Material time

While most people would like to think about time as a physically ungraspable, abstract concept, the truth is that time is of matter. It is made of matter, in fact, it is matter itself. There is no time without matter just as there is no matter without time. In other words, time and matter are the same one thing, and time is synonym for matter as well as matter is synonym for time.

There isn’t a gigantic cosmic watch ticking somewhere among the galaxies, measuring the abstract concept of time, while all the living beings, molecules, and atoms obediently age on the planets. Actually, we can’t think about time and obediently aging material things separately from each other. Matter and material things don’t age because time is going on over their heads, but because they carry the idea of expiration in their very essence. In other words, because all material things have a date of expiry (galaxies expire in billions of years, suns and planets in millions of years, human bodies in a few decades, plants in a few months, and flies in a few days), their process of expiration is perceived as time. Time, therefore, is not a concept, but the nature of matter, the perception of expiry, the transformation of matter over its short-lived existence. When you touch your cup of coffee, you are actually touching time. Similarly, every time you open a door by touching its handle, you are touching time itself.

When matter is created, time is created, and when time is created, matter is created. The two things cannot exist without each other. If there is matter, through its expiring nature, there must be time. If there is time, there must be something that it expresses (measures), that is, something that has a beginning and an end (expiry). What does not have a beginning and an end does not have time, and where there is no time, there is no change, no transformation, no movement, or expiry, but there is eternity. In eternity, therefore, matter (= time) cannot exist.

Even though we live in matter, we still are able to perceive timeless eternity. The perception of eternity is the perception of what is not bound by time. While my body transforms and is obviously bound by time, and even my ever-evolving “personality” changes, the only thing in me that is changeless is the fact that I exist. I exist regardless of the time-bound transformations of my body, personality, and beliefs. I exist fully and in the same way when I am born as when I am 50 or 90 years old. Since my existence is not affected by time, and it shows no changes, it carries the signs of eternity. Even though death may seem as the end of my existence, death is only the expiry date of my time-bound, ever transforming body, not of my steady, timeless, never-changing existence. (My) existence cannot have a beginning or an end because existence is not made of matter. Temporary matter only manifests my eternal existence. If existence had time, existence would have to be made of matter, showing signs of aging and changing. Yet my existence does not age. My existence does not change. What ages and changes is the (material) manifestation of my existence.

One must think about life (time) and existence separately.