ETERNITY UNVEILED: A REFLECTION ON THE NOTHINGNESS OF TIME

        

The word “eternity” invokes in the mind a sense of awe and eeriness. Consequently, some people have consigned the concept to the realm of the transcendent, the religious, and the superstitious. But, is “eternity” such a distant idea, reserved only for the superman? That does not seem to be the case. On the contrary, eternity is not as transcendent as we make it seem. Each day, we interact with eternity; we engage and exist in eternal dimensions, without even knowing. We behold eternity every moment of our lives and call it another name.

We may find no clue, nothing corporeal enough to point us to the direction of eternity: everything everywhere appears transient and subjected to the laws of wear and tear. But appearance is one thing and reality is another. In reality, we are surrounded with eternities—not merely with theories and concepts of eternity but with eternity itself.  

 What then is eternity? A simple, single definition will suffice. Encarta dictionary defines the term as, “time without beginning or end.” And, indeed, that is what eternity is: timelessness, endlessness; “foreverness”.

That very word, “forever”, is as deep and intimidating as “eternity.” Just what does it mean for an event to occur forever? Imagine what it would be like to live forever, to enjoy or to suffer forever—not for ten million or ten billion years, but forever, for eternity. How daunting! I’ve heard people describe eternity as billions and billions and billions of years, thus giving the concept an air of unfathomable absurdity.  

But the idea of eternity is unimaginable only to the time-governed mind. Take the idea of time out of eternity, and the concept of eternity looses all its needless mystiques. But can we do away with time, when, as it appears, our very existence is time-bound?  We are ruled by times and seasons, shrunk into hours and minutes and seconds. Aren’t we? We measure all things with the standard of time. But, do we also care to find out if time actually exists?

 Time, as an entity, does not exist. Instead, what exists is faith in time. Our faith in time, being somewhat immovable, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for us to think of time as an illusion. After all, we daily witness the endless tick of clocks, and the fluent passage of days and nights and of seasons. Don’t we watch mothers give birth after nine months, and see the child grow into an adult after some years?

If we look a little beyond the surface, we’ll discover at once that: in the first place, there is no clock other than the ones we invent. There is no transcendent, unified, clock in nature. We build our lives around “earth-clock,” and earth is just a tiny speck in the universe. And even on earth, time zones differ. One man’s two months can be another’s two years or even two decades, depending on variations in space. Those familiar with the theory of Relativity can relate with this better. One man’s noon is another’s midnight. While some are preparing for sweet night rest, others are trapped in early morning rush-hour traffic. Facts like these inevitably lessen our faith in Time.  

Have you noticed that time becomes real only when you think about time? You may be absorbed in some tasks without any awareness whatsoever of time’s swift passage. Whether you’re involved in the task for a long time or short time is at that moment immaterial. Everything about time—it’s length and speed—surfaces only when you are through, when you take your mind back to the “time-governed” world.

Moreover, time tends to slow down when one is in pains and to speed up when one is in the brink of ecstasy.  This should not be so if, truly, Time is an immovable, static entity, independent of all mental processes.

When we sleep or experience a trance, we immediately loose our sense of time. When that happens, we step into a state of timelessness. This is the state of “eternity,” for eternity refers to “timelessness” and not to an infinite unit of time. In that bizarre state, we may have series of experiences that seem to last for hours, only to realize that we’ve been away for just a second; we may experience an event that seems to last just a wink, but wake up to realize that hours have passed. We deduce therefore that, beyond the boundaries of time—which is a product of wakefulness—things just happen: when, how long, and how short don’t really count. When we “wake up” into the consciousness of time, we begin to wrap our minds around seconds, hours, days, and so forth. In this way, our faith in Time grows.  

Time is appearance; timelessness is reality. And here lies the bottom line of the matter: when we look closer, we’ll discover at once that we are not time-bound; that, outside our little minds, we exist in a timeless dimension. But it does not appear so because, even though we are basically “timeless”, we surround ourselves and ultimately our lives with time and time machines; and these mental creations give birth to more time-bound concepts—days, weeks, past, present, future, near-future, and so forth.

If time exists, it does so only by reason of “invention;” for, that which we invent inevitably exists. Those who are familiar with quantum theory at the preternatural level probably understand that: past, present, and future coexist in an indistinguishable flux. This provides the platform for déjàvu and similar experiences which, if discussed, will distract us from our immediate scope.

One, at this point, may wonder, “If time does not exist, do we then live forever, for eternity?” We don’t need to live forever, because the idea of “forever” is itself an error, a complete absurdity; but we definitely live “in eternity,” in a state of timelessness, every day of our lives (let’s not forget that what we call day is nothing in particular but the product of the earth’s rotation). Each moment is eternity, because each moment is in its real sense timeless. If eternity implies timelessness, and if time does not exist, then we exist in eternity by default.

We are not governed by time; our minds are, because we make it so, because we keep thinking about time. We live each moment in the “forever” dimension. Does that mean we don’t die? Certainly, living organisms die, but they don’t die because of time; they die because of a disruption or malfunction in cellular activities. People grow old not because of time, or because of an “aging” gene in man, as there’s no such thing in the human body, but because of a manageable process of wear and tear. If you can control the cellular depreciation, you can keep the body in perfect shape.  Biologists have a better understanding of this, I believe.

Things don’t depreciate because of time. Things depreciate because things depreciate.  We don’t need time to make things happen, for existence is rooted in timelessness. We may call this timelessness “eternity,” and deal with reality as with an eternal entity.

Eternity is neither a wishful, idle notion nor a concept reserved for mystics and prophets. Eternity does not imply an infinite unit of time, as is easily believed; it implies no time at all. The idea of “eternity” is therefore quite reasonable and possible, being, from this new light, a continuation of what is and has always been.