Part 5. Time. Its Nature and Meaning

Now let’s talk about, perhaps, the most mysterious phenomenon that we can only meet in our experience. Time. What is time?

 When this question arises, an ordinary person, a layman, would say that time is a clock. The hand is ticking; this is time… It was yesterday, it is today, then it will be tomorrow – this is time… Obviously, what the clock shows us is not time; it is just a time measurement instrument. The work of the clock is based on certain periodic processes in time. That is, on the clock, we translate time into space. For example, when I say, “Will we meet today at five o’clock? ˮ – this means, after the period of time when the hand of the clock passes the space to the fifth mark, we will meet. If my interlocutor has the same clock, we will understand each other and orient ourselves in time.

 But as soon as we think about time a little more deeply, we will see that it literally slips through our fingers. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present is some imperceptibly small value, the border between the “past” and “future.” This value is so elusive that it cannot be established or grasped somehow. As soon as I thought about the present, it had already become the past. It turns out that there is simply no time! It is something that is not. And at the same time, we know that it is. Time is such a one-of-a-kind “no” that “is.”

 That is, time is not something present; its essence lies in the fact that it “rushesˮ. The same thing applies to the events of this world. After all, they are located in time… There are no past events, there are no future ones yet, but present events – as soon as you think about them, they become the past. It turns out that the world itself does not exist either… But we know for sure that it exists! There is a kind of riddle before us, a paradox requiring a solution.

 You will probably be surprised to learn that modern physics has no answer to the question of the nature of time. The most important phenomenon in this world remains without any explanation. In physics’ equations, time is just one of the variables, and its direction is completely indifferent. It means, modern science considers time as one of the forms of space. Whereas the main difference is the fact that time is irreversible. In each of the three dimensions of space, I can go back. I can go back to the room I left. But in time, I cannot return to the moment I first entered it (this room). Time flows only in one direction. There is no way to bring it back. You can break an egg, but you cannot make its fragments gather back.

 And we can say this: time is a stream, no parts of which can be together. As soon as we allocate some parts of time, the part that was in front of it has passed, and they cannot connect. For example, a day cannot be next to another day. One day comes only after another. In other words, time is what prevents everything from being simultaneous.

 According to one of the definitions of time, it is just an abstraction that follows from the movement itself. After all, all things move. We call “timeˮ the process of their movement or the measure of their movement. This was the Aristotelian theory of time, a widespread point of view. But in reality, it is not the case. Let’s imagine a closed system with absolutely no changes, no processes. Just some kind of emptiness, for example… Will there be time? Yes, if there is consciousness in this emptiness, and this consciousness is observing it. This consciousness will begin to cut the void into time segments; it will bring time into it.

 Where does time flow from, and where does it go? A moment in time has passed, and all the objects of the world that were a second ago have gone somewhere. It’s as if their previous state has flowed into some abyss. They have become different. Where did they all go? You’ve probably heard children ask: “Where did yesterday go? ˮ In fact, this question is far from childish. Where did all these mountains, rivers, stars, and galaxies fall, which were a second ago? There is a story by Stephen King called “Langoliers,ˮ which was filmed in the 90s. The plane passengers fell into a time loop and returned to the past for some time. And it turns out that such beings act there to devour the world left in the past. That is, the world, which has gone back in time, seems to fall somewhere, with all its planets and stars. And Stephen King says the Langoliers are devouring it…

 In fact, there are no Langoliers. Things that were a second, a day, or a year ago do not disappear anywhere; no one devours them. In a certain sense, they continue to exist in the same place where they were before – that is, in the world of true reality.

 Let’s go back here a little, to the first part of this book, and remember how we established that “behindˮ this external, phenomenal reality perceived by our senses, there is another, the true reality of all things, which is incredibly wider and more redundant than ours. What is “our reality,” the reality of this “dunya” (material world)? This is nothing more than the result of filtering or truncation of that true reality produced by our physical body and, above all, by the brain. The brain is a monitor that gives us information about the world around us in a filtered, curtailed form. In this case, death is a filter reset and return to the true reality, as we have said.

