A conception of Time

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 What would you say of a language and its people which has the same word for tomorrow and yesterday? The word in Hindi is _‘kal’._ What a brilliant conception of time that our people thought to move away from the linear passage of time to that which converges the future and the past to the present! The meaning of tomorrow or yesterday becomes known only by grammatical structure  or in context of the present. 

It is the senses that tell us that time flows. The past we think of as having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. The “now” of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, which too is relegated to the fixed past.

Hidden in this lies an amazing paradox. Nothing in the physical, philosophical or spiritual world corresponds to the passage of time. In fact it is seriously at odds with modern physics. Albert Einstein famously expressed the point, “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.” 

How did our people reconcile this obvios dichotomy between passage of time as we perceive it, and its illusory nature? As the physicists came to the conclusion that there is a time-space continuum, our philosophers too understood that time is analogous to a landscape, a timescape as it were, with all past and future events laid out together. How beautifully than to represent this idea by referring to the past and the future with a single word, 'kal'. This again is derived from the timescape, which is called,  'kaal'. 

However, there are things that have frozen the passage of time. Though relegated to the past, they are relived again and again in the present. One such example is the composition, 'Time' by Pink Floyd. It is an iconic musical masterpiece has become our cultural heritage. How poignant that so many people had requested this song to be played at their funeral or in their dying moments. Were they saying, it is not their end, but a journey on a timeless landscape...

Nothing captures the pathos of the passage time better than these lyrics of this song:

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again_

The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

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