I was out in my boat a few days ago and mused how time seems so different at sea than on land. Has anyone thought about how time goes quickly when you guzzle and gulp your breakfast to get to work on time, and waiting for things seems like eternity? We have watches and clocks, and things in nature happen at regular intervals: the revolutions of the earth, the orbit of the moon and the tides of the sea, the orbit of the earth around the sun. But is that not simply a succession of “now units”, for want of a better term, in eternity and not time?
We are taught that after this life, we will find ourselves in eternity, where time will no longer exist. Suppose someone said that we are already in eternity? Does that not blur the frontiers somewhat? This is what is suggested in There Is No Such Thing As Time.
Julian Barbour’s solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.
“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” says Barbour. “People are sure time is there, but they can’t get hold of it. My feeling is that they can’t get hold of it because it isn’t there at all.” Barbour speaks with a disarming English charm that belies an iron resolve and confidence in his science. His extreme perspective comes from years of looking into the heart of both classical and quantum physics.
The problem is both scientific and philosophical. It all seems be like the problem of space, which can only be defined by the stars, planets and other bodies, without which space is nothingness.
Its all very puzzling, but we should make the effort to try to understand something.
The Blue Flower 
I absolutely agree, Father, that time is worth trying to understand, even if we never will. I was first alerted to the elusiveness of the concept when I read Chapter XI of Augustine’s Confessions, where he admits to not knowing anything more about time even though he knows he has been thinking and talking about time for a long time! In later years I had the opportunity of studying Space and Time at university. Special relativity theory introduced me to the concept that time was motion-dependent and variable; quantum mechanics introduced me to the concept that the past and causality were also not what we generally take for granted. When all is said and done, religion uses the term “eternity” to mean “a stable state”. In other words, at a stretch, the state in which things are reduced or revealed in their essence. (Never mind that it may also be true to say of physical creation that change and time are also of its essence). We seem to always come back to the dichotomy between Parmenides and Heraclitus, don’t we? The inadequacy of some of our religous vocabulary is one reason why it seems to me reckless to close our minds to other ways of understanding God or Life or Being. Tillich and later Robinson used the term “Ground of Being”; The Hindus posit “Brahman” and Buddhists see the possibility of merging or returning into the unindividual non-ego of “nirvana”. The essence of Christianity is, of course, to see Jesus as the embodiment/incarnation of this “ground of Being” or “Brahman” who is called, following Jesus’ example, Abba, or Father. But even Jesus does not give us any clue about post-mortem time itself. And I’m reminded of Paul telling us “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”? If I may conclude, on the subject of time, by saying that I can’t recommend enough for laypersons like me reading Chapter XI of The Confessions, and a wonderful book – now republished in orange Penguin paperback “The Fabric of the Cosmos” (2004) by a Brian Greene. Wonderfully readable and very mind-expanding.
You might find this interesting – by Nicholas Berdyaev:
Jakob Boehme: The Ungrund and Freedom
The mysterious teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund, about the abyss, without foundation, dark and irrational, prior to being, is an attempt to provide and answer to the basic question of all questions, the question concerning the origin of the world and of the arising of evil. The whole teaching of Boehme about the Ungrund is so interwoven with the teaching concerning freedom, that it is impossible to separate them, for this is all part and parcel of the same teaching. And I am inclined to interpret the Ungrund, as a primordial meonic freedom, indeterminate even by God.
Thank you Father. I am now working my way through Berdyaev’s essay on Boehme’s Ungrund. There’s a lot to take in and savour. At first glance, I seem to find ideas to which I have already come, which I’ve already half-formed. There is a kind of symmetry, a balance, a coherence in the way he presents this cosmogonic and theogonic dynamism: we know truth only through evil etc. ergo, (I wonder) evil is necessary? we have freedom but it is part of the creation from God, hence in a sense, we are what we are made and hence predestined, hence freedom is illusory. And so on. IT will take me several readings to fully take in eveything.
One work that intrigued me when I first read it and which I am re-reading now is a book entitled “Christianity, Communism and Society” by a Kenneth Ingram, published in 1951. He touched on the idea of a changing God: He wrote:
“I’ve been speaking of this life-force which is always in motion, always striving forward and therefore always changing. The christian idea is of a God who is changeless, dwelling in a realm which is above time and is eternal…….All I want to suggest to you is that, bound up in the theory of transcendence, of being able to get above any temporary situation in which you are involved, you are….getting above time…..For time is part of the situation you are surmounting. This is a difficult conception and I’m not pressing you more than a suggestion that transendence involves transcendence over time. Time – our conception of time anyhow – may not be a feature of ultimate reality; it may only arise as a result of our limited vision…….Transcendence and immanence might appear at first sight to be contradictory, but our experience shows….we ourselves are both within and above the flux of our evolving environment. That is why, if I accept the idea of God as tenable, I can conceive the possibility of a God within a reality which is perpetually in the motion of development…….” (pp.56-57)
I think one of the undercurrents to the constant religious struggles in the West, at least, over what is truth and right – which I might term the “war over orthodoxies” – is the difficulty we have in accomodating or accepting what we have been trained to reject as contradictions, as though anything we thought was black could never be at the same time white. It is as if everything had to be clearly fenced off from its neighbouring possibilities except our own understanding and logical system which are universal and without limitation. We get irritated with both those who insist that x is this and not that, and those who insist x is just what we make it. But Boehme seems to, in Berdyaev’s words at least, deal with the idea of inherent opposites and contradictions easily enough.