 So, the “time” that we’re familiar with, divided into past, present, and future, is also one of the filters imposed by our brain on the true reality. Past, present, and future are the filters through which we see things on the monitor of our consciousness. In this form our brain gives them out.

 Let’s call our usual time, which flows for us in this world, “Zamanˮ. Zaman (Arabic word for time) is our usual time. And the time of the true reality, i.e., the reality of the Preserved Tablet and the World Soul, is “Dahr.” Allah says in surah “Manˮ: hal ata ala l-insani hinun mina dahri lam yakun shai-an mazkuura – “Has there not come upon man a period of Dahr when he was not a thing even mentioned?ˮ (76: 1). Imam Baqir (A) says, “He was a thing, but was not mentioned. ˮ This refers to the world of “Zarr” before our world. This subject is quite long, about only one of this type of verses, one can speak for a very long time… So, the time in that world is the very time of Dahr; therefore Allah does not say: “Has there not come upon man a period of Zaman, of the time of the earthly world? ˮ. No, He says: “Has there not come upon man a period of Dahr? ˮ – that is, of that time.

 And how does that time work? Here we also have time and not eternity because only Allah is eternal; everything else is in time. But that time is arranged entirely differently from our time. The main thing is that there is no separate past, present, and future. They penetrate each other; they form, as it were, a lasting present.

 Therefore, everything in itself, meaning, in its reality (in “Dahr”), has an extension in time, a volume in time. For example, a person’s life span in time – from the day of birth to the day of death – is 70 years. This is a person’s volume in time. So, this volume is given entirely, at once in that world. Just as in our world, the volume of a body in space presents wholly and immediately. We see the figure of a person not from one side but all sides, as a whole; we immediately comprehend its entire volume. In the same way, in that world, the whole volume of the body in time is given.

 What is our brain doing? Our brain produces, as it were, an innumerable number of instant photographs from this time volume. We compared our brain to a monitor. Look, here you have loaded the entire movie into the computer processor, and it is already there in full, from beginning to end. But the monitor displays this movie for you gradually, frame by frame. The brain is the same. It makes a storyboard of integral objects and processes of the Dahr world; it shows them to us in the form of a film – the film of our life.

 Why is this needed? This is necessary for testing a person. “To test you: which of you is best in deed? ˮ (67: 2) – as the Quran says. If Allah had not created such a torn time in which the past is separated from the future, if we lived in an eternal present, our test would not have been possible. Therefore, we call Zaman, that is, the time of this world, “the time of testingˮ or “the time of deedsˮ, and Dahr, the time of Barzakh and the future world, “the time of reckoningˮ. As the hadith says, “This world is deeds without reckoning, and that world is reckoning without deeds. ˮ Time or Zaman is a stream carrying people in the ships of their deeds.

 And so, when a person dies, his clock stops, and he returns to that time of Dahr, from which the world of our earthly time came out, like an island on the surface of the ocean. At the beginning of this world is Dahr, and at the end of this world is Dahr. Allah says in surah “The Prophetsˮ, “Didn’t they see how We come to the earth, reducing it from its borders? ˮ (21: 44). In the cycle “Adam and Satanˮ I said that Adam’s paradise was on the earth. It was the Barzakh’s paradise, which God then removed from him. After that, Adam got an earthly body, and our time began. After the arrival of al-Mahdi, the world of Dahr will again manifest. This is the “reducing of the earth from its borders,” which the Quran talks about. At the beginning and end of our world is Dahr.

 And if we look carefully, we will see that there is external time, that is, the time of objects outside of us, formed by our brain’s filter. That is, the brain takes the integrity of an object – a set of its states that are immediately given in the real world – and decomposes this integrity into separate “framesˮ, into separate time moments, making such a cut. Earthly time is not inherent in objects themselves; our brain generates it. So, on the one hand, this is external time. And there is, on the other hand, inner time, the time of our very consciousness. So, these are two completely different times. External time is Zaman, and internal time is Dahr. For our consciousness, the laws of outside time do not work. As we have already said, our consciousness is “there,” in the real world, “behind” this physical world.

