The Secret of Time

Xuefeng

January 5, 2006

Eternity is long; very long! It runs endlessly. Beginning, developing, changing, and concluding is ornamented by the waves of time. The universe flies in eons. Life twists and turns in years. Love and hate rise and fall in summer and winter. Feelings of gratitude and resentment emerge and disappear in spring and autumn. Time, mysterious time! The wonderful experience of bringing forth the new from the old, drowning the vicissitudes of transitional times, transforming hope into despair, and turning solids into gas and smoke. Life rises and falls in time; it goes up and down in time. Time, what exactly is time?

· It is the recorder of material cycles.

· It begins with the creation of matter and ends with its demise.

· It has these eight characteristics:

1. Time is nonmaterial - it is untraceable, formless, stateless, shapeless, heartless, senseless, invisible, untouchable, and can neither be heard nor caught.

2. Time is positive and negative - future time is positive; past time is negative.

3. Time is particular and universal - its particularity applies to the specific; its universality applies to the general.

4. Time is variable - it progresses unevenly; it changes as physical movement changes and disappears as physical movement disappears.

5. Time exists throughout all physical space - it is as big as the universe and as small as particles; where there is matter, there is time.

6. Time is vertical and horizontal - it manifests itself vertically as the past, present, and future, and horizontally as momentary and eternal.

7. Time has different meanings under different forces - it changes as gravity and acceleration change, but has the same meaning under the same forces.

8. Time expands, contracts, and disappears - the quality, shape, and motion of matter cause it to contract or expand with changes in any of those. When matter disappears, time disappears.

There is no time in the nonmaterial world. Non-matter is a reaction to matter but does not share any of its properties. All matter proceeds through generation, development, decline, and death, but non-matter has neither life nor death, so it has no time and is eternal. Tao, LIFE’s spiritual entity, ideas, spirits, thoughts, dharmas, the nature of Tathagata, Celestial beings, angels, and the Elysium world do NOT have time. Therefore, the nonmaterial world is eternal.

Since the motion of matter is absolute, we perceive that all things run in time. In this sense, time changes everything and decides all. It can transform the decadent into magic and the ordinary into extraordinary. Everything changes with the passage of time. Along the eternal river of time, all matter is transitional, illusory, and valueless.

Time’s control must end in order for one to achieve an eternal existence. As humans, it is to fish for the moon in water or to plough the air for our bodies to break away from our shackles, so the human body must follow its nature. To leave time, we must work on our spiritual entities. Life is short and the spiritual entity of LIFE has many different directions in which to spread. Perfect spiritual entities go to heaven and defective ones go to hell. If we can perfect our spiritual entities within our limited lifetimes, then we can transcend time. In addition to transcending time, we must also work on our non-matter by revering and taking the Way of the Greatest Creator. To roam in ideas, thinking, spirits, and other areas is to deal with eternity and to transcend time maximally and from within the confines of a limited time. When fruits ripen, they fall. When water flows, channels form. Once we make this breakthrough, we can enter horizontal space and time and immediately feel fresh and enchanted.

Please refer to Time and Space of the Universe for further study.