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It was wonderful last week to spend time thinking together about deep time. And to see pictures which made deep time so immediate and palpable! It was very humbling.

I didn’t know many of the scientific facts which Arlo presented, and it was exciting to see how miniscule human life is in the context of the vastness of the universe. But even though I didn’t know the scientific facts, what I was feeling when I was contemplating deep time seemed familiar to me. It was a familiar feeling of seeing myself as not the center of the universe—of seeing that though I affect the universe and the universe affects me, the latter is much greater than the former, and that I am for the most part like a leaf riding the waves in an ocean. In some contexts this sense of being pushed around can seem oppresive and one wants to take control of one’s life and be assertive. But in some other contexts (what maybe we can call deep contexts), seeing oneself against the background of the vastness of the universe is actually uplifting, empowering and even soothing. It is the kind of feeling which makes one laugh at the false presumption of one’s importance and grandeur implicit in being vain or even feeling stressed, and which makes one blissful at the thought of being just the smallest fraction of the infinite.

These thoughts make me think of the relation between Arlo’s presentation and our discussion in the prior meeting about heaven and reason. At some points it seemed to me that Arlo was saying that until the rise of geology in the last couple of centuries, human beings didn’t have the concept of deep time, and that people thought of the world as only being a few thousand years old. I am not sure if this is true. Some very ancient religions have explicitely endorsed the idea of the world being billions of years old; Hinduism is a case in point. Also, even if someone a thousand years ago thought that the earth was only a few thousand years old, that doesn’t mean that she didn’t have the concept of deep time. This is because people in the distant past didn’t identify the earth’s time line or even that of the physical universe with the time line of the universe as a whole. For them there was a distinction between the sacred and the profane, to use Mircea Eliade’s terms. That is, a distinction between time which we can fathom in our everyday life, and a time which is beyond time, which is so vast and so expansive that we cannot possibly comprehend it. This is the time which applies to God or gods.

I would say therefore that the distinction between deep time and the ordinary time of our everyday experiences is not a recent discovery. The distinction is implicit even in a primordial, religious way of thinking of the world. I would say that this distinction between deep time and everyday time is actually implicit in the very structure of human consciousness. This leads to a thought which I wasn’t expecting and which I have enjoyed contemplating since our meeting. Namely, the kind of transcendence one can experience in spirituality of embracing sacred time is not different from the kind of transcendence one can experience through a scientific analysis of the world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all if one is religious, scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic or anything else, as long as one is embracing deep time in whatever ways one is leading one’s life.