 Consciousness lives in Dahr, for there is no distinction between past, present, and future. For example, a person who died 20 years ago is as real to me as a living one. But in the earthly “realityˮ, he has long been gone and has nothing to do with the present. Remember, in the first part, we asked where all this content of our consciousness is stored, which we can reproduce down to the smallest details? And we said that it could not be stored in the brain. So, it is stored in Dahr time. 

For example, I saw a person someplace. And so, ten years passed, I again came to that place and remembered this person standing there. He’s not there for a long time, but for me, he is. Because this picture has moved to Dahr (it was always in Dahr), and from there, I read it. This is how memory works. I saw this person in Dahr time, not Zaman. 

 Internal time contracts and stretches; it is not mathematical, in which each interval is equal to another. As a child, every day seemed very long. The year was almost an eternity. The older we get, the faster time flies for us.

 And when we experience something very unpleasant, it seems that time lasts forever, and when absorbed in something interesting and pleasant, time flies unnoticed. Depending on the importance of the subject and on the emotional background, time stretches and contracts. This is the property of Dahr time because there is no homogeneous time in that world: there is time as a derivative of properties, qualities, and significance of objects. As we have said, thought generates space and time there. And we see this in our inner experience, which is immersed during Dahr. If our thoughts are significant, time also becomes meaningful, flowing like a fast river.

Conversely, let’s take a concentration camp dweller who is forced to work. Every day he has to do what he is entirely uninteresting, under duress, for a bowl of some soup. That is, his life is as meaningless as possible. His time will be the same, like a shallow puddle, because his world has no meaning. In Dahr, significance gives rise to time. No significance – no time. It almost freezes in place. It seems to a person that all this lasts for a very long time, almost forever…

 And from here, by the way, there is such a thing as self-mortification of the organism because of the loss of meaning. It is known that having lost the meaning of life, a person quickly dies. His time is running out. Conversely, there have been cases when a person at the terminal stage of cancer, which all doctors refused, suddenly recovered because his life took on some meaning. For example, he had a child to take care of.

 As we know, in a state of clinical death in front of a person, his whole life passes in some seconds. And the Quran and the hadiths speak about this: in that world, a person will see all his deeds. So all this does not go anywhere; all this is there.

 Maybe someone will say: well, there is a past in our minds, while in reality, it (a past) has not existed for a long time. But is there a future? Answer: yes, it is there too – not as a given matter, but as a project, as a plan. The image of the future. What we must become. The way the world should be. We simply could not live without a vision of the future. Going somewhere, we assume that there will be such and such, we build an image of the future.

 And in fact, this is very important. We have said that in Dahr, the entire temporal volume of any thing is given at once and in its entirety, and the brain decomposes this volume into separate moments or frames, making such a time slicing. And we have noted that our consciousness also lives in Dahr. So then why are things not given to us in their entirety? Why don’t we know the future? The fact is that some part of the temporal volume of each thing is not given to us precisely but in the form of a flickering field of possibility. This is what we call the “futureˮ. 

 For example, I look at a chair and see it in the stream of time, where my brain puts it. This object, the chair, exists in the world of Dahr in its integral temporary form, from beginning to end. When I look at it, I see only a part of it, which more and more recedes into the past. That is, my consciousness begins to read from that actual chair the moments of its time. But! Some part of its history, its volume, which has not yet been read, remains open to me. And I can change it. It is just as in space this chair would open up for me gradually. Here I see it completely draped. Then the cover gradually opens – by 10, 20, 30 percent… Similar to this, I see it in time. There is part of the object that is still hidden by the veil.

 So, that part of the temporal volume of this object, which has not yet been read by the brain, which has not yet been placed in my time and has not become the past, is open to changes. I can turn away from this chair and go somewhere. Or I can take a sledgehammer in my hands and start crushing it. Thus, I will reduce its time volume; I will intervene in its, so to speak, “fate.” Therefore, the future is open. The future is just the openness of the temporal volume of things for us. And this is the meaning of the test in our earthly world. I can either act this way or that way. I can change everything at any moment; I am able to make the future different from the past.

