The spinning earth gives us a certain regularity. So do the changing seasons (the earth going around the sun). Over time mankind has scaled this regularity and ‘invented’ what we call time.
A full round of seasons became a year. Each season was divided into three months. A month consists of 28 to 31 days.
Of course this is known to you. What you may also know is that it was Julius Ceasar who came up with the calendar as we still use it today.
Inside this calendar there are days and a nights which together became 24 hours. Hours were split up into minutes and they in seconds and so forth.
Society as it is now, is totally dependant on our perception of time. You come out of bed at a certain time for the sole reason to be at work in time. Appointments, break, holidays, etc. are all planned on a certain time and date. This is so natural for us that we don’t even think about it anymore.
But what if earth would somehow start to turn more slowly around the sun and a year would not last for 365 days, but 500. We would have to re-schedule our holidays, because august would no longer be mid summer (or the months should also be stretched up). Even more problems would occur when the earth spinned more slowly and a day would not last for 24 hours, but 48. Would we keep on going with our routine like we do now, or would we adjust to the ‘new time’?
But what when we are not on earth, but drifting somewhere in space in a spaceship. There would be no day or night, so supposedly we would loose all sence of time, not knowing if it is wednesday or thursday of if it is 8 am or 8 pm. And is there such a thing then?
Sometimes it is said that time in space goes faster than it does on the earth and that astronautes age more rapidly when they are in space. This seems rather strange. Would their watches speed up or will they just keep to the regularity that the manufacturer gave to it and only the men themselves experience this ‘faster time’ (or even the material of the watches as well)?
Or just think of the occasions when you watch a movie with a friend. Your friend is bored stiff and you have the time of your life. Two hours later your friend with relievedly sigh “finally”, while you say “finally? it seemed like it only lasted for an hour”. Your friend will argue that it took at least three hours. In ‘reality’ it took two hours of course, but these two hours were not of the same ‘length’ for the both of you. Do you think time went fast for you and slowly for your friend? I think it did. Your perception makes the time for you, but the rest of the world continues with it’s own time, a ‘joint time’ so to say and you correct your onn perception to that.
So what if you are bored stiff in a space-ship when your friend enjoys the film on earth. Does space have it’s own time as well? Or if there is nothing to compare your perception of time with (no rest of the world) there is nothing to correct this perception. Would you then fall back on the earthly time or can you still correct your own sense of time when you return to the earth?
Then you will say: “I have been in space for a week” and the people on earth say: “no, it has only been two days”. The next question is if you aged a week and the people on earth aged only two days.
Now then, is time your perception of things that happen (like day and night) or the aging process of the physical world? In either case, it seems to belong to the physical world!
If we leave this physical world for a while, what new ideas will come up?
Let us say that there is life after death and after a while you return to the face of the earth. Would you have a sense of time in that period or will it be like a dream where a whole year can last only two seconds? And then when you go back to earth, will you be born in the future (counting from now)? Taking that this is indeed the case and the new birth is about 2000 years after your previous, will you have had the idea of being somewhere else for 2000 years or for a much shorter periode (as in a dream)?
This last thing is even almost comperable to astronautes in space who have been off the face of the earth for three months for example. Was it three months for them too?
A conclusion of this brainstorm can be that time is an expression of the physical world, but that there are different ‘times’ for everything present in this world. Somehow there is a collective time (or maybe this is the perception of time of mother earth?) and then a time for every individual that at times has to be adjusted to the first. Space undoubtly has it’s time, maybe the time of the universe. If that is true, then the time of mother earth can or even has to be corrected to the ‘universal’ time as our to hers. Possibly in the end there is no final expression of time, and just like everything else time is endless.
“Time is no definable concept and can therefor
be neither proven nor analyzed according to
the methods of a superficial philosophy”
The Mahatma letters to A.P. Sinnett (KH)