Time & Timelessness
We speak about time as if we fully grasp it. We schedule it, save it, spend it. We complain about not having enough. We imagine it as a river carrying us from birth toward disappearance.
Yet the closer we look, the less solid time becomes. What begins as something obvious slowly turns mysterious.
Three faces of time
Time can be approached in at least three ways::
Physical time – the time of clocks, planets, and cosmology
Biological time – the time of growth, aging, and decay
Psychological time – the time created by thought, memory and imagination
They overlap, but they are not the same.
Seeing the distinction is already liberating.
Physical time – from shadows to atoms
Humanity did not begin with seconds and minutes.
We began with:
sunrise and sunset,
the changing face of the moon,
the return of seasons.
Time was once cyclical, rhythmic, intimate.
Later we built instruments:
sundials, water clocks, pendulums, mechanical escapements, quartz crystals, atomic transitions.
Each innovation made time more precise, yet also more abstract.
Why 24 hours in a day?
Why 60 minutes in an hour?
Why 12 months in a year?
Mostly because of ancient counting systems, astronomical convenience, and cultural inheritance.
When physics looks deeper
At ordinary scales, time seems straightforward.
It moves forward.
Causes produce effects.
We grow older, not younger.
But modern physics shakes this confidence.
Newton (Classical Physics)
Time flows uniformly, the same everywhere.
Einstein (Relativity)
No.
Time depends on motion and gravity.
Observers moving differently will disagree about what events are happening "now."
There is no single cosmic present.
Quantum Mechanics
Stranger still.
Almost everything in nature becomes uncertain and quantized.
Time does not.
It remains an external parameter.
Some attempts to describe the whole universe produce equations in which time disappears entirely.
So fundamental physics does not clearly contain a flowing river.
It contains relationships among events.
The sense of passage may not be in the equations themselves.
The arrow of time
And yet life has a direction.
You remember the past, not the future.
A glass falls and shatters; it never leaps back to the table.
Where does this asymmetry come from?
Entropy
In thermodynamics, systems tend to move toward states that can be realized in more ways.
Order gives way to disorder.
Structure disperses.
This statistical tendency provides time with an arrow.
The Big Bang
Observations of the expanding universe reveal that overall entropy has been increasing—yet within this expanding disorder, pockets of temporary order have emerged: galaxies, solar systems, and life; and eventually they too fall apart.
Every memory,
every erosion of mountains,
every aging cell,
is part of this long aftermath.
We are living inside the unfolding of that initial imbalance.
Physics at its base may be nearly timeless.
But the universe we inhabit carries a direction — and that direction becomes life.
Biological time – entropy made intimate
The body is where the arrow becomes personal. We develop, ripen, decline.
Cells accumulate damage.
Repair mechanisms lose efficiency.
Molecular errors multiply.
Aging is entropy working locally.
Why don't organisms repair themselves indefinitely? Because evolution optimizes for reproduction, not immortality. Once genes are reliably passed on, the pressure to maintain perfect repair weakens. Nature is practical, not sentimental.
Different species age differently because their survival strategies differ: Some invest in rapid reproduction; Others in long maintenance; But none escape change.
Life is a process, not a possession. We don't live, life lives through us!
Psychological time – where suffering lives
Now we arrive at the most intimate layer.
Psychological time is not measured by clocks. It is generated by thought.
The mind revisits what has happened.
It imagines what might happen.
From this movement arise regret, pride, hope, anxiety.
Watch carefully. An experience occurs — perhaps beautiful, perhaps painful.
A moment later thought says:
"I want that again,"
or
"I never want that again."
With that, a narrative self traveling through time is formed.
Yet in moments of total absorption — love, awe, creativity — something unusual happens. The commentary pauses.
There is no yesterday to repair,
no tomorrow to secure.
There is vivid immediacy.
Afterward, thought returns and calls it happiness.
Lao Tzu captures this:
If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
If you are anxious, you are living in the future.
If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
Timelessness is not endless time
Timelessness does not mean millions of years.
It means freedom from psychological movement away from what is here.
Clocks continue.
Aging continues.
Appointments continue.
But the inner resistance softens. You don't dwell in the past or the future. You simply rest in mindfulness.
Physics questions whether time truly flows.
Cosmology gives it direction.
Biology embodies that direction.
The mind personalizes it.
Yet awareness itself is never elsewhere. To notice this is not to withdraw from life. You still plan, build, care, and act. But the burden of carrying an imaginary timeline relaxes.
There is more space around experience.
Final reflection
Time may be the greatest practical tool humanity ever invented.
Timelessness may be the deepest relief we ever discover.
Both are helpful.
One helps us organize the world.
The other helps us be free within it.
Time ravages, yet timelessness dwells within; we mindfully breathe—present, aware and free!