Time is Money. Don’t waste time. Time and tide wait for none. Why don’t you spend your time in some useful pursuit? I have no time. Time is running out. Such thoughts are dominant in the thinking of the current human civilization entrapped in a hypnotic trance of mechanical existence in which people carry on with their lives like sleepwalking automatons conditioned by a commercialist consumerist paradigm. The underlying assumption is that Time is made of some objective and concrete stuff that can be possessed, managed, spent and sold. On the other hand, the philosophically oriented people see Time as a Tyrant that devours life, moving relentlessly from past through present to the future, in a never-ending linear flow. No wonder human beings with short life spans feel that Time dumps them to die, rot and disappear into oblivion. This separatist view of Time as an objective entity that exists independent of Life and Being is so cemented into our minds that we take it as absolute truth.

The worsening news about terrorism, war, global warming, and diseases like swine flu or AIDS intensify a feeling of time running out, in the minds of most people. Before something snuffs life out, people want to fulfill their endless desires as fast as possible. So everyone in the existence trance is in a hurry manufacturing countless worries as byproducts. In this chronic restlessness, ironically, very few are aware enough even to stop for an instant and question this mad rush. We have artificially divided Time into particles ranging from nanoseconds and minutes to years and centuries! This leads to a fundamental error in our way of experiencing reality.

The existence trance spawns a matrix of ideas, beliefs, feelings and concepts produced by innumerable isms, traditions, dogmas, sciences, religions and all kinds of vested interests who want to impose on existence their own narrow visions of reality. This matrix of trance has become so complicated that the very attempt to cope with it results in depression, addictions, consumerist escapism, violence and what not. The prevalent linear view of Time is a creation of this unconscious autopilot trance of existence.

So you think time runs like a river from past to the future? Let us step out of this box. In fact, there are many ways of looking at the concept called Time. A moment in the future becomes the present. This present moment then becomes the past. If we look at Time in this way, Time appears to run from future through the present to the past! A reversed arrow of Time! But that too is only a way of looking at Time, an aspect of time, not the whole Truth. Ancient civilizations saw Time as running in cycles like the repetition of the four seasons. The Hindu concept of Four Yugas that repeat eternally is an excellent example of this. Some ancient wisdom traditions talk of Timelessness. With the advent of rationalist scientism, the ideas of Time’s Arrow and progress in a straight line gained ground.

Suppose we are sitting in an airplane about to take off, looking out through the window at night. We see the runway lights rushing in one by one. For a second, a light appears in the window and flies past us. These lights before they appear in the window are in our future. When we see the light in the window, it is our present. When it vanishes from the window it becomes the past. When the plane gains height and we look at the runway below, we see that the rapid movement of the lights was an experience created by our own relative position and movement as observers. From the different position of the plane up in the sky, we see all these lights simultaneously existing in fixed positions on the runway.

Our high vantage point can be likened to an expanded consciousness. Like the moving aircraft, it is the movement of our brain/mind structure that creates the appearance of an ever-flowing linear river of past, present and future. When we are happy, time seems to fly and when we are sad, even a moment seems to drag on tortuously. It is the mind that moves and creates the existence trance, separated from the seamless whole of Life in Being. When we access an integral consciousness, we can see that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. Then the linear movement of Time can be seen as just one aspect of an Eternity that encompasses past, present and future as an integral multidimensional unity.

Though every child learns at school that Albert Einstein’s relativity theory has debunked the Newtonian view of absolute Time, our society still runs on the track of linear Time. Einstein viewed Time, not as a separate entity, but as part of a space-time continuum. And Time ‘flows’ differently according to the speed and position of the observer. Every observer perceives Time in a unique way. But even Relativity is only a scientific theory based on the current scientific paradigm. As the scientific or intellectual frameworks change, the way we view Time too will keep changing.

Some thinkers exhort everybody to go back to the old cyclical view of Time to neutralize the negative effects of the sick emphasis on the linear clock Time. But is it the right approach for the future? The cyclical dimension of Time too is only one of the many aspects of Time. Cyclical Time is not endless repetition either. Within the broad cycles of Time that are repeated, evolutionary progress happens in both linear and non-linear ways. Focusing on the cyclical aspect of Time alone will only lead to another lopsided emphasis on just one dimension of a multidimensional reality. It won’t be different from the obsession with linear Time. The temptation to anchor in just one aspect of Time can be seen in ideologies that exclusively glorify the ancient past, the modern present or a futuristic world and treat the other aspects with contempt.

Some spiritual idealists call for focusing on Timelessness. However, a focus on Timelessness alone will lead to Transcendental illusionism that ignores the process of collective and individual evolution and sees the manifested cosmos and Time itself as mere illusions. Such illusionism fails to integrate evolutionary spirituality.

Another spiritual view of Time focuses on the present moment or ‘Now.’ This is a variation of the Timelessness view. But most often, this emphasis on the present moment gets misinterpreted into an obsession with dividing Time into past, present and future and focusing exclusively on the ‘Now.’ The past and future are dismissed as unreal or irrelevant by the followers of this view. This approach results in a lopsidedness of consciousness.

For an integral consciousness, the past, present and future are not separate disconnected parts, but the interconnected aspects of a multidimensional integral whole. In an integral multidimensional consciousness, you can experience the ‘presentness’ of the past and the future, the ‘pastness’ of the present and the future, and the ‘futureness’ of the past and the present! The Supreme Consciousness is not just in the ‘Now,’ but includes today, yesterdays and tomorrows interpenetrating and evolving together in non-linear quantum entanglement. Even some cutting edge physicists have come to the conclusion that the past, present and future are not separate compartments, but have a simultaneous existence. What matters is not the exclusive focus on any one aspect of Time like the present moment, but being conscious and aware always. Being ‘present’ meaning ‘being conscious and aware’ always, has been misunderstood to mean focusing on a hypothetical particle called the present moment leading to the fundamentalism of an incomplete worldview that tries to reject the evolutionary dimensions of spirituality and the Cosmos.

Those who follow exclusivist modern linear time fundamentalism, ancient cyclical time fundamentalism, rational futuristic fundamentalism and the ‘Now’ fanaticism of the New Age or illusionist spirituality quarrel over the imaginary superiority of their blindly chosen limbs of the ‘Time Elephant.’ In a world facing a planetary crisis, life has become complex due to the increasing intricacy of our material, social and technological structures that separate us from unconditional existence. What the world in crisis urgently needs is an integral experience of Time that encompasses all of Time’s interconnected aspects.

We can go beyond the existence trance to a multidimensional and integral phase that enhances the evolution of humanity and advances the planetary consciousness. Beyond the trance of sleepwalking existence, we can freely play with Time if we realize that it is a creative tool in the infinite creation space. The various views of Time can be seen as different but interrelated aspects. Then the ‘Space of Time’ or temporal space becomes fluid and creative rather than the rigid ‘Tyrant Time.’ If we anchor ourselves in Being, free from the existence trance and exclusivist views of Time, and let the multidimensionality of Time flow into manifestation, then Time will become a flexible aspect of ourselves through which we can play a game of infinite creativity and Divine manifestation on Earth.