As a mental exercise, try to define time. You are not likely to be especially successful. You will discover that time has no meaning outside of 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 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 and return to their lowest energy state. The spring in a mechanical clock unwinds until there is no more stored energy to run the clock. Ordered systems eventually, and quite naturally break down into random disorder until they reach a state of chaos. Entropy is, in fact, the result of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything “ages.” Everything naturally 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 living human beings, 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. The rising of the sun, the phases of the moon, the changes of season are all part of our material world.
Time in the spiritual world
There is, however, another definition of time that does not depend on entropy. It 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.
Our earthly time is quite immutable. Real clocks cannot move backward or forward from the present. We can’t physically go back in time to change something we did in the past or into the future to perform an action we can imagine doing later. However, 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 tedious process can seem like it drags on forever.
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. In our world, we can remember the past, contemplate the future, and live in an ever-present “now” based on the sequential order provided by our material, entropy-driven world. However, in the spiritual world, there is no objective, measurable time, and each soul caries its own mental experience of time. When a soul enters the spiritual realm, each spirit maintains its psychological (mental) desire for a material existence, and its sense of time is very much a part of that former existence. A spirit can still remember its past and contemplate its future, even if there is no real “now” there.
In the mainstream spiritual world, time is simply another dimension that each soul can traverse freely. Just as we can traverse our worldly three dimensions, forward, backward, up or down, right or left, a spirit can traverse time into the past or future. It can explore the material world in the past by simply “going there”. But exploring the earth’s future is more difficult for the soul. The future becomes increasingly cloudy the further “ahead” the soul looks. This is due to the infinite number of possible timelines inherent in our earthly existence.
Say you flip a coin to decide which of two restaurants to go to. Heads! the timeline you follow is definite. You decide on a particular restaurant, and thus you decide on particular timeline, with everything that timeline entails. You are deciding on the route you take to that restaurant, the type of food you will order, where you will sit and any number of other incidentals that your choice entails. However, if the coin had come up tails, you would have made an entirely different choice and followed an entirely different timeline. In Spirit, both future timelines are visible to the soul. Say, in one of these timelines, you get to the restaurant intact. In the other timeline, you get into an auto accident and become disabled. In Spirit, a soul can look into the immediate future with some accuracy, but beyond the immediate future its vision is cloudy.
A spirit’s personal 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 where souls who are mentally bound to their former material existence remain until they can progress beyond their earthly addictions.) 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, many spirits trapped on the transitional plane may 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. As a result of these spirits’ ignorance of spiritual time, this narrow band of memories keeps looping over and over again so that any new lessons the soul might learn concern only that fleeting period of their lives. This is called a time trap, and it is a common phenomenon for earthbound spirits. 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 do not 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 environment where changes are constantly taking 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.