The Illusion of Time

Ever had the feeling of having complete mastery over a subject? The feeling caused by the rush of dopamine to the head from a momentary illusion of omniscience. Give it some time. Your mind receives new information, analyses it and slowly plants the seeds of doubt in the crystal clear theory. And lo behold! It all comes crashing like huge waves on a rocky coast. A black smear on a white canvas. Smokes and mirrors. Muddy the still waters. We were happy knowing the large white rock floating in water was actually frozen water. It was only when we explored it further and started realizing it was only the tip of a gargantuan iceberg that we lost our cool. Is that all? Is there more? If what we know to be true is only an illusion, what can we be sure about? The more you know about something, the more complicated it gets and you have less understanding of it, than what you had before. Time is one such concept.

Time was present before life on earth began and will be a witness to the apocalypse in the future that shall wipe out all known life. If life was born in the cradle of evolution, the hand that rocks the cradle is time. Time in its epic scales, millions and billions of years, is the key ingredient of evolution. For us, time has been the only constant in an ever changing world. It was our reference point to our actions. It was the manuscript on which history was written. We thought we understood all about time. Time was such a still observer that we could anoint different roles to it. For some it was the healer, some never seemed to have enough of it, some had it a plenty to the point of misery, while for  many time was death itself as it withered youth and eventually sucked the life out of us. We got smug and we started building devices to keep track of time, ranging from sundials to atomic clocks. We scratched the surface too hard, only to reveal the mysterious strands that make time. 

With this new knowledge of the building blocks of time, it wasn't constant anymore. It had become relative. It could go slower or faster to each observer under different circumstances. It is so interlinked with space, light and gravity that one couldn't exist without the other. Time, which we thought we knew like the back of our hands, became the foremost illusion of the universe. It is truly baffling to know that when you look at the sun right now, you are actually looking at the sun, roughly eight minutes back in time. 

Traveling across time became theoretically possible. This gave rise to novel conundrums of endless time loops, going back in time to change history and getting a glimpse of oneself in the future. Once time turned from the known to the unknown, it was subject to speculative imagination resulting in a rich lore of science fiction. So, what lies ahead for mankind in our quest to demystify time? 

We shall keep continuing with speculative theories and one of those could result in our mastery over time wherein we can travel back and forth along the arrow of time and even bend it. However, will we be happy having given the access to the past and the future? Each individual free shall multiply threefold and I can't help but picture a world predominated by chaos of the highest order. I am reminded of a saying from Buddhist theology, 'the man who dwells in the past and the man who dreams of the future are seldom happy. The truly happy man is the one that lives in the present moment'.

So what is the best way to navigate through the maze of time? I prefer to take Gandalf's words in Lord of the Rings as my course of action."All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us right now"

Stargazing

The gift that keeps on giving. Mankind has always been on the quest of a mythical gift that keeps giving riches, since the dawn of civilization. Needless to say, homosapiens, with their unique ability of collective imagination, the very same idiosyncratic element that catapulted them to the top of the food-chain, started weaving tales of such a legendary gift like a mulberry worm weaving its finest silk . Legends spun across civilizations tantamount to this. The Philosopher's stone, the Elixir of Life, the Akshaya Patra, Kamadhenu in Indian mythology, Midas from the land across the Aegean sea are a few of those. The riches need not necessarily be hedonistic. It could take various forms like truth, knowledge, the true form of nature to name a few. No question has baffled us more than the one of how our universe works? We have, at the most, made a few dots in the right direction in this quest, only in the last couple of centuries, through the brilliance of a few men like Newton and Einstein. Yet, there is still so much of the universe unexplained that what we know is a handful of sand picked up on a vast beach.

But how did it all begin? When did we start to ponder about such ethereal concepts? When did we get enough time to realize there's the most intricate labyrinth lying above us waiting for us to solve it? Oh it's when we turned our heads away from the mundane trivialities of everyday survival. It was when we lifted our heads up and looked above. We did stare long and many a time. The blue sky in the day and the endless darkness at night stared back at us. We noticed the big silvery white orb moving across our heads playing hide and seek once a fortnight. Then we found the planets and the stars. Though it took us thousands of years to figure out who these wanderers in space really where, the real gift of this intriguing process, guided by the beacon of curiosity, was, the questioning mind.

Every other moment, our heads were stuck too deep in day to day life like ostriches with their heads in sand. It was only when we looked up, we could contemplate on how it all began with a big bang out of nothingness. Various civilizations came up with their own theories which were purported to be the truth at those times. Those supposedly true 'theories' gave rise to an astounding pantheon of gods across ages. It didn't really matter if those theories would eventually turn into myths over the passage of time and advancement in human civilization. The process led to the development of creative imagination in man, which would eventually sow the seeds of modern science centuries later. It led us along the path of understanding the true meaning of Nature, which in essence is the meaning of life. Without doubt the ultimate truth of life has to be the most precious gift ever. It all began when man gazed at the stars. 

Truly then, stargazing has been the gift that keeps on giving.