TIME AND THE SOUL

'Time-poverty' is an expression that has been used increasingly frequently since the first edition of Jacob Needleman's remarkable book in 1998. Many readers of this review (and indeed the writer) know only too well what it is like to have too much to do and too little time to do it in. This new edition has an engaging foreword by John Cleese and a new introduction by the author in which he reflects on the way in which the 'earthquake' of 9/11 exposed the fragility of our world and highlighted the fact that we have 'placed the satisfaction of desire above the cultivation of being'. We have lost the art of 'consciously inhabiting our life' and, through our increasing absorption in busyness, 'we have lost the present moment'.

Needleman's book is a profound meditation on our increasingly toxic relationship to time, a relationship that he thinks represents a metaphysical challenge arising from our loss of contact with the inner life of the soul and a concomitant loss of meaning. Our materialist world-view tells us that both we ourselves and time are finite and that life as a whole is meaningless. We mistakenly try to address this issue by focusing on things, on the outer life, while neglecting the inner connection. As Plotinus famously said, 'remembering is for those who have forgotten'. As a culture we have forgotten who we are, we mistake the finite and fearful ego for the soul or Self. Needleman approaches his theme not only through philosophical narrative but also through the imagined interplay between a mature professional and himself as an adolescent, meeting each other across time and throwing the shifts of identity into relief. He also quotes a Sufi story where an old man is rescued by his younger self, telling the tale from both ends. This narrative is reflected in an exercise that he suggests, where you pretend that you have already done something that you are in the process of doing, thus introducing a kind of conscious determinism into a sequence of actions. In my own case this involved imagining that I had completed a run, the route of which I had already planned - it was a curious sensation 'going through the motions', especially as a walk or run is in a sense predetermined. The experience was analogous to Gurdjieff's self-remembering. As Needleman points out, we do exist at an interface between the time and the timeless, between our sense of ourselves as ego and a wider or deeper identity-Self. We can inhabit this life more consciously rather than being driven by surface considerations. This involves a shift of focus towards the Self, following Aristotle's injunction that 'the wise man is never in a hurry'. Nor is he consumed with needless worry. He/she pays attention to Jesus' saying that we should first seek the Kingdom of God, that is give priority to the inner life, to contact with what Emerson calls the Oversoul: 'We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence….to which every part and particle is related; the eternal ONE'. So rather than focus on the future, we should focus on the timeless: 'the soul's answer to the problem of time is the experience of timeless being' (author's italics). In this way we become more engaged in life and are not devoured by time. Indeed time can be seen as creative rather than destructive as we gradually build up the substance of our being. Needleman moves on to point out that the immortality of the soul does not imply the continued existence after death of the socially conditioned self that is a product of time. The self is not and cannot be the Self, although the former can be informed by the latter if our priorities are straightened out. And when the Self touches the self, when the soul touches the ego, we experience both meaning and freedom from time: 'when I am exists, the ego has found what it wanted. In the last chapter, Needleman makes a number of other observations, partly by invoking his hero's teacher Max as an embodiment of wisdom. Another aspect of our problem with time is that we tend to live by mechanical time rather than biological time or the time of consciousness. This artificial and accelerated rhythm is an 'inhuman tempo' that jars our intrinsic rhythms and helps create stress-related conditions. So we need to re-establish the connection with our inner nature, which may also help us reconnect with nature outside ourselves. Then we become aware of that 'life within life' and can live both an inner and an outer life'. Needleman's profound book should migrate to the top of your reading pile if you are as concerned about your relationship to time as I am. Steve Taylor's book discusses some parallel themes to Needleman, notably the relationship between the ego and time, of which more in a moment. He outlines five laws of psychological time: time seems to go faster as we get older; it goes more slowly when we are in unfamiliar circumstances, but more quickly when we are absorbed and slowly when we are bored; and it passes slowly when the ego is in abeyance. Taylor produces a useful tool in the form of a continuum chart between boredom-absorption and the perceived passage of time and considers ways in which we can make our sense of time expand. One stratagem, adopted for instance by the vagrant French poet Arthur Rimbaud, is to cram in the maximum by way of sensation and experiences. However, this may not be practical for many of us, so Taylor recommends a second path enabling the expansion of time through spiritual practices such as meditation where the mind is stilled. In meditative states the sense of a separate ego dissolves and time slows down, as indicated by Needleman above. Taylor goes further by suggesting that psychological time is an illusion created by the ego, and illustrates his thesis with experiences of timelessness and transcendence of the ego in the near-death experience. He then suggests that a spiritual way of life gives us access to more vitality, less sense of ego and a more mindful appreciation of the moment. So the answer, as proposed by both these authors, lies within rather than without. In this way we can recover our own rhythm and escape the thrall of the mechanical 'inhuman tempo'.