For the last couple of days, I have been travelling by Bus because my two wheeler had broken down. Coming back to travelling by public transport again has been a wonderful experience. I have yet again had the opportunity to see so many lives trying to get to someplace to make their living. So much rush, so much hurry, people literally running, more often trying to get ahead of time. People appearing so busy, with no moments to spare. Children fighting the crowd to get to school. Men, over the phone, talking business. Women, over the phone busy texting and with the ear phones plugged in to their ears.
We seem to have lost a lot of time, trying to gain some time by rushing about for everything. Not only time, but personal space and peace. We fail to understand the true value of time. Or may be, fail to question what time really is.
According to Einstein, time is an illusion. Just an illusion. Time is only relative. For someone or something that can travel fast, time is slower and vice versa(Picture two people - one on a bicycle and other on a motorcycle, starting from same place and reaching the same destination). Einstein also stated that there is nothing that can travel at the speed of light. If anything travelled faster than the speed of light would be in a time that has not happened yet. That something would be ahead of time and nothing can be in a time that hasn't yet occurred. Although, anything with mass can never travel at the speed of light!
We usually think of time as having three parts - Past, Present and Future. Past is just a collection of memories. We can never experience the past, we can just remember it and cherish it in the present. Past, then is not objective and cannot be measured. The only contact with the past is in the present.
Future is only our mental construct. We cannot experience the Future until it becomes our present. And until then, future is only a hope and a dream. The projection of future which is the way we would like to think of it is considerably less accurate than our memories of our past. Again, there is no objective thing such as future. It cannot be measured and our only contact with it is our present. The course ones future takes is based on the decision one takes and choices one makes in present.
The only rational thing that remains with us is the present. Present is ever changing. Time is an illusion that we created to try and measure the rate of change of the present. It is always NOW. An ever changing NOW.
In Hindu philosophy, time is regarded as an aspect of creation. Time exists only as long as we are bound to the things of this world through our senses. Time is a mental concept created by the movement of our senses, the celestial objects and our perceptions. It is a part of an illusion which we consider real. In God's consciousness there are no divisions of time. There is only the present moment, one continuous, indivisible and indistinguishable state of existence.
The saying, live in the moment, I guess was born out of this very idea. So then, why, I ask, is the world rushing, what is it rushing to and what for?
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