This is the third of the fundamental questions which science is not really suited to answer – why do things change?
Science often concerns itself with the ways in which things change. In other words, science looks for patterns in time. That does not really answer the more fundamental question of why things change at all. As with the spatial distribution of stuff, a static universe where nothing moves or changes would seem much more likely than the reality that we find ourselves a part of, where everything is changing all the time.
Indeed, for time to have any meaning at all, there must be change. (Similarly, space has no significance without the non-uniform distribution of stuff discussed in the previous article.) This muddies the picture even further: there is a link between the stuff in space and the structure of space itself, and there is a similar link between things moving or changing and the meaning of time.
Relativity theory has taken this topic into mind-boggling terrain. Not only is there no absolute space, with space itself flexing depending on the distribution of mass within it, there is also no absolute time. Time distorts in the same way as space. Indeed, in the maths of relativity, there is no difference between time and each of the three dimensions of space.
The differentiation of time from space seems to be tied up with our consciousness in some peculiar way. We have a very strong intuitive sense of time passing and having a ‘direction’, ie. we have a completely different relationship with, or sense for, the future compared to how we relate to the past. In science, though, our intuitive sense for things doesn’t count for anything.
There is one physical theory – the second law of thermodynamics – that seems to give time a special status. This law states that entropy always increases. Roughly speaking, this means that things are always tending to get more disorderly. The significance with regard to time is that the law gives a way of distinguishing between time going forwards and time going backwards, that does not depend just on our intuitive sense of time. It does, as expected, link time with change and it states that change is always in a certain ‘direction’.
So much for science. How does a mystic understand time and change?
Recall that a mystic regards the subjective consciousness as the primary truth. And our conscious experience is in the moment, now. It is timeless. We do, of course, have a strong sense of time because we have memory. The recollection of memories, though, is always in the present moment. So, strictly speaking, to a mystic, time is an illusion brought about by memory.
Apart from our normal understanding of the word ‘memory’, there is another aspect of our mind that gives us a sense of time flowing and that is thinking. When we are thinking, there is a stream of words in our conscious experience. That stream of words has a syntactic structure and the understanding of the words relies on us having awareness of more than a single word at a time. It’s as if we have awareness of a few seconds of thought as directly as if it is all in a single moment.
If you have ever meditated and experienced a mind without thoughts, you will know that our sense of time is very tightly linked to thinking. A moment without thoughts is a timeless moment. That is the subjective feeling of it. This leads to a strange phenomenon in organised meditations: If one’s mind has been very quiet during the meditation, when the chimes sound to signal the end of the meditation, the perception is typically that one has only been sitting there for a few minutes, when in reality an hour has passed.
Apart from thinking, our perception of time is even more directly linked to conscious awareness itself. When we are unconscious – for example in deep sleep – that period of time simply doesn’t exist for oneself.
Here we started out with a question about change and soon veered into the tightly related topic of time. To come back to change, a mystic does not really think in terms of change. Each moment is understood to be spontaneously arising in an acausal manner, without reference to past or future. With such a perspective, the concept of change vanishes along with time.
