Spiritual Evolution

The Mystery of Time

Before we begin stop for a moment and in your mind, try and work out what time actually is. For most of you, your mind probably went out into space somewhere, trying to grasp some kind of invisible concept.

To most people, time is seen as a mysterious force, like an invisible one way river, whose flow is unstoppable and from which nothing can escape.

To the unexpanded consciousness that tries to understand the nature of time, it appears that time itself is some kind of entity that somehow has form and structure, a real tangible thing in its own right. This has led to the beliefs that some things can exist outside of time, such as the statement 'God is outside of time' or even statements such as 'before time began' and 'the end of time.' Some people even believe that it is physically possible to reverse, travel back or forward in time and to bend time, so here I will reveal the mystery of time.

We use the word 'time' to describe our observation of change and its speed (velocity), compared to what we have chosen as a standard for comparison. This may sound a little too technical for some, so let me simplify.

The standard that has been used for thousands of years is the rotation of the earth, each revolution being one day. When you look at the face of a mechanical clock you will note that it represents twelve hours or half a revolution of the earth. One hour actually represents a distance of one thousand miles, travelled by a point on the equator. A twenty four hour clock would be much better, because the small hand would then represent the rotation of the earth as it travelled a full circle. It's amazing that a person standing still on the equator would actually be travelling at one thousand miles an hour.

We call each division an hour. Each hour is further divided into 60 minutes and each minute is divided into 60 seconds and so on. The point is that each measure on a clock equals a distance that the earth has travelled in its rotation.

You cannot observe time because it is no more than a calculation, so what you are doing is observing change and comparing it to something else that is changing, i.e. the position of the earth as it turns.

A boy walks a mile in an hour, he has travelled 1 mile as the earth has made 1/24 of its revolution.

Everything in reality is in constant motion, from the vibrations of sub-atomic particles to a change from one position in space to another, and all change can be calculated through comparison.

Time cannot be bent, it would require the bending of calculation, and to travel back in time would require enough energy to reverse the whole universe to a previous state, i.e. back towards the beginning of the Universe, that energy would have to be more than there exists in the Universe now, therefore, it would only be possible to recreate anew what existed in the past instead of the original.

Now we have an even bigger problem. To reverse time it would first have to be stopped, that is to say, the constant flow of change would have to be stopped before it could be reversed, In which case reality would cease to exist. Reality exists because of motion therefore to be outside of time would be to be outside of all of realty, in other words, not to exist at all. You cannot observe time you can only be aware of change and compare it.