Theos-Talk Archives (April 1994 Message tl00012)

This is by Eldon Tucker.

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     Animals, and to a certain extend primitive peoples, have a
simple view of time. Only the present exists. The past is gone and
non-existent. The future, to them, is also unreal.
     In modern society we have learned to control things much
better. We've learned to become accountable for the past and to
carefully plan for the future. If we do something bad, it may now
be in the past, but we still know that we'll be punished for it,
and that thought affects our decision to take the action. And we
know that if we plan our actions carefully, our future rewards are
greater.
     Giving value to the lasting consequences of the past, and to
the rewards or suffering that the future may bring, depending upon
our attentiveness to it, we assume more responsibility for
ourselves as beings existing in time.
     This added responsibility brings a greater sense of clarity to
our activities on this world, our physical-plane Globe D events in
life. We may sleep less, take on more responsibilities, and concern
ourselves more with what we do and what is happening about us.
     The past takes on more of a sense of reality as we keep
records, journals, diaries, and take pictures, and surround us with
materials that help us remember and picture in our imagination what
has happened.
     The future also takes on more of a sense of reality as we make
detailed plans and schedules which we may subsequently try to live
by. We may be under great pressure to finish certain things
quickly, by some deadline, or burdened with a great number of
responsibilities that we have to tend to, with too little time to
do them justice. And we look forward, and try to arrange our
upcoming activities to keep our live in order.
     Contrast this with a primitive lifestyle. Picture a life on a
little farm in Mexico, where one day is like the next, and there
are no schedules, no pressures, no burden of responsibilities. We
may have to keep ourselves fed, and to follow the regular routine
of life, but it seems timeless, eternal, because it is always the
same, without change, for as long as we can remember.
     This secluded lifestyle allows one to disengage from life on
this world. We are not as heavily invested in life and activities,
but we rather just peacefully get by. We are not caught up in the
flux of the human lifewave, of the great evolutionary sweeps of
consciousness that drive the cultures and challenge us to our
limits.
     In this isolated Mexican life, we are more free of existence
on this earth, more loosely engaged in life here, and able to bring
a bit of the rest of the devachanic consciousness.
     It may be necessary for us to disengage from the intense
activities of life in the active subraces, the dominant cultures of
our age. We may need a time of quiet, of peace, of rest, to
reconnect to our spiritual roots within. And this may be a few
years, or even a lifetime away from the mainstream. But eventually
we come back, and resume our participation in the drama of human
life.
     In this peaceful haven, we have less pressure to be aware of
the past and of the future. The sense of time is more simply just
that of the present. It needs nothing more. And it is fine, we can
exist and live good, noble lives.
     But for evolution to take place, there needs to be growth,
change, and challenge in our lives. We need the pressure of many
things happening, the intensity of activities that makes us
intensely aware of both a sense of the past and the future. The
present is not sufficient to let us get by.
     If we are not careful, though, we can even get so caught up in
what has happened, or in planning for the future, that we pay but
scant attention to the present. We may be reliving an event in our
past--be it horrifying or wonderful--or dreaming of things to come,
and impatiently waiting for them to hurry up and happen! This would
not be good, though, and we would be neglecting the challenge for
growth in our lives.
     We live in the Kali Yuga, called the Iron Age, a period of
intense existence where things are hard, where they come quickly,
and where the most rapid evolution is possible. It comes as the
last ten percent of a great cycle of evolution called a Kalpa, and
we are but 5,000 years into its 432,000 year length. During this
period, we are reborn much more quickly.
     The Kali Yuga is considered a desirable period to be born
into, because of the potential for our spiritual progress through
the challenges that it offers. The intensity of life that we
experience in the major cultures of our world come from it. The
cultures take on the nature of the Kali Yuga, and we can join them
and participate in it, or step away, and live in isolation.
     Coming back to the sense of time, do we really, in our
culture, have a better understanding of time than primitive
peoples? No, not really. We are better able to plan things and to
handle a complex lifestyle, but we are not necessarily more clear
about what we are doing at any particular moment, more clear in our
experience of the present. And our philosophical understanding of
time may be farther from the truth that primitive ideas, because of
various popular misconceptions that we have been brought up with.
     We can observe objects or beings change over time. We can
describe that change mathematically. For instance, we can plot the
equation for a flying baseball, showing over time its position in
the school yard.
     In our graph of the baseball, one coordinate represents time,
but does this mean that time is a dimension of space, because it
can be graphed like space can? Does every moment of time
represented on that graph exist, all at once, like every point of
space across the schoolyard? No.
     When we talk about the flight of the baseball in the abstract,
we are referring to the space of the actual schoolyard, and
comparing it to abstract time, a time that could start at any
moment and would always follow the same course. We are comparing
actual or manifested space with abstract time, when we are talking
about the graph in a general sense.
     When we talk about the actual fight of the baseball, the
particular one that we might consider, then it is different. There
is the actual space of the schoolyard, and an actual period of time
where a real baseball is in flight. But even then, the entire graph
is not true all at once.
     During the time of the flight, the part of the flight that has
happened, that represents the past, is a description of where the
baseball has been. It is describing a sequence of state changes
that the specific baseball has undergone.
     The baseball is a dynamic thing. It is in flight. It is
subject to the influence of the strike of the bat, and it will only
follow the trajectory unless there are other influences that could
change its path. It is not predestined to follow the graph that we
might use to predict where it will be.
     Soon the baseball has completed its flight, and has fallen to
the ground. Its trajectory, its experience of the flight, the
experience of the players in watching it fly--these are all things
of the past. They no longer exist. The graph has gone from a
prediction, to a dynamic document, describing the present, to a
historic document.
