by Naresh Jotwani

A recent post on this blog, Time as a Resource, showed that time is a crucial resource in business management. Like any other valuable resource, time must be utilized in an optimal manner. As a short and sweet summary of that post, we repeat here the line from Peter Drucker with which that post started:

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

However, as we shall now show, there is much, much more to time than what we encounter in our busy worldly lives. When we logically explore various aspects of the lived human experience of time, we are led to conclusions which have a huge impact on the values by which we order and live our lives.

This claim will probably come as a surprise to many readers, since we usually take time for granted. But in fact it should not come as a surprise, because a resource which is valuable in business management is also valuable in life management. It is that simple! We just have to explore carefully and logically the lived experience of time – and go wherever that takes us.

In that spirit, the following logical exploration of the lived experience of time has been arranged in three parts: (1) the relationship between the faculty of memory and the concept of time, (2) the difference between the concept of time and experienced reality, and (3) the right definition of ‘progress’, based on the previous two parts.

Relationship between time and memory

Imagine living as a perfectly healthy biological being, but without the faculty of memory. In that state, one’s natural instincts would operate perfectly well – hunger, thirst, fear, sleep … and so on – but there would be no record in the brain of past events, nor of anticipated future events.

In that state of being, if one sees somewhere the pattern 7:30 PM, for example, the pattern would signify absolutely nothing. The word ‘clock’ would have no meaning, because the concept of time depends on the comparison between two states. Our beloved ‘present moment’ is often one of the two states, the other one being in the past or in the future. In the absence of such a comparison, the concept of elapsed time and time cannot exist.

Thus the ability of conceiving time depends on the faculty of memory. Subtraction is involved: T1 minus T0. But if we live only in the present moment, there is always only that present moment, T0. There is no T1, and therefore nothing with which T0 can be compared, and hence no such thing as time.

Birds, cattle, dogs, cats, snails … all animals except Homo Sapiens live by their instincts. Indeed, on evolutionary basis, animal species have got along just fine without the ability to conceptualize time. Seasonal migrations, hatching, caring for the young, colonies of social animals – countless such amazing activities happen by animal instinct.

The broad structure of the human brain supports this argument.

The involuntary nervous system of the human body operates through the spinal cord. The inner part of the brain (shown in blue), from the base of which the spinal cord begins, governs instinctive responses.

Logical responses – involving memory, complex concepts, analysis and reasoning – happen in the frontal cortex. IQ tests measure the capability of that part of the brain. The part which governs involuntary responses and instincts is identical in all humans; that is the common humanity.

In terms of computer architecture, the memory and processor part is in the frontal cortex. The computer system does not have anything corresponding to the involuntary nervous system or instincts. In a human being without memory, the involuntary nervous system and instincts would operate normally.

Concept versus reality

Time as conceived by scientists is infinitely divisible and multipliable. In other words, it is not possible to posit such things as ‘the smallest possible slice of time’ and ‘the longest possible slice of time’. This follows from the simple fact that time is modelled as a continuous real variable.

[Note: Physicists are exploring theories of ‘quantized time’, but these are at present only speculative theories.]

Human reasoning works equally well with time at the scale of nanoseconds or millions of years. Imagine that fifty top scientists participate in a seminar. The topic of the seminar could be the working of an electronic circuit over a nanosecond, or the motion of a galaxy over a million years. Regardless, the fifty capable minds would deal logically with the respective phenomena and – we hope! – come up with conclusions which are reliable. This shows that our logical mind can reason with time at either scale – the very small or the very large. That does not come as a surprise since, as we have argued above, our concept of time is man-made; a real number is a familiar concept.

In reality, however, the rest of our nervous system usually cannot cope up with extremely fast or extremely slow changes. The difference between conceptual understanding and our lived experience comes out clearly here. A physicist studying galactic phenomena ranging over hundreds of millions of years may growl at a waiter for being five minutes late in serving him coffee.

