Illusions and Delusions of Time
'Let nothing disturb my peace nor separate me from You, O my unchanging God' (Elizabeth of the Trinity)
Thanks for joining us! We are now about half way through this Half Day Retreat (Sunday 19th December 2021) entitled 'Advent: The Challenge of Time'.
Without getting too much into the 'physics of time and space' or indeed the 'psychology of the human mind' we would like now to consider briefly what we might call the 'delusions and illusions' around time.
In the quotation above Elizabeth of the Trinity conveys her faith in an 'unchanging God' and implicitly acknowledges the many factors that can interrupt or 'disturb' our peace. These might include targets and aspirations, the behaviours and language we readily associate with keeping to a particular fixed time scale.
Quickly we might develop concepts of ourselves, our role or our direction rooted in a time frame ( ... a '24/7 mode' as the Americans might say!) which impinges on the truth of who we really are, our relationship with nature and our relationship with the eternal. Perhaps we have experience of people whose sense of 'self' - power, influence, control, sanctity - can even be damaging and destructive within the spaces, and the time, that they are able to operate.
If you so wish there are fields within human psychology that you might like to explore further at some point (see the link below).
http://www.exactlywhatistime.com/psychology-of-time/temporal-illusions/
But for now we might think of it like this .... today (Sunday 19th December 2021) has been a foggy day across the North West of the UK where our AECI HQ is based! Do we, at times, need to lift the fog of illusion and delusion that can linger within when we dwell for too long on secular or on worldly time, on ambition and aspiration ?