     Even with this real flight of a particular baseball, there was
no point in time when the entire graph was real, when the entire
time coordinate existed at once. We have a dynamic succession of
changes of state, but no timeline extending into the past and
future.
     The fact that we can plot different states of an object over
time does not mean that the past and future are equally real, and
that all are a continuum. It does not mean that there is such a
thing as a dimension of time.
     One difference, for instance, is that time is not reversible.
Individual beings cannot move freely backwards or forwards in time.
Two reasons why this cannot happen is that we are both the sum
total of all our past experiences, and that we are ultimately
composed of that karmic web of currently existing relationships
that we have created with the other beings in life.
     If we went into the past, if we were able to undertake time
travel, we would have to have a personal time dimension, one that
existed apart from the collective one for everyone else. For
instance, day 14,601 in your life might be lived in June 10, 1995,
and day 14,602 in your life lived in June 17, 1774, after you had
travelled back in time. But assuming everyone else stayed in place
as a movie that you could rewind and alter at your discretion is
not reasonable.
     The other reason that this cannot happen is that you are
ultimately composed of all your karmic links with others. At any
point in historic time, there is a particular way which everyone
else is, and a particular state of those living links with you. And
those links uniquely define you for that moment. So if you were
able somehow to go back to 450 BC, the only you of that time that
could possible be would be the one that you already had been at
that moment.
     There are mentions of the dimension of time, though, but the
references are likely veiled references to deeper teachings.
Consider the picture given by Blavatsky of a bar of metal being
dropped into the ocean. [*Secret Doctrine,* I, 37.] The you that
exists in time is described as the cross-section of the bar that
passes through the ocean's surface, as the bar drops. It appears to
change over time, but is really all one thing.
     It would not be correct to say that this means that the past
and future are equally real with the present, but rather that there
is a deeper truth to this analogy. The analogy is more useful when
you take it as saying that you are greater than that part of you
that exists at the moment, that you are the three-dimensional bar
rather than the two-dimensional cross-section being manifested (in
space and time) at the moment.
     You are your totality of the moment, your Auric Egg, the *bar*
above and beyond the manifested self or *cross-section* that you
have brought forth at this moment in time.
     When the bar is not passing the ocean surface, you are out of
manifestation, but still whole and complete. And when the bar
crosses the ocean's surface, it can do so at any angle, it can stop
and reverse its direction many times, and it can go through many
cross-sections. There is not a specific sense of a single flow of
time to the experience.
     The idea of time as a dimension like space is a false analogy.
Even if we could reverse the physical processes of one's outer
forms and make it appear to be moving backwards in time, because
everything in it is going in reverse, it is not going backwards.
For there is still you, the Monad, above and beyond existence,
moving forward in time with the rest of us.
     Reversing your physical processes does not take you to an
external, objective, actual world of a day ago, of some time in the
past, for there is no such place.
     It is not possible to totally reverse things, because you are
intimately interlinked with all of life, and you could not reverse
everything else, everywhere else, to go with you. And even could
you, there is no such place as the past as somewhere to go, as
somewhere different than the present as a place where we are at
this moment. At this moment in time, there is not also our world as
it were 100 years ago, equally existing now and as a place we could
time travel to.
     The past has to die totally, at some point, to make room for
the present to be born. The past is really a condition or affect
that qualifies our existence in the eternal now. And it is not
separable from the present. You are what you've done and made your
self to this moment, and the past is not external to that self that
you are.
     The future is not separate either. It qualifies the experience
of life by your awareness of upcoming changes and by your
participation in the changes through your planning and
preparations. You change what you do today to better optimize what
happens in your life. You make take delayed gratification,
withholding some pleasure in life until a later time, for the
better good of your life.
     When you do this, you are not as much experiencing or creating
the future as you are working in the process of sequences the
events that appear in your life.
     The past eventually fades, and is recycled and eventually
disappears. Nothing, though, is lost; it becomes a part of us. And
the future, as we look farther and farther ahead, eventually
appears to disappear as well. This is because it looses its effect
on the present as well, as it becomes more distant in time.
     When we plot the change over time of something in life, like
the growth of a flower from a springtime bulb to its blossom and
eventual demise, we show there is an order or sequence to its
unfolding and we gage it by the cycles of day and year. There is a
natural progression to that growth, which is itself a certain kind
of cycle.
     But every point of time along the way as the flower grows
*does not exist* at once. There is the pattern and an individual
attempt to follow and grow by it, but no guarantee of success.
     As we unfold spiritually, we find an increasing sense of the
past and the future in our lives. We find that we are affected more
by things out of the distant past and are concerned and affected
more by things in our distant evolutionary future. The sense of
time of greater cycles than a day or lifetime begin to affect us.
We begin to appreciate and be moved by our spiritual roots in the
distant past, and to be drawn to participate in the grand work of
bringing humanity to liberation, to bringing everyone to the other
shore, to nirvana. We feel a real concern with things far removed
from our immediate needs of physical survival in the world and
personal interactions in the day-to-day life.
     In doing so, we begin to participate in our consciousness in
greater cycles than before, cycles of far vaster time periods and
more far-reaching affects. We begin to grow and expand and evolve,
and become something greater than before.
     Let us not try to escape time, to shy away from the Kali Yuga
and seek the Timeless in the wrong place, in the temporal world,
but rather emerse ourselves in the grand cycles of life, and
participate in life to the fullest. Let us embrace in our
consciousness as much of our heritage and our destiny and we can,
to our fullest extent and reach, and then bring this broader, this
grander perspective into our lives. There is only the present, but
we can make it as big or as small a present as we choose. Let us
make it a wonderful, grand, full present, as we give expression to
the loftiness that we can take into our lives!