Great and unreckoned time
Sophocles, Ajax
Bears forth the unseen and conceals what has been revealed.
Time, says one definition, is the measure of change. But if everything changes, what constant can we measure change against?
The answer in ordinary life is simple: we measure time by cycles that are, from our point of view, stable—notably the apparent rotations of the sun and moon around the earth. (We may not live in a geocentric world from a scientific point of view, but from a human point of view, the earth remains the center of our universe.)
But how far can we apply this principle? We often hear that the universe is 13.8 billion years old (or some such number). This claim seems baffling. What could constitute a year in the enormous expanses of time before there was a sun or an earth to go around it? Atomic decay is ostensibly a more objective measure, but how do we know that atomic decay took place at a constant rate in the early stages of the universe? Was even the speed of light a constant at that point?
On this matter, a NASA website says the date of the Big Bang is determined by the age of the oldest stars (but how do we know that?) and by the Hubble constant, “a measure of the current expansion rate of the universe.”
Unfortunately, NASA goes on to tell us, “If we compare the two age determinations, there is a potential crisis. If the astronomers who estimate that 1/H0 [the Hubble constant] is as small as 10 Billion years are correct, then the age of the Universe would be shorter than the age of its oldest stars. This contradiction implies that either the Big Bang theory is incorrect or that we need to modify general relativity by adding a cosmological constant.”
I am no physicist, but my impression of the “cosmological constant,” first posited by Einstein, is of a figure added to the equations to make them come out even. It has a whiff of the arbitrary. NASA goes on to tell us that the age of the universe is probably somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years, which leaves more than enough wiggle room for comfort.
Consider this too: We see galaxies that are light-years, light-centuries, and light-millennia away. How do we know how far they are? By the law of the red shift: “The wavelength of the light is stretched, so the light is seen as ‘shifted’ towards the red part of the spectrum,” as I learn from the website of the European Space Agency. But how do we know that the red-shift principle works the same way with light that may come to us from millions or billions of years ago? Why should we assume that natural laws that apply to our little corner of the cosmos should apply everywhere?
The quick answer is this: science posits that these laws are constant; this is the law of uniformity. But the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume argued (for complex reasons) that the principle of uniformity cannot be proved rationally. As the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell quipped, “The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.” Or as investors read in every mutual fund prospectus, “past performance does not guarantee future results.”
Why, then, does science continue to rely on the principle of uniformity? The answer is maddeningly circular: because it has worked up to this point. Up to now, the generous farmer has come every day to feed the chicken. (I’m reminded of my late Aunt Dot, who used to tell me, “You’re a good person, Richard—up to now.”)
These considerations lead us into the thicket of advanced physics and quantum theory. We are frequently told that if you think you understand quantum theory, it means you don’t. Since the converse—if you don’t think you understand quantum theory, it means you do—is not true, we can set aside these abstruse considerations and move on.
In any case, philosophical and scientific explorations of time indicate that it is not what it appears to be; many say it is illusory. Indeed many if not all of the great spiritual traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, tell us that the whole of this phenomenal world is maya: illusion. Plato contended that we are no better than people who are (unbeknownst to them) chained in a cave and who have never seen anything but shadows projected from real objects, of which they have no concept. This is all very well, but even those who make such claims remain under time’s yoke, like the rest of us.
For some clarification, we can go to that most cryptic of all Kabbalistic texts, the Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Formation,” sometimes translated as “Book of Creation”). The Sefer Yetzirah, traditionally attributed to Abraham, is of unknown origin; most scholars date it somewhere between the third and the sixth centuries. Toward the beginning, we read:
Ten Sefiroth alone: they are measured by ten without end: the depth of the first and the depth of the last, the depth of good and the depth of evil, the depth above and the depth below, the depth of the east and the depth of the west, the depth of the north and the depth of the south.
“Of nothingness” translates as belimah, an obscure word in Hebrew. In the Bible, it is found only once, in Job 26:7: “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing”—“nothing” here being belimah. Usually it is derived from beli, “without,” and mah, “what”—that is, “without what,” hence without substance. Like this verse from Job, the Sefer Yetzirah implies that the universe as known hangs upon nothing—or at any rate, something that is unknown and unknowable to us.
The first half of the verse from Job is revealing. Here the “north” (frequently equated with evil, which is said to stem from Gevurah) hangs from tohu, here rendered as “the empty place.” Tohu is familiar from Genesis 1:2: “And the earth was without form, and void.” Here tohu is rendered as “without form”; void is bohu. This pair has made it into Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, which defines tohubohu as “chaos, confusion.”
Consequently, Genesis, Job, and the Sefer Yetzirah all agree that the universe arose out of a primordial void or chaos (khaos means “void” in ancient Greek), about which we only can say that since it is nearly impossible for us to conceive of such a realm, to us it is “nothingness.”
As for “Sefiroth,” again there is no really satisfactory translation: principles is one more or less adequate word (the form is plural in Hebrew). Perhaps a better one is dimensions, at least if we equate each pair with a dimension.
