- Concept of Space and Time

Space and time are great inventions of the mind. Both exist objectively. Although we may feel how time is carrying us away, we can neither halt nor prolong it. We cannot recover a single moment of existence. The flow of time is beyond our control. We are helpless in it as floating leaves in a flowing stream.

The concept of space and time has strongly conditioned our minds in the form of ideas of past and future. We tend to engage in thoughts in the present moment – memories, recollections and reflections we labeled as thoughts of the ‘past’ and project them beyond us which we categorised it as ‘future’.

By not realizing that they are merely the product of our own thought processes, we ironically burdened ourselves with worries about past and anxieties of anticipation of what has yet to happen.

Only when we live in the now, then we free ourselves from the bondage of time and space. In Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” he states that to “fully understand space and time has become physics’ most daunting problems …” The present laws of physics do not distinguish past from future. For example, they do not explain why spilling a cup of tea cannot simply be reversed.

People have long puzzled over the basic nature of space and time. The philosopher Kant proposed over 200 years ago that space and time do not really exist but are intuitions or perceptions imposed by our own minds, and that was in line with the teachings of Buddha.

In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein found that space and time are interchangeable and replaced them with space-time for rigorous scientific purposes.

In the material world, we are taught that everything has extension and duration. Space and time have their peculiarities. Space has three dimensions: length, breadth and height, but time has only one – from the past through the present to the future.

Time is inevitable, unrepeatable and irreversible. Thus, we smartly say that one can make money but not time.

Correct understanding of the concept of space and time is closely connected with the scientific picture of the world. Generally, scientists claim that space-time is conditioned by matter, just as a form is conditioned by its content, and every level of the motion of matter possess its space-time structure.

Thus living cells and organisms have changing rhythm of time and geometry, and possess special space-time properties. This is known as biological time.

There is also historical time, whose unit may be the replacement of one generation by another, which corresponds to a century. Subject to our practical needs, historical time is counted in decades, centuries and millennia. The reference point may be certain cultural-historical events or even legends.

One cannot live in the world without concepts though he or she may be enlightened. The enlightened person in living his or her life, has to use that process of mind to deal successfully with the world. Thus, there are two levels of truth: the worldly truth and the ultimate truth.

Meditation helps us to see the conventional nature of time-space, to see that in reality it ultimately does not exist, that it is simply a mental construct, a projection onto what is happening in the moment.

There are many other concepts which also keep us strongly bound – concepts of self, of ownership, the duality of subject and object. You can see how much of our lives revolve about them, how much we live in the world of shadow, an illusion and the mere appearance of things.

We can set no limits to the universe as a whole. It categorically forbids us to do so. It is ageless. It is infinitely old and eternally young in its timeless evolution. 

Someone once wittily remarked that he could not imagine the universe having lived its life and sadly vegetating for the rest of eternity. But this does not mean that once we experience a reality beyond the conceptual level, we throw out the whole intellectual process. It is important that we still have to pay attention to what is happening on the day-to-day experiential level.