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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

What is Time, Eternity, and Timelessness?

An Exploration of Temporal Experience
and Metaphysical Mystery

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ultimate Truth does not deal with a particular being or a group of beings; it deals with Being itself, with a capital B—the Ground of All Being, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal, and a groundless Ground that underlies every relative truth in existence but is not itself a relative truth and thus is not detectable by ordinary, external science but only by an interior, meditative science. — Ken Wilber[1]

Time, eternity, and timelessness are among the most enigmatic concepts in human thought. They form the philosophical scaffolding beneath our understanding of existence, finitude, and transcendence. While time structures the rhythm of our everyday lives, eternity gestures toward the infinite, and timelessness suggests an existence beyond duration altogether. In this essay, we will explore these three concepts—not just as abstract notions but as windows into how we interpret reality itself.

I. Time: The Structure of Becoming

Time is the most immediate and yet elusive feature of our experience. We move through it, but we cannot touch or see it. As St. Augustine famously remarked, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.”

Physical Time.

In physics, time is a dimension like space, often treated mathematically in equations of motion. Newtonian physics regarded time as absolute—ticking uniformly everywhere, independent of matter or energy. But with Einstein's theory of relativity, time became relative to the observer, affected by motion and gravity. There is no universal “now”; simultaneity becomes a matter of perspective. This challenges our intuitive, linear view of time as a universal flow from past to future.

Biological and Psychological Time.

We don't experience time the way clocks measure it. Human beings feel time stretch and contract—waiting in boredom, it crawls; immersed in creativity, it vanishes. Our sense of past, present, and future is central to consciousness. Time is not merely a container in which events unfold—it is deeply tied to memory and anticipation, making it a function of the mind as much as of physics.

Philosophical Time.

Philosophers have long debated whether time is real or an illusion. For presentists, only the present is real; the past is gone, the future yet to be. For eternalists, all moments—past, present, and future—are equally real in a block universe. The debate touches on free will, determinism, and the nature of change. In this light, time becomes a battleground for different worldviews.

II. Eternity: Infinity in Time or Beyond It?

Eternity is often thought of as infinite time—time stretched out indefinitely. But more rigorously, especially in theological and metaphysical traditions, it means something much more radical: not infinite time, but timeless existence.

Linear Eternity.

In popular imagination and some religious contexts, eternity is often pictured as "forever"—an unending duration. This idea appears in many afterlife concepts where souls endure for all future time. But this conception raises the problem of tedium: an infinite sequence of events is still bound by change and becoming.

Timeless Eternity.

In contrast, classical theism—especially in thinkers like Boethius and Aquinas—defines eternity as the "simultaneous and complete possession of endless life." God is not in time, moving from moment to moment, but entirely outside of time, beholding all of history in an eternal "now." Eternity in this sense is not duration without end, but a state without before or after.

Philosophical Challenges.

Can such timeless eternity be coherent? If something is entirely changeless and outside time, how can it interact with temporal beings or create the world at a specific moment? Some philosophers, like process theologians, reject timeless eternity in favor of a God who evolves with time. Others defend timelessness as necessary for perfect knowledge and unchanging being.

III. Timelessness: The Absence of Sequence

Timelessness is not simply a negation of time, but a radically different mode of existence—often associated with mystical experience, mathematical truth, or the “ground” of being.

Mystical Timelessness.

Mystics across traditions often speak of a state in which time dissolves. In deep meditation, near-death experiences, or altered states of consciousness, the self can feel suspended in a spaceless and timeless reality. Past and future lose meaning; there is only an eternal present. This sense of timelessness is often interpreted by spiritual thinkers as a glimpse into an ultimate reality beyond the flux of time.

Ken Wilber, for instance, sees this as evidence of the “Ground of Being”—a metaphysical substrate that transcends time and gives rise to all phenomena.[1] But such interpretations are controversial. Critics argue that these experiences, while profound, do not necessarily point to a metaphysical reality. Rather, they may be better explained in terms of neurological processes—especially changes in the brain's default mode network and altered activity in areas responsible for time perception. In states of deep meditation, for example, the brain's tracking of sequential events can slow down or collapse altogether, leading to the powerful feeling of timelessness.

To leap from subjective experience to ontological claims about the nature of reality is, at best, a category error. While mystical states may offer transformative psychological insight, they are not inherently more reliable than waking perception when it comes to describing the external world. Thus, the burden of proof lies on those who would use such experiences to affirm the existence of an atemporal Ground of Being.

Mathematical and Logical Timelessness.

Mathematical truths—like 2 + 2 = 4—are also often said to be timeless. They do not change or decay. Logical structures and abstract relations seem to stand outside of time, which has led some to argue for a realm of timeless forms à la Plato. However, whether this means they exist in some metaphysical “beyond” or simply represent the invariance of certain conceptual frameworks is an open question.

Naturalistic Accounts.

A naturalist might argue that all appearances of timelessness—whether mystical or mathematical—are rooted in the brain's abstracting capacity and its ability to detach from immediate sensory input. Timelessness may thus be an interpretive artifact of consciousness rather than a property of ultimate reality.

IV. Three Modes of Reality or One Spectrum?

Are time, eternity, and timelessness separate ontological categories—or aspects of a single continuum?

One approach is to see them as nested perspectives:

• Time governs the empirical world—change, causality, entropy.
• Eternity is a metaphysical concept that frames the temporal world within an overarching unity.
• Timelessness is the deep ground or background—unmanifest, beyond dualities, untouched by becoming.

This is the view of many mystical traditions, such as Advaita Vedanta, which speaks of Brahman as beyond time, space, and causation, yet immanent in all forms. In this view, time is a projection or limitation of timeless being.

Alternatively, from a secular or scientific stance, time is primary, and concepts like eternity or timelessness are poetic or metaphorical constructs with no empirical basis. Here, eternity becomes shorthand for very long durations, and timelessness may reflect psychological anomalies rather than ontological truths.

V. Conclusion: Living Between Time and Timelessness

We live in time: we age, remember, plan, and regret. But we also long for eternity—not necessarily for endless time, but for a moment of wholeness, presence, and transcendence. The paradox of human life is that we are finite creatures who dream of the infinite. Whether eternity or timelessness truly exists outside of our imagination or inner experience remains uncertain—but the very fact that we conceive them speaks to our restless search for something beyond the fleeting now.

Perhaps, in the end, the meaning of time is found not in escaping it, but in understanding our place within it—aware of its limits, yet open to its mystery.

NOTES

[1] Ken Wilber, Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth and Delight, Shambhala, 2024, p. 20.