Time and the Eternal Now
I must admit - I have been hooked on reading the writings of Morris Davis - a retired Baptist minister who has been active since retiring writing a number of books addressed to the topic of Non-Duality in religion and spirituality.
This publication is a recent publication from Davis and I thought gives interesting insight into the subject of our understanding of time and particularly the subject of what is often called the eternal now.
So below is Morris Davis's "sermon" on how to understand time.
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I enjoy reading time travel novels on occasion. I have liked this subgenre of science fiction since I was an adolescent, when I read Wells’ Time Machine and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Later I read Finney’s Time and Again and Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut, where the protagonist is “unstuck in time.” Then I read Doomsday Bookby Connie Willis, Timeline by Michael Crichton, and 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
I read less of this type of novel now than I used to, but I still pick one up from time to time. It fascinates me how small decisions by seemingly insignificant people can change the course of history. It makes me believe that ordinary citizens like you and I will change the direction of our nation in the coming year.
I tend to get philosophical around New Year’s Day. I think not only of the vagaries of history, but I also reflect on the nature of time itself. We go about our daily lives using the Newtonian model of absolute time. This is the assumption that time flows at a universal, unchanging, and uniform rate for everyone, everywhere, independent of events or observers. Yet Einstein theorized - and later scientists have proven - that time is relative.
Science has demonstrated that time is not a universal constant. It speeds up and slows down depending on speed and gravity. The faster you go, the more time slows down. At the speed of light, time stops. That adds new insight to the Biblical verse “God is light.” Also, the more gravity, the more time slows down. A clock on a satellite orbiting the earth measures time differently than an identical clock at sea level.
It is fascinating to think that time on earth is not the standard to judge time. Sitting comfortably in front of my woodstove as I type this, I am not stationary. The earth is spinning on its axis at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. It orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Our solar system is speeding around the center of our galaxy at an even more incredible speed - 500,000 mph.
That means that time on earth is different than time on other planets in other solar systems in other galaxies. There is no such thing as standard time. There is only a patchwork of times depending on where you are in the universe. Our past is another planet’s future and vice versa. Pondering this mosaic of time is enough to cause one to reach for some of that New Year’s eggnog!
On top of that, consciousness changes our perception of time. We awake in the morning, and hours have passed unnoticed. When we are bored, time drags. When we are having fun, “time flies.” When we are “in the zone” of some creative endeavor, time seems to stand still. When I write, I lose track of time – as my wife can attest. It happened just now! Darn! The fire has gone out again!
Time is a psychological phenomenon as well as a scientific one. Past, present and future are fictions of the mind. To quote Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five: “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist… It’s just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once that moment is gone it is gone forever.”
Then there is Now. What is now? Is it the present? Is it a fleeting moment, a moving boundary line between “then” and “not yet?” Some see it as a razor’s edge cutting between what we call past and future. Some folks try to stay in the present as a spiritual discipline. I once attended a mindfulness retreat where everyone was doing their best to be in the present moment ... and failing miserably. They were worn out from trying to be present!
The truth is there is no time or place that we can possibly be but here now! We do not have to try to be where we already are. We cannot be anywhere else. We cannot live in the past or the future. We cannot even be in an imaginary moment called the present. We can only be here, and it is always now. True mindfulness is effortless. Effortless effort. Actionless action. The Tao te Ching calls it wu wei.
Paul Tillich calls it the Eternal Now. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God. To experience it, all we need to do is notice it. Be aware of the spaciousness and the limitlessness. Now is eternal and infinite. One cannot escape this. All other times and places are mental constructs based on memories and expectations. The Eternal Now is within us, and we are within it. We are it. There are no boundaries between us and now. We are one.
Time disappears in the presence of Now. The heavens and the earth roll up like a scroll, and time is no more. The beginning and the end collapse into each other. As the Eternal One says in Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” This is the Sabbath Rest. This is the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the Eternal Logos. This is here now.