This is not an attempt to mix science and magic. I have to admit my knowledge of scientific ideas connected to time are very limited. I tried reading Stephen Hawking once and was only able to finish it when I saw it as a magical book rather than a scientific text. As a result I would have missed a lot of what he was really trying to say.
The magical tradition since the Neo-Platonists has started with the idea of a No-Thing – a divine being which is entirely without explanation and can only be defined by what it is not. Such a being was seen as infinite and totally above time (or duality). That is all very well, but there is no way for such a being to create. The children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth pointed out that no one liked to live in infinity because it was a place where it was difficult to make ends meet.
The Kabbalah talks about a focusing of the limitless into a single point where it could create image of itself. This concentration was infinitely dense and was the basis of matter. Obviously, this is not a perfect image, because it too would be infinite and unknowable. Even in this state of concentration (the Kabbalists call it Kether) we have no rules and no way of measuring anything. Then the beginning of everything began with an explosion and then a limitation.
This limitation was Time and the two Gods connected with it were Chronos and Rhea and from that duality was born Zeus – who created the universe. In other words once the reign of Chronos was established, Creation could begin. Time provides a frame in which the One Thing can study itself.
Ancient Civilisations saw Time as something inevitable. Our universe was as regular as the ticking of the clock. In fact, when there were attempts to reform the calendars when they had slipped out of cinque with the seasons, people rioted because they felt such a move limited their lives by a few months.
However, there were hints that not everyone thought this. Thoth who was the Egyptian god of Time was also a god of Magic, so the idea was that Time could be as flexible.
Then in modern times, we realised that Time was entirely relative to the person doing the timing. Time speeds up or slows down depending on the location or focus of the timer. Christmas dinner with the in laws is always longer than an evening out with your friends. With your friends you are not focused on the events around you, you are listening to stories, chatting, and time flies. Christmas dinner drags because you are bored and are focusing on the minutiae of your surroundings (rather than listening to your Aunt’s long descriptions of her spleen operation while your nephew runs around breaking things).
Scientifically (I guess) this means that Time is a little like gravity and it slows around denser physical or mental states.
When you meditation on a “higher spiritual” object time should pass slower (if measured by an outsider), whereas if you head to the underworld, time will pass faster. A serious of experiments I did with a group a few years ago tried to prove this. Each person was given a pathworking and were asked how long they were out. Pathworkings which involved gods and angels were always seen as being only a few minutes long, while those to the underworld were thought to be much longer. The problem is that much depended on the meditation experience of the people in the test and their ability to get into that state.
The British occultist Marian Green did a good test for this. She got a group together and told them to get into a meditative state and then stand up when they felt five minutes had past. The less experienced came out of it after a couple of minutes. I got into the state and started to count one-iggly oggly, 2-iggly olgly etc. After I had counted to 300, I stood up. I had been out for 15 minutes. Someone had to wake Elliot James up after half an hour because we wanted to get lunch (he is a water sign poor thing).
What this suggested to me at the time was that although we see things in linear time actually this is part of Chronos’s illusion. The closer we get to a state of unity the less control has over us. What this practically means is that the infinite One Thing sees everything happening at once. All of Time, Past, Present and Future is happening at the same time.
Once you realise that Chronos’ illusion is just to help you piece together reality and understand it not actually “real” it answers many questions about issues like Re-incarnation (no), heaven and hell (no) , Divine punishment, (no), Past life experiences (no it is happening at the same time), Destiny etc.
I don’t think that everything happening at once neccessarily rules out re-incarnation, as a single spark might have several incarnations at the same time – or to put it another way, several bodies, astral bodies and consciousnesses. On a larger scale, the Infinate One knows itself to be trillions of people (etc.), and creation spirals on in a repeating pattern then it seems as if naturally the Divine Sparks or whatever we want to call the point where each of us begins, would do likewise. (obviously using language to desribe something far beyond the symbolic code that is language is quite limiting and can only approximate an idea, but I hope you understand what I am getting at.