Part 4 Time is NOW!
[From God’s point of view]
... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Gentle Readers,
I hold along with many that all the time we have is NOW! If we are going to make a difference in the world, change our lives for the better, improve those around us, witness the truth about God, Creation, heaven and life in general. Then when will we start making an observable difference? Time is all we have, talents won’t if not used. Money may buy many things but will that wear out. It is only what you leave behind that will count for something, a word, a thought, a goal, a roan to follow. Time:
Events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
Time sense in children, men, women
These time sense distortions are, of course, distortions and nothing else, since the rest of the world continues to experience contemporary events within a "normal" time frame. They have nothing to do with Einstein's theory of the relativity of time. They are psychological and subjective. But in spite of their subjectivity they are real, and there is some evidence that they can be linked to such unlikely factors as the age and/or sex of the individual.
For example, LeComte du Nouy undertook a number of studies of the differences in time sense between children, men, and women, and concluded that they were real. He wrote about them at some length subsequently in a book entitled Biological Time. Here he observed:
Time does not have the same value in childhood as in later years. A year is much longer, physiologically and psychologically, for a child than for a man. One year for a child of ten corresponds to two years for a man of twenty. . . . The time lapsed between the third and seventh years probably represents a duration equivalent to fifteen or twenty years for a grown man.
Du Nouy believed that the capacity to absorb knowledge in a very young child was correspondingly far greater than in the adult, including the comparatively effortless learning of several languages concurrently. Children have more time, more psychological time, but not more chronological time. He also concluded that there is a real difference in the time sense of the adult man and the adult woman.
A man's time sense is particulate, fractional, an hours-minutes-seconds kind of time sense. A man very consciously counts time, saves it, loses it, wastes it, does many other such things with it as though it were being parcelled out to him in bits and pieces of a size convenient to the task which occupies it. Du Nouy believed that the male had a kind of inner clock, the ticking of whose mechanism he was somehow aware of. In England when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752 and September 3rd suddenly became September 14th, general rioting resulted on account of the fact that workmen felt they had been robbed of eleven days of their lives, eleven whole days of life that personally belonged to them. A man tends to be more conscious of delay because of this inner clock. Western man makes clocks with smaller and smaller divisions until he can now measure a millionth of a second. He assumes that the measurement of a fraction of a second represents an absolute measure of some strictly objective reality: a sixteenth of an inch, let us say, of the tape that has been wound on the spool to the right.
According to du Nouy, a woman's sense of time is somewhat different from a man's, and the two divergent senses are cause of not a little confusion and sometimes friction. Her sense of time is not fractional or length oriented, but event oriented. He reasoned that this results from the various cycles which regulate a woman's experience throughout life, most of which are not experienced by the male. These cycles are essentially related to child-bearing, puberty, monthly periods, gestation periods, menopause, and so forth.
The result is that a woman is timing life, not by the even spacing of the minutes or the hours in the way that a man times his, but in cycles which are much longer and not nearly so precise. The intervening time spaces are not attended to in the same way.
When a Marti responds to her impatient husband (name withheld to protect myself if she reads this - although she would agree with me) as he waits to take the family to the movie, by saying "Coming, dear, right away," she does not mean this literally. She means only that at that moment this is the next event she has in mind: to join her husband.
Meanwhile, I make a mental note of her reply and allows her forty-five seconds to make the trip from her bedroom to the front door! Consequently, I am is frustrated when, ten minutes later, I am still pacing up and down the hall. . . .
Neither party seems able to accept the other's sense of time. And children have the same problem with grownups.
Flow rate of time: absolute or relative?
It is clear, therefore, that time does not have a fixed spending&value in experience. It does not flow at a uniform rate through the consciousness of each individual. If we were all drugged alike, the passage of time might be universally accelerated or decelerated: and no one would detect it. Our mechanical clocks would be part and parcel of the conspiracy and their observed rate would simply reflect our drugged perception and share in the same acceleration or deceleration. Just as, if we were to double the size of the Universe and everything in it, we would also have doubled the size of our yardstick, so that the Universe would measure exactly what it did before! The same is true with time. If time passed for all of us at twice the speed or dragged for all of us at half the rate that it presently does, we would not be aware of any change.
This variability is entirely subjective of course -- or at least we assume it is. Actually, we have no way of knowing whether there really is — somewhere — an objective flow rate of time or an actual yardstick for size. We build our clocks by our consciousness of the time it takes the earth to complete one revolution about its axis, and our calendar around the time it takes the earth to circle the sun. We observe the rate of the revolution of the earth and try to make sure that the rate of the revolution of the clock hands is in agreement: but in either case it is, after all, by our consciousness of this rate that we are guided. Some other smaller people on some other larger planet might be surprised at our assessment of how fast time flies, especially if what we call a drugged state is the normal state for them, or if their body temperature is running much higher or much lower than ours.
Thus the rate of time's flow lies in our consciousness. It is relative, to us. There is no way in which we can say how fast it is flowing by until we specify whose time we are talking about. Whose time is right? Moreover, there is no absolute ground for assuming (as we commonly do) that the flow rate of time is the same everywhere in the Universe. And God's time and our time may be very different things, not perhaps in the direction in which it flows but in the rate at which it flows.
One might argue that the sun determines the rate, not we. So it does. But it is important to realize that if our inner clocks all ran at one tenth of their present rate we would simply see the sun moving correspondingly more slowly across the sky, and we would still see our clocks keeping time with that movement. It would not be necessary to re-set our clocks. Our reading of the sun as moving at a slower rate across the sky would be exactly matched by a similar reading of the movement of the minute and hour hands of our clocks, even if they were one of these new types which are claimed to have such tremendous accuracy. Pendulum clocks are highly dependable, but they too would be seen to slow up or to accelerate. The swing of the pendulum back and forth would be matched to our perception of the speed of the sun in its circuit, because we would make sure that it did. On the basis of this swinging pendulum we might make our calculations of the value of gravity and though they would be adjusted to our time sense, they would still be correct. In short, nothing would change. Only some super-natural being who was not locked in as part of our space/time frame of reference, who could look on without becoming entangled with our metabolic acceleration or deceleration, would be able to observe what was happening to us. We ourselves would not be aware of it if we were all involved.
Nevertheless, we still feel confident that somewhere there is indeed a real time rate, and that it is only our sense of time that is upset -- not the time rate itself. We recognize that we are all alike immersed in a psychological time frame from which we cannot escape. But we all agree, or did agree until Einstein came along, that the flow rate of time itself had an absolute quality about it.
What, then, did Einstein really mean when he said that time is relative? Did he only mean that the sense of time is relative, while the flow of its current moves on at a speed that is invariable? Did he mean only that we experience time at different rates but that this variability is only in the consciousness of the observer? The answer is, No! This is not what he meant. He meant that time does not have a fixed flow rate, that its flow rate really is variable, that this variability is not dependent on the observer!
Before we turn to examine the implications of what Einstein proposed, implications which have since been very widely confirmed by experiment and observation, it will be well to see that Western man has often lagged behind people of other cultures in their understanding of the "real" nature of time. We shall then be in a better position to use this new understanding as a means of explaining a number of important passages of Scripture — some of which have hitherto appeared to be in contradiction with each other in disconcerting ways.
Think about these things and we’ll get together to consider these and others as we begin to see time as God "sees"
Love,
Denis
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