Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325 page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.
As a mental exercise, try to define time. You’re not likely to be especially successful. You’ll discover that time has no meaning outside itself. It can, however, be measured in, say, the unwinding of the spring in a clock, the swinging of a pendulum or by the passing of some other physical process like the changing of the seasons, the position of the sun in the sky, or the phases of the moon.
Physicists define time in terms of entropy. Entropy is defined as the tendency of all ordered physical systems to become disordered over time. Ordered systems eventually, and quite naturally, break down into random disorder until they ultimately reach a state of chaos. Entropy is, in fact, the result of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything “ages”. Everything deteriorates over time. This includes you and everything around you. The ability to observe these changes as they take place allows us to keep track of time.
Time also has the property of continuity. We expect each day to follow the day before, and that day will be followed by another day tomorrow. Time is the element that separates all actions on a microsecond by microsecond basis. Without time, there would be no sequential events. There would be no before or after; no past or future. Every single action, movement or thought would happen simultaneously. For conscious entities, events must be separated in time, or they would have no meaning.
Since we live in a world of matter, we experience the constantly changing states of our environment and our bodies. We also have clocks to measure the time it takes for those states to change. Thus, we can keep track of time by observing our environment as it constantly changes.
Time in the spiritual world
There is, however, another definition of time that cannot be measured in terms of the changing of the seasons or the ticking of a clock. We maintain the psychological capacity for gauging time in terms of the past, the present and the future. When we leave our bodies behind, we take this mental property with us, so, as spirits, we maintain our sense of time immediately after death.
Since there is no matter in the world of Spirit, entropy has no meaning there. Hence, there is no way to measure time, and thus there is no objective “time” in the spiritual realm. But even though time has no objective meaning in Spirit, when a soul enters the spiritual realm, each soul maintains its psychological (mental) desire for a material existence, and its sense of time is very much a part of that former existence. It can still remember its past and contemplate a future, even though there is no way to measure time in its current spiritual state.
Our earthly time is quite immutable. Real clocks cannot move backward or forward. We can’t go back in time to change something we did in the past or into the future to preform an action we can imagine doing later. However, for the human (and spiritual) mind, time is quite different. We can remember the past and contemplate the future, and we do this without the benefit of clocks. In addition, for us, time can pass slowly when we are bored, or it can pass quite quickly when we are doing something we enjoy. “Time flies when we’re having fun”, and a boring process can seem like it drags on forever.
Because of this discontinuity between a spirit’s mental sense of time and the lack of any objective way to gauge its passing, a spirit’s sense of time depends exclusively on that spirit’s mental state. Therefore, spirits can not only move forward in time, but backward as well. In Spirit, time may also speed up, slow down or stop entirely. Time for any given spirit depends entirely on its mental state and its status within the spiritual hierarchy. It depends very much on the experience, understanding and spiritual evolution of the spirit itself.
This accounts for much of the difficulty that spirits who remain on the transitional plane experience in controlling their thoughts and environment. (The transitional plane is the plane of earthbound spirits.) Everyone dies with their mental concept of time intact, but because there is no “objective” time in Spirit, each soul experiences time in its own way. For instance, most spirits trapped on the transitional plane experience only a narrow slice of time, often concerning memories surrounding their time of death, or memories of a particularly emotional or guilt-ridden part of their lives. This narrow band of memories keeps looping over and over again so that any new lessons the soul might learn concern only that short period of their lives. For them, every day is “Groundhog day”.
Thus, a spirit might create its own Hell right on the transitional plane. Earthbound souls often become imprisoned in a timeless Hell of their own making, constantly reliving some trauma from their past life, or fretting about something about which they feel a sense of guilt. While living people may suffer continuing guilt during their lives, they don’t become trapped in time loops because of the changing state of their physical environment. Spirits don’t have that advantage since in the spiritual world, there is no matter and therefore spirits may remain mentally confined to a particular time or place. On the transitional plane, nothing around a spirit ever changes. Once rescued from their self-imposed prisons on the transitional plane, however, the spirit enters the planes of illusion where the spirits are more evolved and thus produce a communal “spiritual” environment in which changes can take place. This illusion of time allows spirits there to evolve, something that can’t happen on the transitional plane.
Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325 page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.