Mystic Mantra: The eternal spring that runs us all

Time is a fascinating and an eternal reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought of time and space as properties found in objects as things in themselves, just as we are obligated to acknowledge their existence as two infinite things. This is fundamental to the existence of all things, because they ought to and should continue to exist, despite the fact that everything that exists is subject to “ringing in the new and ringing out the old” symphony. You’d think of the idea of illusion, or “maya” in Indian philosophy, in this context too.

Plato identified time with the period of motion of heavenly bodies. His pupil Aristotle thought of time as a quality of movement — one that may not exist on its own, but is “virtual” to the movement of things. Aristotle also argued that time is, in essence, a component of change. It cannot exist without a certain kind of succession, or modification, aligned as it is to the manifestation of a soul proficient in “tapping” its full measure.

Time symbolises the fruition of our efforts too — with the passage of each moment we become conscious of being alive. What does this illustrate? That anything that relates to the present, howsoever inconsequential, is greater than what was reckoned vital in the past, although it reflects reality that such-and-such a thing exists, or existed, at a certain point in time. This sublime précis holds the fulcrum to metaphysics. It echoes the passage of time, or each event in our life, as a “lived” moment. This is precisely the reason why we declare most things as being only a part of “what-was-as-it-was” at some point in time — for all intents and purposes of the past and not the present.

Yet, the most erroneous thing we often do is to think of time as always sliding away from us, or that we lack the ability to stopping it. It’d only be prudent for us to think about time as an eternal spring without any expiry date that runs us all — of time with which we are always capable of transforming ourselves for a higher purpose. When we uphold such a belief in each fleeting moment, it takes us to the next level, while making it the purpose of our life. This, in more ways than one, prompts us to look at everything with reflective wisdom, or translate everything to the present alone, which is all encompassing, albeit that “everything” is but the dancing of the shadows in the perimeter of our past. This mirrors the enigma of life too — that the next moment for us may not exist anymore than it does, or it occurs as it ought to in the present, an all-inclusive, all-expansive moment.