 Then the question may arise: if all the things of this world in all their temporal volume are already present at the level of the Preserved Tablet, in the world of Dahr, then it means that our whole life has already been written down somewhere, and we are only playing it? So what is the point of testing and trial if the result is evident in advance and recorded somewhere? And how then can we change our future? How is this possible?

 The answer to this should begin with the fact that such a logic is itself imposed by our understanding of the earthly time of Zaman and does not apply to the time of Dahr. The word “in advanceˮ that we used here (when we said that “result is clear in advanceˮ) in itself stems from our picture of time. This understanding that “everything has already been written down” is in itself a consequence of the imposition of our usual picture of time on that time, which has completely different laws. It comes from the fact that we live in our time and do not know another one, and therefore automatically impose the laws of our time on that time. We think that if a thing “already exists,” then that’s it; it cannot be changed in any way. That is, in our minds, we immediately transferred it to the past. It became the past, unchanged. Whereas in that world, the past is one with the future. There is no past as such and no future.

 Now I’m sitting in my chair writing this book. This happens at such a moment in earthly time, on April 21, 2017. But when did I write this page in Dahr time? By the time of Dahr, you can say that I wrote this page a thousand years before my birth in this world. And in the same way, it can be said that by the time of Dahr, I wrote this page a thousand years after my birth. If the past and the future are one, then to say, for example, “the life of such and such a person was recorded a thousand years before his birth” is like saying “the life of such and such a person was recorded a thousand years after his birth.” No difference.

 Abu Lahab rejected the call of the Messenger of Allah (S) and became an unbeliever at such and such a moment in earthly time. However, according to the time of Dahr (to the time of the higher worlds), he became an unbeliever before the creation of heaven and earth. And if Abu Lahab accepted the call of the Messenger of Allah (S), he would become a believer at the same moment in earthly time. Still, in the Preserved Tablet, it would be written that he was a believer before the creation of heaven and earth.

 If you understand this, you will see that Abu Lahab’s unbelief was recorded in the Preserved Tablet when he became a nonbeliever. According to earthly time, he became a nonbeliever in such and such a month of such and such a year, but according to the time of the Preserved Tablet, it happened before the creation of heaven and earth. And if he had become a believer at this same moment of earthly time, he would have been recorded among the believers in the same Preserved Tablet before the creation of heaven and earth.

 Therefore, Abu Lahab’s call to Islam made sense because when the Messenger of Allah (S) addressed him with this call, he did it in earthly time and not in the time of the Preserved Tablet. According to earthly time, Abu Lahab was not a nonbeliever before he rejected the call of the Prophet (S), although he was so in the time of the Preserved Tablet.

 Indeed each of you has come across such a phenomenon called “time inversionˮ in a dream. This phenomenon is a mystery for psychologists, and there is even a series of research devoted to it. So here I am, sleeping and dreaming. At this moment, someone loudly claps their hands or drops something next to me. And when I wake up from this sound, I remember a long dream, a whole story that I saw in a dream, and it ended with this loud sound from which I woke up. In a dream, this sound can take the form of a shot, thunder, or something else. 

What happens here? It turns out that in a dream, consciousness seems to know in advance how everything would end. It knew in advance that there would be a clap and adjusted the whole dream to this. After all, the dream was a whole story, which logically led to the clap or shot. I met someone in a dream, we talked, then began to swear, then this man got a gun from somewhere; I ran away from him, there was a long chase scene, and finally, he shot me, and I woke up in horror… From the point of view of earthly logic – the logic of earthly time – this is impossible. Because the clap was at the end, not at the beginning of the dream. In earthly time, first I had a dream, and then there was a clap. Whereas according to the time of sleep, it turns out that at first, the clap was perceived by my consciousness, and then it brought the dream to it and finished it.

 This phenomenon can only be explained by what we have said. In the world of Dahr, where our consciousness lives and where we find ourselves during sleep and after death, there is no past and future. Therefore, hearing the clap sound in the future is like hearing it in the past.

 The basis of consciousness is there, the basis of reality is there, the basis of death is there, and the basis of time is also there.

The first volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam” can be purchased on Amazon at this link.

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