Sometimes, our lived experience totally loses any awareness of time. We are totally ‘lost in the moment’ – watching a beautiful sunrise or sunset, the full moon rising, a clear blue ocean, or a smiling child. For a few moments of lived experience, time ceases to exist. The frontal cortex hibernates!

Such moments, when time comes to a standstill, and we lose ourselves in the moment, are special states of the mind. The reality of such states cannot be denied, even though this reality is not measurable or quantifiable – and is expressible only with great difficulty!

As we know, Physics works with space-time ‘trajectories’ of objects, for example the motion of a ball thrown up in the air. The trajectories of objects are deterministic or probabilistic, depending on the model used.

Question: Does the mind also have a ‘trajectory’, as our acquaintance with Physics may lead us to think?

A moment’s reflection indicates that ‘trajectory of the mind’ cannot even be defined objectively. Why? Because the present moment, the past and the future are all in the mind, as one unified whole. Any conceived axes of time and space are also in the mind. Clearly, the ‘current position’ of the mind cannot be measured by instruments which are in the mind. Without a ‘current position’, the mind cannot have a ‘trajectory’ like that of a physical object.

But we saw that the mind does have a state. While discussing galactic motions during a seminar, a physicist’s mind is in one state; when a waiter is slow in bringing him coffee, the physicist’s mind is in quite a different state; when the physicist is with family, the mind is in yet another state … and so on.

This is not rocket science. Any honest person will agree that the mind goes through a number of different states during the course of a day. We sense some of these states as being wholesome, others not so much.

Consequently, a human being invariably seeks the more wholesome state of mind – the happier, more contented, more fulfilled state. That is the nature of our being. It is equally natural to seek durability of the wholesome state. There is no point in repeatedly losing what one gains with much effort, just as there is no point in running a business which repeatedly stumbles into loss.

Empirically, sages who have delved deep into this aspect of life have found that perfect stillness of the mind is such a wholesome state, a state worth striving for. This goal is by its definition totally non-competitive, as it does not a require taking even a penny from anybody. There is plenty of peace for all the human beings on the planet, without the seeker being forced to compete in a ‘rat race’.

State of the mind is a reality which is absolutely central to our wellbeing. A person always seeks a better state, but the method employed either succeeds or fails. One method is to meditate in a secluded spot, in pure experience of the timeless and limitless moment; another method is to inject or ingest a chemical substance. The former works well; the latter, not really.

What is ‘progress’?

In the definition of ‘progress’, the right yardstick should be based on objective conditions of life – for example standards of health and nutrition. In a society that is improving, ‘progress’ correlates well with time, because overall conditions improve from year to year.

But suppose that, in a society, for whatever reasons, conditions deteriorate from year to year. Then ‘progress’ does not correlate with time, but instead degradation correlates with time.

Certain people, however, have made a fanatical cult out of belief in ‘never-ending progress’. Allegedly, this ‘progress’ started at some point millennia ago, and will take the faithful to a promised ‘golden future’. This blind belief, with a very strong emotional component, is projected on top of reality, including the reality of other people’s lives. Inevitably, the projected narrative becomes more important than reality. Inconvenient truths are kept out, and selected aspects embellished greatly to claim ‘steady progress’ — exactly as prophesied! The tragic result is that falsehoods prevail over truth.

This is nothing but a shameless con game, a deliberately misleading version of history, founded on wrong understanding of time, human beings and communities. This linear view of ‘never-ending progress’ misses the essentially cyclical nature of reality. Harmful ideologies are born out of this erroneous view, even as wealth and the ivy-covered walls of academia bestow a false halo to the false view. This false view engenders contempt and/or condescension towards the views of other cultures of the world, in place of the humility and open-minded inquiry of true scholarship.

The meaning of sanatan dharma is that human existence today is essentially the same as it was millennia ago. Changes in material conditions are superficial. They do not cause the slightest change in the mind’s unceasing effort to seek a durably wholesome state. That empirical truth is sanatan, eternal.

If a durably wholesome state of mind was priceless millennia ago, then it is priceless now. The true meaning of ‘progress’ has to be in alignment with this never-changing empirical fact of human existence.