THE RICHNESS OF TIME
The nature of time is perhaps the most precious asset we have and can enjoy in life. We enter the world, we are given a certain amount of time, we do not know how long it will be; and when we exhaust that given space of time. It’s over.
The appreciation, understanding and intuition of this temporal richness allows us to think about time from the perspective of its physical nature as well as the way of thinking and experiencing time from the biological structures that offer us the experience of the passage of time and its speed, the sense of flow of time and its direction, and the notion that past and future are things symmetrically exact in time. The basic quality of experience in the physical world is that things seem to develop only in one orientation, but that is really an environmental effect of the moment.
Our brains try to take things that are happening in the real world at different moments and synchronize them so that our experience of the present is of things happening at the same time, but those signals for us actually come at different times. When playing the drums, we have the notion that everything happens in a moment, but the truth is that sound waves travel at different speeds, light waves that bounce off the drumstick or the movement of our body touch our retina and then be processed by the brain as part of the sensory experience in our hands when we feel contact with the instrument, which is a much slower process than the one that our nervous system is receiving signals through our body; and our experience is that everything happens at the same time. But what happens is that sight comes faster than sound and sound comes faster than physical sensation, so the process of union by which all these signals are intertwined in the present, are experienced as the moment in that we become aware of the action and experience of psychophysical sensation. The idea we have of time is actually the illusion of experiences in our memory, we play repeating the time that has already passed but we do not realize that the present time is exactly the future, and thus we do not use our senses to play with the force of gravity, the passing of time, nor the sense of direction of what we “touch” since there are unconscious processes that then make us have the experience as “real” in the present moment, while what is happening is something else different. Thus we spend our lives in the world exhausting the given space of time without taking full advantage of its nature.