What Is Time?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What is time? Does it exist by itself or only within? How do you explain time?

Answer: I can see time when I look at my watch. I sense time when I contemplate my life and think that it elapses rapidly, when I ponder about things that happen to me, and when I reflect on consequences and emotions.

Our will to receive, the basic material we are made of, feels past, present, and future. It recognizes time as changes that take place in our desire to be pleased. In other words, time depends on the sensations that take place in our will to receive. If not for those sensations, we would have no perception of time whatsoever.

If there is no difference in our sensations, no delta between feeling better or worse, we don’t notice the flow of time. If our sensations were always the same, time would stop. That is, time for us is a result of fluctuations that happen in our sensors. No change, no time. How is the preceding minute different from the next? They vary due to the processes that take place in our desire to receive. This is what we call time.

Time is the difference between the quantities of pleasure that we experience in our prior state compared to our next state. Our sensations keep changing. This explains why things that happen to us in the past, present or future are important from our egoistic point of view. We explore the states that our desire to receive pleasure experiences. The alternating states are imprinted within us as time.

The will to receive is the matter of creation. It is a sensor that feels fullness or emptiness. It measures the state that it goes through according to the sensation of fulfillment that is compared to its previous state and by evaluating the quantity of pleasure in both of them, thus forming a notion of time.

Time is a measurement tool of fulfillment that is present inside the will to receive. We want to be delighted so we develop a sensation of the future and look back into the past to learn how to organize ourselves in order to achieve the desired goal.

We organize our fulfillment; that’s why time splits into various phases for us.

We strive to know our future and learn from our past, but all of it derives from our desire to be pleased. While the desire to receive develops, its various shapes form a sensation of time in us.

According to its developmental stage, the will to receive splits into the following phases: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and speaking. Humans are the only ones who sense time, i.e., recognize the past, present and future. These phases are different for humans from the point of view of their sensation of fulfillment.

We feel various kinds of time internally. There is time that keeps track of hours, yet there is another type of time, which we simply feel inside us. Time can be measured by billions of years or it can be split into brief moments. We measure time according to the degree of its importance to us and to the extent of our involvement in it.

A sensation of time and its essence are two totally different things. Perception of time depends on our internal individual experiences, whereas astronomical time is calculated based on the movement of planets, although it is still quite relative.

The entire universe is a will to receive inside which we watch processes that take place at inanimate, vegetative, animate and human levels.

So it means that all of them happen inside us. The entire reality is inside us; it is a product of our perception. If our perception of reality changes, notions of time, movement, space, and the whole universe, its entire picture that we live in will also change.

That’s why we have to ask ourselves a question: “What is our life? What is the reality in which we exist? Is it relative? Can it be changed?”
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 4/17/2014

Related Material:
The Origins Of Time
Time Compressed Into A Point
Time – Illusion or Reality?

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