Scattered across the immense vacuum of space are stars, galaxies, suns and moons that are older than our human minds can comprehend. The age of our universe is about 13.8 billion years. The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago and the age of Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years. The rise of mankind is recent, with the first modern human appearing around a million years ago and Homo Sapiens — today’s humans — arriving only in the past 200,000 years. If you compressed the time the universe has existed into a single day, humans arrive at 11:59:56pm, just four seconds before the end of the day. Imagine that – it took nearly 14 billion years to create the conditions for humans to exist!
It’s difficult to imagine millions or billions of years ago since man’s frame of reference is right now. The term “now” means everything and nothing at all. When does “now” no longer exist? If you ask someone, “what time is it now?”, by the time they respond, now has become the past. Yet now is all there is. We don’t live in the past or future, but within perpetually occurring moments of “nowness.”
Einstein discovered that the passage of time is relative. This relativity of time is the basis of this article, but from a philosophical viewpoint. If man measures time relative to his lifetime, then a few months or years seems significant. However, if time is measured relative to the unfolding of the universe, then a lifetime is but a blink of an eye. Most of us view time from within our lifetime. However, there are an infinite number of time perspectives. For instance, one can view life as a continuum beginning from the past 10 million years AND into the next 10 million years!!!
When you look at your life from this vantage point, then your personal problems — the things you worry about, the goals you failed to achieve, etc. seem trivial. Your life is not insignificant, but your worries, fears, and insecurities are. This is mind-blowing because it allows you to view the concept of time and your personal life from a different perspective. Why worry when you have a few more millions of years of life remaining? Of course, this notion of time is balanced by the precept that you can’t keep God waiting, so we’re not entitled to become complacent in overcoming our deficiencies.
There are stages of growth in all aspects of nature. In other words, all growth occurs sequentially through evolution and God oversees your growth process. The stages in your spiritual development require more than one lifetime to complete. Life is a continuum of cycles – you’re formed and re-formed through a series of incarnations.
Growth not only occurs at the individual level, but also at a group level (families, nations, races, etc.). Westerners don’t acknowledge the concept of reincarnation and their culture reflects this limited understanding of what life is. “Seize the day,” they say, because “tomorrow you die.” If there’s only one life, then there isn’t much incentive to engage in self-improvement. This is why Black people shouldn’t model our lives after Westerners because they have yet to adopt reincarnation as a fundamental principle of the evolutionary structure of life.
Growth occurs at its own natural pace. If someone or a group of people needs to grow, you’re not going to talk, march, picket, plead or vote them into developing faster than nature intended. This is an important consideration when addressing racism and white supremacy, for example. The bitter truth is it will take more time – perhaps many centuries — for people of European descent to develop the capacity to overcome their prejudice and racism. Once again, a few centuries are merely a blink of an eye from God’s perspective.
Once we begin to view time over billions of years, we can become more patient and understanding of our own faults and those of others. Reliance on a human clock leads to incorrect emotional responses to challenges in life. When we encounter difficulties, we tend to express negative emotions in adverse situations. The problem isn’t the situation, but in our responses to them. Adverse situations are natural, unavoidable and time-constrained. The proper response, even in tumultuous scenarios, is always peace and joy.
You may be using the wrong clock to determine what time it is. You are not a lifetime event. You’re a star in an infinite galaxy that is constantly evolving, and you grow brighter as the universe unfolds. You have a destiny and purpose that cannot be confined within the expanse of a few years in an earthly vessel. You’re a spiritual being that transcends space and time. Your journey began billions of years ago and will extend billions of more years into the future. So the next time you want to know what time it is, just remember that you are timeless. You were born before the sky was made and you will still be gleaming when this galaxy ceases to exist.