This rendition makes the Sefer Yetzirah passage startlingly clear. We now see a universe with one dimension of time (the depth of the first and the depth of the last); three dimensions of space (the depths of above and below, east and west, north and south); and what would appear to be a kind of moral dimension (the depth of good and the depth of evil).
This moral dimension appears to be out of place, but actually it fits in perfectly. Up to this point, we have the three familiar spatial dimensions and one dimension of time, which appears to move unilaterally in a single direction. But what impels motion?
Good and evil provide this motion. The good is what we perceive to be desirable, what we move toward. Otherwise there is no motion. As someone once said, you would not even go into the next room if you did not think that you would benefit somehow.
Similarly, evil is what we move away from. What we perceive as bad, we avoid or push away. (Of course this all becomes much more complicated in day-to-day life.)
Notice that motion here is, like time, unilateral. You can only move in one direction in any single moment. Going further, it would seem that this “good” and “evil” in fact create and constitute time, since motion towards and motion away dictate change and therefore time. Without motion, there would be no change and no time.
At this point, we can see that this dimensionality lies at the heart of human experience and is universal. People worship all sorts of gods and demons and have all sorts of ideas of the universe ranging from the sublime to the delusory; but every last person has an above and a below, a front and back and a right and a left. These are the coordinates by which we construct our experience. (You can relate this to the archetype of the Four Directions found in many traditions.)
Some who are familiar with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life may ask how these Sefiroth relate to those on the Tree. Here is my answer:
Depth of good: Keter
Depth of evil: Malkut
Depth of the first: Hokhmah
Depth of the last: Binah
Depth of the above: Tiferet
Depth of the below: Yesod
Depth of the south: Hesed
Depth of the north: Gevurah
Depth of the east: Netzach
Depth of the west: Hod
But I would never claim any absolute authority to these attributions. It turns out that practically every Kabbalist—including the greatest ones—has his own solution to this conundrum.
These considerations help us understand the apparently monstrous injustice of the Fall. In this myth, God sets up the primordial human pair for failure by showing them the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then forbidding them to eat from it. But they do. Note the punishment: “Unto the woman [God] said, I will multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. . . . And unto Adam he said, . . . In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, until thou return to the ground” (Genesis 3:16‒17, 19).
Here in this peculiar, often derided myth is the secret of human life: we have chosen to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To know good and evil is to experience it; otherwise knowledge is not possible. We, the human race collectively, have chosen to know good and evil by descending to this realm of physicality and experiencing it. It hurts to have babies, and you have to work hard for a living. Although of course I have no idea of who you are who are reading this, I will make this statement about you infallibly and without the slightest fear of refutation: you have known some good and some evil in your life. So have I; so has everyone. The proportions administered to each of us vary wildly, but that is another question altogether.
Genesis also tells us that “unto Adam and unto his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). You and I are both wearing coats of skins right now. You are wearing a coat of skin even if you are stark naked. These “coats of skins” are physical embodiments—the means by which we experience good and evil.
In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant overturned Western thought by proving that we do not perceive reality as it actually is: we perceive it through a range of cognitive structures that he called the categories. There are twelve, according to Kant. If you run your eyes down the list, you will that they are equally fundamental to our perception of the world:
1. Of quantity
Unity
Plurality
Totality
2. Of quality
Reality
Negation
Limitation
3. Of relation
Of inherence and subsistence (substance and accident)
Of causality and dependency (cause and effect)
Of community (reciprocity between agent and patient)
4. Of modality
Possibility—impossibility
Existence—nonexistence
Necessity—contingency
Again, it is impossible even to imagine a world apart from these categories. No science fiction writer, no matter how brilliant or daft, has ever been able to construct a world in which there is no causation or negation.
The models provided by both Kant and the Sefer Yetzirah suggest that our experience of reality—including time—is extremely narrow and circumscribed. It does not seem possible to evade these limitations through any obvious means.
Nevertheless, the great esoteric traditions suggest that there are realities beyond those that we experience. When these traditions come to describe these realities—for example, what H.P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine calls “an Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable Principle on which all speculation is impossible”—they admit that their descriptions fail. Nothing can be said about this reality, including, strictly speaking, that nothing can be said about it—because even that is saying something about it.
In short, a contemplation of time suggests that time is itself a limited category, a framework for experiencing the world that is valid only under extremely circumscribed conditions, even though these are the conditions we live in. Here, I think, a dual kind of intelligence is called for: one that says that it is almost impossible for us to apprehend realities beyond categories such as time but that we have the right, even the duty, to try. ◆
Sources
Biblical quotations are from the King James Version.
Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest, 1993 [1888].
The Book of Creation. Translation and commentary by Irving Friedman. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1977.
Henderson, L. “The Problem of Induction.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website.
“How Do We Measure the Age and Size of the Universe?” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Center website.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn. New York: Willey, n.d.
Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004 [1912].
“What Is ‘Red Shift’?” European Space Agency website.
Smoley, Richard. A Theology of Love: Reimagining Christianity through “A Course in Miracles.” Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2019.
This piece is excerpted from the Spring 2025 issue of Parabola, THE MYSTERY OF TIME. You can find the full issue on our online store.