It was thinking about Time that probably began to turn my thoughts towards 'spiritual' matters in a fairly serious way - so that after about a decade of thrashing-around I became a Christian.
For example; I encountered a book called Ceremonial Time, and then began reading a lot of anthropology of hunter-gatherers, and how they regarded Time.
And began reading A Question of Time by Verlyn Flieger - which is about Tolkien, and got me onto the Notion Club Papers, also books by JW Dunne, JB Priestly - and indeed the neo-Platonism of Boethius.
I still continue to think about Time, and have more recently come to regard Time as inseparable from Being - in that Time is included in concepts such as life, consciousness and purpose - which are necessary aspects of Being.
Even more specifically; I have come to regard Time - considered conceptually, and all actual possible Time - as necessarily intrinsic to consciousness; because consciousness is the cause of all possible meaning, and without consciousness is meaningless, unknowable chaos.
People often assert that Time is subjective - hence, they imply, not necessary not-really-real - because it is a product of Consciousness.
They are implicitly assuming that only things which are independent of consciousness are really-real. The assumption is that only those things that exist when there is no consciousness to apprehend them are truly objective.
This is, indeed, the standard assumption of science - as well as most other functional systems of modern discourse.
It is also the assumption of much Christian theology; which posits that God exists prior-to and outside-of Time - that God is not affected by Time - that God is always the same, hence Time has no meaning for God.
Such ideas crop-up in many attempts to explain how God can be omniscient without impinging on human freedom of agency - because God lives outside of Time, while men live in Time (this is the explanation in Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy - and CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, where it is also used to 'explain' how God can listen to millions of simultaneous prayers).
All of these are based upon what I would regard as Objective Models of Time which separate Time from Consciousness, and describe Objective Time without any reference to any Consciousness or subjectivity.
Thus - a separation is assumed between subjective Time occurring in Consciousness; and a putative Objective Time whose properties are modelled without reference to any Consciousness, and may therefore be utterly different from experienced-time.
Yet, I have come to believe that - because God is alive, conscious, with purpose - Of Course God exists in Time, as do all Beings.
What, then, sets bounds to Time? What is possible, and what is not possible?
I think the answer lies in what we can experience - and Not what we can believe.
Experiencing is participative - we are involved in it.
We may believe that No Time, or simultaneity of past-present-future is possible; but we cannot Consciously-experience no-Time - because all Conscious experience involves change, and takes place in time.
If we are conscious, then there is Time, as intrinsic to being-conscious.
(If there were no Time, there could not be consciousness.)
We can experience the past, by observing it; and that past can change us from-now-on as we learn from that experience. But we cannot experience changing the past, because we cannot stand-outside of Time - ourselves unchanged while operating upon events.
When we experience the past, we are not 'travelling' to another Time, but are participating in the past as it continues in the present.
But we cannot know the future - because it has not happened. The future is not a part of the present, therefore we cannot experience it.
We cannot experience what has not happened; and the future has not happened.
In sum - I regard Time as objective - which is why there are things that cannot be done, no matter what we may believe.
But Time is also necessarily subjective, because it requires a Being, with consciousness. (And all beings are conscious - to some degree, in one way or another).
In other words - and in general - all objectivity is subjective in origin: including Time.
