Poemander

Time, lifetimes, years, days – you don't have them, you never had them. All you have is a moment if anything at all. This moment is you, it contains all your life, or lives if you wish so – from conception to procession.

We imagine time as a river. We look front and back, up and down the stream mesmerized by its unstoppable power, like a child looking out the window we can't help, but turning our head left and right following every passing car. Should you stop for a moment and look just where you are, you will see that our 'stream' is no longer a stream, it is the spinning of our own head that made it look like a flow. What it is instead, it is a frozen lake with us skating in circles tracing the same figure on and on again. Only few would ever change the line they trace, leave alone stopping or getting off this icy lake altogether.

Time is a mind construct nourished by the hopes and consolations which are in need of the future and of the past. Constantly moving ahead of itself or lingering behind, mind doesn't stop, it afraid to suddenly see itself in the mirror. Like a fool who would rather chat without a stop only not to be revealed in his foolishness, mind doesn't stop in order not to be revealed in its emptiness.

Time is space inverted. Vast space suppresses time, vast time dominates space. Like in the myth of Cronus, where son deposed his father; they can co-exist together, but one must be more potent than the other. This myth also shows that time can be born out of space (Uranus as a personification of space). Whereas space is born from Air (Aether) and Day (Hemera), who themselves in turn were born from Darkness (Erebus) and Night (Nyx), the children of Chaos. Unambiguously, from Greek, Chaos means a yawn or a gap. Again we see Nothingness as a precursor to 'real' , 'orderly' world.

Chaos is a gap, it is emptiness without the space or the time, it is the world of unknowable. It is not even the darkness, which is a manifestation of it. Science sees things, particles springing out of the vacuum and disappearing back, they are compelled to call it the principle of uncertainty. Ancients called it the music of the universe, the underlying harmony, the breath of Brahma. They saw a great power in this emptiness, capable of producing all things, including space and time. Unknowable is all around because it is the source of everything. And while the reason doesn't reach there, two windows exist into the unknown:the lit one – love and the dark one – fear.