12/03/2024
Thoughts on Time and Timelessness
In many esoteric traditions, there's a belief that there are entities that are free to act without reference to space, and there are entities that can act without reference to time, and entities who are above both time and space, who exist in a realm of timelessness. The Greco-Roman traditions of paganism and neoplatonism subscribed to this idea. But what does living in a "timeless" ream or state really mean?
This concept is usually be described through reference to astrology, with these entities being beyond or above the astrological spheres, but people today have so little understanding of astrology, even people who profess to be devotees of it, that these comparisons make little sense. Instead of using astrology as a way to discuss it, I'll use the humble car, the automobile. In this I'm going off of an example created by someone else who used a train car for the same purpose. For this, we'll start off with humans, then with lesser spirits, and conclude with those who truly live in the timeless and spaceless realm.
Time, for us humans, is caught up with the body itself. It's related to being incarnated. In this, the body is the car, and the human being is the driver. But our body is a car that has to keep going forward twenty four hours a day. It has to keep driving, although for a time it can go on auto pilot while we sleep. Nevertheless, it has to keep moving forward, using fuel, getting maintenance, until the day it dies.
Now picture this car driving endlessly through highways, along with other cars doing the same thing. They have the force of momentum with them. Yet, on the fields next to the highways, where there's grass and dirt, there are other beings who aren't involved in this. They don't have vehicles they're connected to, they can just sit and watch the cars go by. These are the lesser timeless beings, or beings freed from time, because they're not obligated to move, to go forward, because they're not incarnated in a physical body. Because they don't have to go forward, they can take their time, and move much more slowly than those beings that are locked into their cars.
Our perception of time is linked to our human existence and the need for action to sustain that existence, with this ultimately being linked to the span of time between birth, old age, and death. The cycle of life is how we measure time. Cumulatively, there are a great number of beings who are experiencing the cycle of life with one another, and this gives the illusion that there's a collective purpose behind individual actions. However, thoughts about an arrow of history, reflective of time on a greater scale, are, in my opinion, false. They're illusions that are derived from our own experiences projected onto history itself. Behind history, then, there's a certain amount of regular, cyclical, actions that happen over and over again, which form the ground on which the particulars of history develop. History can "progress" or it can go "backwards" depending on the sum total of individual actions, and though these actions are conditioned by the actions that have gone before, it's never settled what direction those individual actions will take, whether they will make things better or worse.
If we go back to our car and highway analogy, there are highways which many cars have taken, and which are therefore deep, highly established, and then there are paths which are less taken. Sometimes the less taken paths intersect with the more taken ones and influence them, but often the result of cultural inertia is that the other paths have a tendency to be more and more marginalized. Much of history is based on this inertia, though people don't realize this, or see how stereotyped their lives are.
However, from the perspective of the beings that are outside of the tracks, that are outside of the highways, most of the pattern of the tracks and the cars can be seen. They also have the luxury of being able to predict with a certain amount of confidence what cars will go by when and where, on average. Because of this, they have the ability to intervene, to influence the continual going forward of the vehicles, in order to change things in accordance with their will, or with a higher will that they're serving.
These beings can see the future, in the sense of seeing the average future, average for people taking a particular path, especially for people who are taking a path that's been taken by many people before in many ages. They can alter this path in ways that are probably predictable for them, though the people who are altered by it consider it to be a miracle. Through this, they can alter the future, but the future itself is an extremely complex thing composed of the actions of many, many different car actors, and so many parts of the future can be altered without really changing the ingrained direction that things are heading. Working to affect a true change of direction for a lot of people is more difficult.
Some people who are bound to these vehicles, who have to keep going forward, have figured out that these entities are out there, and have devised rituals to get their attention. These rituals are to try to entice them to intervene and alter paths on their behalf, for particular purposes, though because the individuals doing the rituals are themselves time bound, driving their cars at the same time, every step of the process is difficult. It's hard to get an accurate picture about what's happening, and so taking the correct action is more difficult as well, not to mention being able to contact honest spirits and having them do what's actually useful.
These ambient spirits who don't experience time in the normal way because they're discarnate, whether this is their normal nature or because they were once human, are still space bound, but upwards, on another level, there are what could be called the grand gods who are literally above space, and who also experience time from the slow perspective of a person not attached to a mortal vehicle. These beings truly have an overhead perspective of all of the tracks that humanity normally goes down, of different trends that are happening, and that have happened in the past. For these beings, intervention can be even more direct and precise, with these lower spirits often helping them out in executing their plans.
