Where there is thought, there is Time

If you were to ask me the time, I would’ve looked at the watch and told you the answer. If you had asked a crow what time it is, it would surely have said, the time is ‘now’. A crow does not have an external reference point for time. However just as we have a biological clock (circadian rhythms), they do too. Also, we all have a diurnal clock to distinguish between night and day. We labeled that as 24 hours. Then we classified time into working time, leisure time, etc.

Space is something that we experience. It’s material. Whereas time is ephemeral. It’s a construct of our mind. Time has 2 dimensions – the past and the future. In the present, there is no concept of time. Inside our brain is a structure called the hippocampus and all our time and place-related information is stored there as episodic memory. In physics, space and time are interwoven. Mass can not only bend space but time too. Hence, the concept of time travel.

For a computer, time is very important. Every instruction is executed in 1 or more clock cycles. A clock cycle can be a billionth of a second. And most of the instructions are repetitive. This is dictated by the instruction set (microcode) of the processor. AI applications are very data intensive and they suck away the GPU time in a mind-numbing fashion. They work on an RTC (Real Time Clock) and they are aware of time. In a relative way, of course.

This brings us to the very nature of time. What is it? Here’s the premise. Where there is thought, there is time. An instruction is akin to a thought. A thought requires some resources (be it chemical or electric) for it to arise. It’s like a wave in the ocean. Seems real, but it goes away. In the same way, there is no time in the absolute sense. It just arises in the ocean of consciousness as a thought. The past and the future are concoctions of our minds. Time does not exist. Only the Self does. The wave is not real. The Ocean is.

Om Shanishchray namah (Dedicated to Saturn, the ruler of time)

God Bless!