Beyond Cronos

Celebrating New Year? Indeed, but how do you date Time? No one knows the beginning of Time, therefore, acknowledging his ignorance of the first unit of Time, man has called it by a paradox: “the First Second”. Atharva Veda states that even the first Manavantara was preceded by a long night of 4.320 million years. A complete void! The astrophysicist Weinberg says that after the first explosion nothing happened for 700,000 years. Even geologists date the Pleistocene epoch and the Palaeocene epoch from 1 million to 27.5 million years.

The past has no existence apart from memory. The future too exists only in our imagination, and the present seems to be an imaginary line in time, that is constantly changing the future into the past. Time in effect is timeless and has no existence apart from the mind. The Granth Sahab terms it as the Akaal Moorat.

When the first unit of time is a second, how can you calculate without the number one? How has man counted two-three thousand years? So when does a New Year begin? When the concepts of past and future are recognised only with reference to the present, what reality do we give them when the present does not last even for a microsecond, but constantly keeps turning into a memory called the past? Time is a flux, each second is connected to the next in an incessant flow like each drop in a moving river. Yes, Time flies, but we are the pilots. It is we who breathe life into the regrets of the past and the airy nothing anxieties of the future. Let us break this bondage, these “mind forged manacles”, this demeaning tyranny of Time and Space. Each breath is a glorious new beginning. Don’t count your breaths, count the breathtaking moments. Count this living moment, this gift, vibrant in its joie-de-vivre. Let’s celebrate every moment. Let’s celebrate Happy New Year.

Note: The western world counts time from the father of the Greek gods, Cronos. He is the etymological source of many words on time, e.g. chronology, chronometer, chronicles, etc.

Prarthna Saran is the President of Chinmaya Mission, Delhi.