Thanks again for linking this essay. I once had a book discussing Berdyaev – and Bergson I think – but I didn’t appreciate it or take the time necessary then. I must now pursue these men further!
Time is a mystery. Much can be said, much can be thought about time, but I’m convinced that little if anything can be concluded. I’ve long been taken with the following verse of Scripture and have found myself in the realm of the counterintuitive. I’m convinced that time both does and does not exist, that there is no conflict between free will and predetermination, and that the human mind can strive toward, but never quite achieve an understanding of such matters. Here follows one of my several poems about time:
Time?
I am Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the ending,
saith the Lord, which is,
and which was,
and which is to come,
the Almighty. (Rev. 1:8)
… The God who is,
who always is,
who stands outside of time,
to whom the moments do not flow,
although they somehow do
… in the beginning that always is,
that never came to be,
never stops, and never passes by
… at the ending that does not end
in the static flow of eternity
… and we
see the flow of time,
and measure it,
try to capture it
in our minds,
in our calculations,
in events that cause events,
or so it seems,
but is it truly so?
… Can time be caught?
Can time be captured?
Is it something we can measure?
Is an hour of pleasure
equal to an hour of pain?
Is a childhood day the same
as the same day to the old?
… and does the past have true reality?
Does remembrance hold what really was?
or could something else have been?
… and is the future yet unset
or is it fully formed?
… If the God beyond all time
can know what things will be,
can we decide?
Is there a will that can be free?
Is there any uncertainty?
… The God who is,
who always is,
who stands outside of time,
to whom the moments do not flow,
although they somehow do,
… the God whose presence, always now,
dwells in every moment and in none,
outside of time,
creating time,
fully found in every time
… and we with Him in eternity,
timeless in the flow of time,
in the everlasting,
never-changing,
ever-changing,
always-growing static NOW.
———-ed pacht
Thank you for sharing your poem on TIme, ed pacht. I found your lines “Is an hour of pleasure equal to an hour of pain?” and “Is there a will that can be free?” encapsulate neatly some of the important implications of the concept of Time and raised in the essay on Boehme. They also make me think of experiences of pleasure and pain. Pain is long; pleasure seems so brief, although we can certainly feel the warm glow after-effect sometimes. But pleasure, at the same time that it affects our senses, might take us out of ourselves; pain might focus us on ourselves – and we are so limited and flawed that we are not easily or beneficially an object of our focus for very long if at all. It may be that pleasure is anything that makes us think well of other things; and pain that which makes us uncomfortably conscious of ourselves. Hence “heaven” may be simply a synonym for what we imagine would be an inexhaustible warm glow of satisfaction in another, and the only concept that could possibly do so inexhaustibly would be whatever God is; similarly, “hell” may just be our concept of being stuck with ourselves alone unrelievedly.
Likewise, this question of free will: how did we ever convince ourselves we are free unless because of our perception that we act sequentially, that is in ‘time’, and do not know or cannot properly imagine, what will happen next? Much food for thought!
A quote from Berdyaev follows: “Boehme’s teaching concerning the Ungrund and freedom needs however to be further developed regarding the distinction between the Divine abyss and Divine freedom, in contrast to the meonic abyss and meonic freedom.”
Could someone please explain the word “meonic”? I can’t seem to find a definition.
Dear MP, I had never hear the word before either. But on this link to an article on Berdyaev http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Philosophy/Sui-Generis/Berdyaev/essays/breisach.htm
I read as follows:
“The two realms of the cosmos, freedom and objectivity, are reflected in man’s existence. Man is man only because he is deeply steeped in the realm of the spirit and freedom. This is the primordial cosmic or “meonic freedom” of Berdyaev and not the social and political freedom of liberalism, which can be expressed in various rights. It is a freedom which underlies man’s whole existence as a challenge which calls him to see in freedom his highest obligation.”
Thus, it appears that “meonic” stands for “primordial cosmic”. It might take an etymologist or a Sanskrit scholar to advise how the word was formed and whence the “me” element derives.
Greek μη + ων= “not-being” or “nicht seiend”; rather “being not independent of” or “being only in relation to other ‘Seiendem'”? I am not sure my explanation is right.
Greetings
George
Why, of course! (And here’s me thinking I know some Greek!) Thank you, George, I don’t know whether it IS right, but it sure SOUNDS right.
“I am that I am” – “He who is” – “The Ground of all being” – The unknowable God as the ultimate definition of “being” or “isness” – If there is one thing demonstrated by quantum mechanics it is that the existence of things, of time, even of ourselves, is a strangely elusive concept. Several times I have asked another to prove to me that I exist. It can’t be done. I know that I exist, but that self-knowledge, unsupported by anything other than itself, is all the evidence I have for that. Some Eastern philosophies, in fact, expend great effort to deny that self-knowledge and to bring oneself to a denial of ones own existence, and ultimately of being itself.
I take it that the core of the Judeo-Christian outlook is that God himself is the only ultimate being and that all other reality is real merely because He has declared it so. He is the one who is (as indicated in the nimbus of divinity in traditional icons), and eveything else, then, can be said to be in itself “me-on” – “not-being”.
I’ll stop here before I start to tie myself in knots.
ed