How do we determine something is real or not? Mostly, we consider something as real when we experience it through our sense organs. This essentially boils down to something that has a physical manifestation. Let’s take a tree or a rock, for instance. We see it, we touch it, and we say, ‘Yes, there is a tree or a rock.’ And if someone says, ‘I don’t see a tree,’ we may call them crazy because it clearly exists for others. Now, what about something which we can’t perceive through our senses, such as an electron? We haven’t seen it with our naked eyes other than in images from our school textbooks or on the internet, but we are certain it exists. How? Quite simply, my TV remote doesn’t work if I don’t put a battery in it. And this experience is the same for all of us. So we believe electrons exist. Now, what about something which we can’t perceive through our sense organs, nor is it experienced uniformly across, something like ‘time’? Do we believe it is real and that it exists?
Based on our individual experiences, we say it is. Because the way we were 20 years ago and now aren’t the same. But here, even though we are talking about time, we are referring to change, right? Then are change and time the same? In a way, if you think about it, they are, but in a way, they are not. Let’s take an example of a rock; it doesn’t have the concept of time in itself, but in the bigger picture, it has.It eventually weathers and becomes soil, means it changes and hence can be quantified through time. And is there anything that won’t undergo change? I don’t think so.So everything is changing, which means everything is traveling through time whether we like it or not.
Now imagine a ‘time’ where there was no ‘concept of time,’ where our lives were not ruled by 24 hours, and the concepts of weeks and years didn’t exist. Would there be any difference to our lives (i mean sapiens as a species here)since then and now? I think our ancestors who lived in caves wouldn’t be able to look at their Rolex watches and say, ‘It’s 12:00 pm,’ but they would still know based on cycles of day and night because everything around us is cyclical (from atoms to galaxies). If that’s the case, could it be that we have multiple universes revolving like our planets around some entity, akin to our solar system, instead of the prevailing view in traditional cosmology of a single, unlimited, vast expanding space? And within this framework, could we be experiencing time relative in our universe compared to those other universes that exist? Just a thought. Coming to my point, At any given point in time, we can exist only in one state, what we call the ‘present.’ But even in the present, we can exist in the past/future. Ironic, right?
There were many instances in my life where time flew like a falcon and moved like a snail. I could have taken the help of Einstein’s time dilation principle had i sent my twin sister to Miller’s planet from Interstellar .But for now ,i will stick to the psychological concept of ‘Flow’ if i lost track of time. In short ,we can all agree that time is relative, and relativity in itself is relative.
For me, time is both real and unreal at the same time. And that’s how existence has always been, in ‘duality.’ And as I said in the beginning, we are trying to understand something which is beyond our comprehension. It’s like for a reptile; it sees an object differently than us humans, but if it thinks that’s the reality and ultimate truth, we can’t blame it, but that’s not the truth because we humans sees things differently. But do we humans see things in its entirety? That’s a thought I leave for you to decide. What I am trying to put forth is, there are things that exist beyond our comprehension, but we are able to apply them now. But as we evolve, we will perceive and apply them differently.
Perhaps what Socrates stated centuries ago, ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing,’ could be the only thing that can transcend the constructs of space and time without a change.
PS: I am interested to know your take on this post. Please leave your thoughts in the comment section if you would like to engage with me on this topic.
