The Limitations of the Time Consciousness Bound by the Framework of the Physical Mind and Senses

Our reliance on the physical mind and the senses, the current limitations of these instruments, and the impact they have on our perception of the world and our experience of time, is the major reason for the fragmented manner in which we experience the movement of Time.  A different sense of time could be obtained through a new standpoint of consciousness, such as the shift to the universal standpoint, or the shift to the supramental plane of awareness, but in theory, a different time-consciousness is also possible if the physical mind and senses were able to do away with the limiting frame and experience the present tied to our individual experience, and thereby experience the universal present.

Sri Aurobindo delves much more deeply into the issue:  “If we could be aware of all the present, all the action of physical, vital, mental energies at work in the moment, it is conceivable that we would be able to see their past too involved in them and their latent future or at least to proceed from present to past and future knowledge.  And under certain circumstances this might create a sense of real and ever-present time continuity, a living in the behind and the front as well as the immediate, and a step farther might carry us into an ever present sense of our existence in infinite time and in our timeless self, and its manifestation in eternal time might then become real to us and also we might feel the timeless Self behind the worlds and the reality of his eternal world manifestation.  In any case, the possibility of another kind of time consciousness than we have at present and of a triple time knowledge rests upon the possibility of developing another consciousness than that proper to the physical mind and sense and breaking our imprisonment in the moment and in the mind of ignorance with its limitation to sensation, memory, inference and conjecture.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Four: The Yoga of Self-Perfection, Chapter 25, Towards the Supramental Time Vision , pg. 858

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