The Unity Of The Appreciative Ego In Time

Existence in spatialized time is spurious existence. A deeper analysis of conscious experience reveals to us what I have called the appreciative side of the self. With our absorption in the external order of things, necessitated by our present situation, it is extremely difficult to catch a glimpse of the appreciative self. In our constant pursuit after external things we weave a kind of veil round the appreciative self which thus becomes completely alien to us. It is only in the moments of profound meditation, when the efficient self is in abeyance, that we sink into our deeper self and reach the inner center of experience. In the life-process of this deeper ego the states  of consciousness melt into each other. The unity of the appreciative ego is like the unity of the germ in which the experiences of its individual ancestors exist, not as a plurality, but as a unity in which every experience permeates the whole. There is no numerical distinctness of states in the totality of the ego, the multiplicity of whose elements is, unlike that of the efficient self wholly qualitative. There is change and movement, but change and movement are indivisible; their elements interpenetrate and are wholly non-serial in character. It appears that the time of the appreciative-self is a single 'now' which the efficient-self, in its traffic with the world of space, pulverizes into a series of 'nows' like pearl beads in a thread. Here is, then, pure duration unadulterated by space. The Qur'an with its characteristic simplicity alludes to the serial and non-serial aspects of duration in the following verses:

'And put thou thy trust in Him that liveth and dieth not, and celebrate His praise Who in six days created the Heavens and the earth, and what is between them, then mounted His Throne; the God of mercy' Furkan, 25:58-59

'All things We have created with an fixed destiny: Our command was but one, swift as the twinkling of an eye.' Kamer, 54:49-50

If we look at the movement embodied in creation from the outside, that is to say, if we apprehend it intellectually, it is a process lasting throug thousands of years; for one Divine day, in the terminology of the Qur'an, as of the Old Testament, is equal to one thousand years. From another point of view, the process of creation, lasting through thousands of years, is a single indivisble act, 'swift as the twinkling of an eye.' It is, however impossible to express this inner experience of pure duration in words, for language is shaped on the serial time of our daily efficient self. Perhaps an illustration will further elucidate the point. According to physical science, the cause of your sensation of red is the rapidity of wave motion the frequency of which is 400 billions per second. ıf you could observe this tremendous frequency from outside, and count it at the rate of 2.000 per second, which is supposed to be the limit of the perceptibility of light, it will take you more than six thousand years to finish the enumaration. Yet in the single momentary mental act of perception you hold together a frequency of wave motion which is practically incalculable. That is how the mental act transforms succession into duration. The appreciative self, then, is more or less corrective of the efficient self, inasmuch as it synthesizes all the 'heres' and 'nows' - the small changes of space and time, indispensable to the efficient self - into the coherent wholeness of personality.
Pure time, then as revealed by a deeper analysis of our conscious experience, is not a string of seperate, reversible instants; it is an organic whole in which the past is not left behind, but is moving along with, and operating in, the present. And the future is given to it not as lying before, yet to be traversed; it is given only in the sense that it is present in its nature as an open possibility. It is time regardesd as an organic whole that the Qur'an describes as Taqdir or the destiny - a word which has been so much misunderstood both in and outside the world of Islam. Destiny is time regarded as prior to the disclosure of its possibilities. It is time freed from the net of causal sequence - the diagrammatic character which the logical understanding imposes on it. In one word, it is time as felt and not as thought and calculated......