Time in the physical world follows an acceptable process. To me there are two parts - one is the movement of the sun around the earth (or the earth around the sun, depending which point you decide to make the ‘reference’). That gives us an obvious ‘count’ of time. Many studies have been done of people who are placed in rooms with artificially controlled light, or no light, for long stretches. It is very disorienting - we do viscerally reference the passage of the sun, in our concept of time.
The other is the ageing process. Regardless of the sun’s cycles, we know time passes because things deteriorate - entropy. I know that, in itself, in abstract theory, could be said to have nothing to do with time, but from our temporal referencing point of view, it is a blatant and obvious confirmation that time does exist.
There are many clever examples of the relativity of time, but I see that as more how we perceive time, not its seemingly independent existence. eg. if you are sitting on a stove, and time is passing very slowly, or sitting with your lover and it whips by fast - your watch is still telling you it’s consistent pattern - that of the sun. Nonetheless the relativity of time is curious addition to the complexity of this issue.
The question arises, does time exist in Astral?
I am going to try to explain how I am coming to see this, based on my experiences. Like many here I have explored the dream world, and its relationship to the physical world, in considerable detail. This has led me to ponder a conceptual structure. I am in no way saying this is correct. It is simply my small attempt to get a grasp on this with my mind - which is not really that necessary, but my mind likes to play with this type of thing.
There is another version of time, which I want to use here. See it as a conduit, a channel of emanation from the source of the universe. not time in terms of past and future, or passage, but time as the flow of ‘events’ through the funnel of the present moment - the eternal now. Like standing on the road, watching the traffic. Out of the distance comes one vehicle after another - small, big, different colours, quiet, noisy etc. These ‘items’ manifest on the screen of our ‘now’, in a flow - this is not about the speed of time, but just the continuous manifestation. They come like nebulous clouds, forming into a final definition as they surface in our lens focus, our palette of the moment, our screen that lies wide open right here now.
Here is my working image:
Imagine you are in a theatre, watching a movie that is being beamed from behind you, onto the screen which you sit watching. Now picture your double, your astral self, sitting in your body, but looking back at the projection source.
Rudolf Steiner said that in astral, time flows in the opposite direction. I have thought on that, and have woven the idea into my own vision of time, as a way to explain some experiences. This means that ‘time’ in astral is not what we think of it in physical - not a relative velocity of change, but a series of events that stream onto our screen, coming from the most subtle nuance, picked up by our finest antennae as intuitions and visions, till there it pops into manifest reality like baby machine.
In astral, we face back to the source of the beam, because the beam streams from deep in our 3rd attention, picks up form matter in our 2nd attention, then finally is born into daylight. This is the same process we follow in our own birth. So by seeing in the astral attention, the 2nd attention, we see events that are coming to us before they manifest. That is why dreamers so often experience pre-cognitative dreams.
But don’t confuse this with past and future. In astral we can travel laterally through temporal time (which is why some say time does not exist in astral), like jumping tracks on the record player - the stylus remains in the same band, but can pick up channels from any available groove. This enables us to travel forward and backward in physical historical linear time, but doesn’t change the flow of ‘items’ from the source - changes the items, but not the flow.
Thus our double is fundamentally differently oriented to us, but we can also turn our head slightly to the projector, we do this when we ponder why something happened - whenever we strive to see into the ‘meaning’ of life - why has this happened? Whenever we ask ourselves the big rhetorical questions - not questions for answers - answers are the screen, but questions for wonder.
Mostly we sit looking into the ‘forward’ illusion of the plot. We look at the screen, and believe we are watching the future unfolding before our eyes, but it’s not, its unfolding behind our head - the screen image is only a reflection of reality, and we bind ourselves to that illusion by being trapped in the plot - we are plot-junkies. We have to pull ourselves away from the story line, and look back into the mystery of possibilities.
This reminds me of one of those hero-type cartoons at the back of those old magazines. The evil guy had our hero trapped in a pit of illusion. The illusion, a dream, was being beamed to our hero while the evil guy sat at the rim of the pit and watched malevolently. Our hero knew he was imprisoned at the start, but the dream sequence began to overwhelm him - he was on a sinking ship in the ocean and he had to save some poor woman ... you know how it goes with heroes.
Well our hero was no ordinary hero. He realised the trap, and turned his gun away from the illusionary bad guy in the dream, and pointed it up into the sky, then shot. He actually shot with his illusionary gun, the light bulb that was beaming the illusion, which immediately stopped. Leaving our hero to see the disgruntled face of the real evil guy sitting at the lip of the pit. I think this hero was called Lotha or something like that - he was a magician.
By turning our head away from the plot, and to the source of emanation, we begin to cross into the being of our double, and see with its eyes, in the opposite direction of time.... back up the beam to the source of all. This then is the direction all the gods travel - not out into manifestation, but back into the centre. This is also the natural turn we go through as we grow older - we tire of the plot, and muse at the mystery.
