Letters On Yoga - Part 1

Fate and Free-Will, Karma and Heredity, etc. - V

The idea of time may be a mental construction, but the sense of it may not be. Savages have the idea of time but it is in connection with the sun and stars and the lapse of day and night and the seasons, not perhaps a separate construction—but one is not sure for they have metaphysical conceptions of their own. Animals are not, I think, so limited in their consciousness—they have not only sensations, but an acute memory of certain things, observation, clear associations, an intelligence that plans, a very accurate sense of place and memory of place, an initial power of reasoning (not reflectively as the human mind does, but practically as any vital mind can do). I have seen a young kitten observing, coming at a correct conclusion, proceeding to do what was necessary for her purpose, a necessity imposed by that conclusion, just as a human child might do. We cannot therefore say that animals have no

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ideas. No clear measure of yesterday and tomorrow, perhaps, but the perception of past and future needs is there and of right times and seasons also—all vital, practical, not reflectively mental in the human way.

But it is true that when one gets beyond the mind, this sense of time changes into timelessness, into the eternal present.

[Time sense in the animals:] A very strong time sense—at least some of them—but usually it works only in connection with strong desires or habits, e.g. food.

No doubt the physical regulated time consciousness belongs mainly to the waking state but it can be subliminal as well as of the mental waking consciousness. E.g., sometimes one wills at night to get up at a fixed time in the morning and wakes exactly at that hour and minute—it is something in the subliminal being that recorded the time and vigilantly executed it.

It is the change in the consciousness. When one begins to feel the inner being and live in it (the result of the experience of peace and silence) the ordinary time sense disappears or becomes purely external.

Time is to the Intuition an extension of consciousness in which happenings are arranged and has not the same rigidity that it has to the intellect.

You are right. The present is a convention or only a constant movement out of the past into the future.

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