December 5, 2024

Article highlights: 

• Time is not time
• Nothing is really solid
• Why not?

Dear Time Being,

In February this year I watched a Netflix docudrama called Einstein and the Bomb.  I enjoyed it, not only because it explored the topic of its title, but more so because it prompted an unusual experience of time for me as I watched.

Recently, going through my Morning Musings file from that month, I came across the thoughts the film prompted, including a message about time from those who walk with me on the inner.  It seemed a fun thing to share today.

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Thoughts about time today.  Well, not time itself, per se… about time not being time at all.  I watched a good docudrama on Einstein last night.  Its script was taken from his letters and speeches.  Entirely.  Every word, phrase, each line the actor spoke in this docudrama was, in fact, something he actually said.  

This interested me… it’s an idea I had some years ago.  I thot: what if a life story was created using someone’s letters and speeches…. Someone from a time when it was common to write letters each day.  Someone whose life was archived.  I wondered, could a good script or book could be created that was accurate to their own words?

That’s exactly what this was!  So anyway.  At one point, Einstein said a few things about time; he said it didn’t exist, that it wasn’t a dimension, he said time is only a construct.  

We’ve all heard this before, we even parrot it to one another.  Most of us believe it must be so because science has affirmed it, yet day to day we can’t really integrate that idea.  We can’t fully enact what it means, practically speaking.

However, in these moments of artful dramatization, something integrated the idea in me… it was as though my body was listening while my mind was engaged elsewhere… and I suddenly had a visceral sense of this actually being so.  

Einstein also said that nothing is really solid… which we’ve all been taught as well but have the same problems relating to our daily experience.  I felt that viscerally too.  So this morning I’m pondering what that lack of solidity and lack of time offer my life.

In the ground zero of our daily lives, the constructs of time and solidity are utterly convincing.  But there are activities in which time seems different… when I fly in a commercial plane for instance, feeling out of touch with daily routines.   The daily world doesn’t feel as solid and time has a suspended quality.  

Vacation drops one out of time and solidity in similar ways, doesn’t it?  Deep meditation can also be a free fall away from both.  What do I learn about time in such moments?

Taking in the random comments around me – those of store clerks, friends, clients, neighbors, waitpersons, overheard conversation at a restaurant, waiting in line or at the dentist.   “Time is weird,” is something I’ve heard more than once.  Some relate it to aging, some to the light coming in; some fear they are losing their faculties. 

Something seems different, we aren’t sure what.  It’s unsettling and we are trying to explain it.  Perhaps it’s not yet explicable.  Maybe we are moving out of the world time, dimensionally speaking.  If so, how would we know?  Would we begin to notice the “weirdness of time” as we seem to be doing now? 

Also, don’t you wonder why?  Why isn’t time real, why aren’t things solid?  I was asking that of Wisdom, when I go this message in reply.

Both temporal solidity and time – being constructs of your physical world – are very vulnerable to distortions, erosions, to change.  That’s because they are relative to what is impermanent… not to what is unchanging.  

The entire physical world is relative to impermanence and therefore it also is not fixed.  It erodes, decays, changes.  It can never be permanent, nor can any creations within it.  

The physical world is not relative to what is permanent or unchanging.  That’s why it’s important to make one’s self relative to what is unchanging… the real essence of life itself.  

Hummm… much to muse on.  I’m not being definitive today, just mulling things around, getting ready to open further to changing time  ;-).

Timelessly yours,
Mayet