Time, Recurrence and Events

The meeting started with a reading from Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries, on The Idea of Time, Recurrence and Events, Vol. 2, p. 425

This was followed by a discussion of some of the questions discussed about the experiencing of events in time.

Most of us think of the events of the day as happenings in periods of ‘linear time’, that is; the events we experience appear to happen as moments in an extended time-line, divided into days, hours, minutes and seconds, with one moment following another.

However, many modern scientists, philosophers and esoteric teachers, tell us that time can also be composed of events that can recur in ‘psychological time’ and that we experience life in two dimensions. We have a personal world of our own thoughts and feelings and a world that we share with other people, who also have their own personal world.

When we view time from a psychological perspective, we can observe our day in ‘psychological time’ which is composed of many kind of events, some happy some depressing, and although some may be important, there are many that are trivial, and in fact are wasting our time if they succeed in gaining our attention.

Events cluster round our line of Time that we call a day and are constantly seeking our attention and intruding in our thoughts and feelings. However when we recall events in ‘psychological time’ we can expand the useful experiences of a positive event, and minimise or discard trivial events that are unimportant.

In the outer world of realities that we share with other people, we have very little control of most of the events that happen to us, events that may place us in an intolerable situation. But in our inner personal world, when we observe events objectively, we can do something to improve our situation.

In ‘psychological time’ we can make an event take more, or less, or all of our time. An event that may have occurred in a very short period of linear time can expand in psychological time and occupy your mind for a much longer period. We can then decide what events we are you going to ignore or minimise, and which events we are going to accept, identify with and maximise, the choice is ours.