The Chest of Time

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, ...

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a Line.

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Omar Khayyam, trns. Edward Fitzgerald

“Allah, the Exalted, has two lights; one by which He guides, and one to which He is guiding. For this reason, the heart has two eyes: the first is for insight, and that’s the Knowledge of Certainty, while the other is the Eye (or Essence) of Certainty. ... When these two lights meet, the human will be able to observe the Kingdom of Heavens and Earth, and realize the Secret of Destiny and how it is ruling over the creations.” Ibn al-Arabi, Al-Tadbirat Al-Ilahiyaa, ch. 18

The questions of space and time have been the subject of philosophy, physics and cosmology for many centuries, with little progress in finding convincing answers. The question: “What is time?” is more like the question: “What is love?” , because it is something that everybody can feel, but no one can give an exact definition of it. If you ask this question to many people, you will certainly get as many answers. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, asks, “What is time?” When no one asks him, he knows; when someone asks him, however, he doesn’t know (EP, “Time” , VIII, 126).

Since the age of Homer, the Greek word “chronos” was used to refer to time. Chronos was a Greek god who feared that his sons would take over his kingdom, so he ate them one after the other—just like time, which brings things into existence and then overtakes them.

Understanding time was very important for early civilizations from both the practical view, where they needed to anticipate major events such as floods and harvest time, and from the philosophical view, which is based on sheer curiosity and love of knowledge. Many religions and ancient philosophies, therefore, have tried to answer some questions about time. Some of these religions and philosophies consider time circular with no beginning or end, some consider it linear with infinite extension in the past and in the future, and others consider it imaginary, while real existence is for motion or moving bodies only.

The concept of time is necessary when we ask about the chronological order of things and the duration of events. And because our life is full of events of all types, so time has its signature in all aspects of life. Some examples are: the aging process in biology, timekeeping in mechanics, the arrow of time and entropy in thermodynamics, and the radically varying psychical time that one feels when waiting for something or in other various circumstances. Therefore, in order to understand the reality of time, one needs to explore many closely related fields like physics, biology, psychology and cosmology.

In recent centuries, with the revolutionary new concepts in physics and cosmology in addition to the unprecedented advancements in modern technology, increasing accuracy of time measurement became very important because it is the reference for the extremely complicated motions, of the different parts of a machine for example, that have to work together in coherence. The critical importance of timing events both on Earth and in space was enhanced by precise time-keeping machines like electronic clocks, atomic clocks, and pulsars which are fast-rotating stars that emit short radio pulses at regular intervals with extremely high precision. But despite the new abstract concepts about time like “time travel” and the “curvature of time” brought about by the theory of Relativity, our modern concept of time has usually remained quite practical because everything has to be done according to the clock. In fact, the modern theories of physics and cosmology have added more questions and paradoxes about time than they were able to answer.

In general we can detect two major opposing views in the philosophy of time:

1- the rational (realistic) view based on the physical understanding of the world, and 2- the idealistic view based on metaphysics.

Rationalists believe that the mind is the most powerful force of man and is able to understand everything in the world, while the idealists consider the world, including time, as something beyond the capabilities of our minds. Because nothing, including time, exists independent of the mind, the idealist believes that time is a construct of the mind and doesn’t have a separate reality.