Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
May 24, 2013
India
May 24, 2013
I recently visited a
very remote temple in Himachal Pradesh, that I had first been to some
twenty years ago. It seemed that time had stood still. It is said that
time is what prevents something from happening, and yet, time is what
makes everything happen. In a sense everything does occur simultaneously.
Scientists have tried to explain that time past, present and future
does co-exist. We need to think of it as different places on a map –
that we could see in its entirety if we were clever enough. Einstein,
who revealed time’s relativity, said that the idea of past, present and
future was an illusion. So many things point to the passing of time.
Our face tells the time – look into the mirror and see how time is
taking a toll of you. Look at the rings in a tree, the waves on a shore, the sun and the stars...
Time is nebulous and invisible. Yet
it is the driving force of everything we know, have and are. Time is
the great sculptor of galaxies, and the juggler of genes. It turns the
dust of creation into planets and polyps, comets and caterpillars – into
consciousness itself. Though proverbially known to be blind, time keeps
modelling and remodelling the clay of existence; and, again and again,
stumbles on a new shape, a new form that can be fired in its ovens. Imagine a world without time - the frames would stop tumbling through the projector, the image would freeze and be destroyed. So while time, in time, takes everything away, it is still the author of that everything.
20th century scientific metaphysics argues that time, along with space,
came into being with the Big Bang - and may end with the Big Crunch.
We
often feel terrified by time’s ‘never-endingness’, and by the corollary
of eternity and infinity. We measure our tiny life against these
unimaginable immensities, and are overwhelmed. It is at once numbing and
exhilarating; the thought that our time would come to end soon - while
eternity will remain stretched out before us. And behind us too: the
realisation that our consciousness was just a spark in an endless
darkness. You may not be able to see it, touch it or smell it but
you feel it blowing through you like a wind. The older you get the
faster it travels; until, finally, its wind blows us off our feet. Yet,
from the age of five I had accepted the truth of it, because it was
impossible to imagine a timeless existence, a timeless universe. I
found that the only way to cope with the idea was to scale the great
cosmic enterprise down to the provincial – the personal. Subjectively,
at least, time had begun when I was born, and would end when I died. So,
in a sense, I would live for all the time there was! This is the
eternal truth, as spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna.
To us, nothing is more precious than time – not even fame or money. Yet
killing time seems to be our principal preoccupation. In what has to be
the ultimate blasphemy, people waste time—precious, fleeting,
insubstantial and allegedly illusory time—by staring blankly at
television screens, or absenting themselves from life’s astonishments,
or giving themselves up to the anaesthesia of habit. For me, that
agonisingly evanescent phenomenon, which evaporates between the future
and the past, between the two great deaths (the one that precedes life
and the one that follows it) has to be used as an aphrodisiac for
existence. We must use time to energise ourselves, to kindle our
enthusiasm, to encourage us to experiment, innovate and take risk.
There is a theory that states that, by and large, living creatures have about the same number of heartbeats. The
theory suggests that the rapidity of a heartbeat is a measure not only
of metabolic processes, but perception - so that a little creature with a
heart that beats in a blur sees the world slowed to a fraction of what
we, human beings, perceive. If this is true, it’s a bit like changing
the speed in a movie camera. At 24 frames a second, the camera shows the
world pretty much as we see it. Run it at a hundred or a thousand
frames per second—it can be done—and you can watch the leisurely
progress of a bullet from a barrel to its target. Take it at just one
frame a second, and you can watch an entire day compressed into an hour.
Most
human beings seem to want to pack a lot into an hour, a day and a life.
That is why we have been driving time ever more relentlessly. There was
a time when people guessed the time by the position of the sun or moon,
and by the length of shadows. Then a clock appeared, a clock with
only an hour hand – the minute hand would come later. And later still
did the seconds hand appear, sweeping around the dial. We began to
divide time into hundredths, thousandths and then millionths of a
second; and, in doing so, pressed the accelerator on our lives and on
the pace of our perceptions.
Until
a moment ago in time, prior to the rise of technology, we lived in a
natural world, where moods were slow to change – unless we were
confronted by a threat. The longer we live, the quicker we live – and
the more rapidly we are bored. A corollary of our increasing tempo lies
in our unwillingness to wait – in our demand for instant gratification.
Consequently we are infuriated by the languor in our laptops or any
sluggishness in our automobile’s performance.
Whether
we try to stop time in its tracks, or swing from pendulum to pendulum;
whether we put our head in the sand or look up to the stars, the future
will reach us at the rate of 60 minutes an hour. While I’ve never been
persuaded that there is a God, I am persuaded that time exists – and in a
very big way. Moreover, time has some of the qualities that we ascribe
to God - of being eternal and omniscient.
Dr. Rajesh Bhola
is President of Spastic Society of Gurgaon and is working for the cause
of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and
multiple disabilities for more than 20 years.
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