The Nature of Time

I don't now what 'time' is, any more than anyone else, but I can see the effects of it - ripening fruit and decaying of leaves in Autumn, the passing year's seasons, seeds that grow into plants, acorns that grow into mighty oaks, maturity in the form of life's passing, ageing and our eventual death. The effects of time can also be seen in rocks.

Patsy.

...my tuppence worth...
As a child I was most baffled and bewildered by one statement of Jesus which was to the effect "I shall take you where time shall be no more" I don't recall the exact words but the essence is that.
So I asked a few adults, including my sister who happens to be my first teacher for everything that really mattered., they all said "but of course"- baffling me even more. As I grew older and got to love Osho and tasted meditation, by and by the statement stopped baffling me, it became "of course" and matter of fact rather than something impossible to get one's head around.

Time exists from the reference point of mind. Beyond the reference point of conditioned mind the continuity of flow/consciousness is pure(not as holy but as the only), unbroken, one, indivisible, in that there is no such thing as time/space/divisions. Mind creates time. Incidentally it creates everything one experiences, feels, sees...this world and everything that makes it "real" is a projection of mind. So within the reference of the understanding of mind-there will always be time, space, movement....slip a little further out of the realm of mind and there is no more of this. That is the mystic's experience. Even Einsteins speaks like a mystic, his enquiry was so deep, he came with the same stuff as mystics.

So time exists for all intent and purposes, and we can go back millions of years in carbon dating etc but that is not time per se, that is the effect of time, we can measure. but it does not exist in Reality. outside the bubble of our conditioned mind. Time is only ever experienced from the reference of your feelings, and if there is zilch going on in your thought and feeling sphere, you cannot pin point how much time has passed by but can have a rough idea(based on your past experiences).

Its not necessarily space that gives you the experience of time either. That is just our way of measuring time, because it is easy. Just leave space to measure time,and take your inner reference away, you will find you are in timeless reality.

it will be hard to experience time in absence of your inner reference. That s why at times people after a meditation become oblivious of quantity of time for a short while... because time does not really exist other than your reference of your inner response. Because it is part of the mechanism what we know as mind(not brain).