It seems so obviously true that there are only two sorts of time. When I fall into a daydream and suddenly reawaken with a renewed start of conscious reorientation that I am sitting on a kitchen chair and staring out of a window, I look at the clock and that tells me I have been absent from this world for possibly five minutes. So-called objective reality measures me in my world.
Where was ‘I’ during that objective time? When am ‘I’ now? When I am fully absorbed in an activity such as gardening with my hands in the soil I am not where I daydream, because the activity I am mindfully absorbed in is the absence of the subjective me. This grubber-out of bramble roots is not ‘me’ isolated in some mental cocoon and tapping on the world, “Knock, knock, please let me in so I can get my fingers around your muddy sinews and pull hard.” No. My perspiration is part of the world’s dynamics. I too am objectively present and true in the qualities of my relationships. I am part of the ecology for you to daydream among.
The old billiards science is dissolving
So why is it that philosophers and scientists alike from their different perspectives on life are unable to come up with a good explanation of what time fully is other than simply dismissing subjectivity, and therefore humanity, as a living, planning, self-reflecting, active feature of our shared ecology? I believe it is because philosophers and scientists are mostly individualistic in their thoughts, not systemic, or social constructivist. Apparently space-time is curved – unlike a billiards table, which is flat and a great time-waster. The vertical effects of gravity locally in time, such as accidentally dropping the billiards cue after seeing a difficult ball drop into a pocket, act on a different scale to the geometry of outer space. Pulling those two concepts together so that they interact is a systemic problem, and for scientists who dare to think about it, a subjective nightmare.

These two scales do not fit together in scientists’ subjective thought, largely because the ‘good old billiard ball’ model of particle-matter that the old science came up with is dissolving into quantum field vibrational transactions, which summate within wholeness to make the innards of a billiard ball in a way that is not primarily geometric. It is systemic, dynamic, organic even, probabilistic. Like the earth’s core, at a profound level deeper than atoms, billiard balls are seething with movement within, which gives them their bounce, but thankfully not any volcanoes to mess up the baize. Astrophysicists know subjectively and objectively that time moves slower where gravity is stronger – so you age slightly faster up in the Himalayan heights than down on the coast by a few nanoseconds every year – but nobody seems to know what gravity or time is. Objective time is fluid, it seems, just like subjective time, because it depends on where the observer is relative to the greatest local mass – a planet, or a billiard ball? That sounds relational to me… systemic and dynamically flexible. Some billiards games seem to go on interminably.
Most billiard balls move in one direction only, despite their spinning, which gives rise to the idea of an arrow of time being linear and causal. But most of the physics formulae about energy transfer in matter work symmetrically in either direction. Gravity is also like that. The conclusion is, which most scientists agree, that the word ‘particle’ is a subjective label for a complex internal process, probably vibrational and so-to-speak spinning. (Now it is time for the general public to agree that that is true, and to work out its subjective implications conversationally.) The linear arrow of time emerges because in a dynamic system the patterning of spins and movements changes over time in ways that becomes irreversible to a former complex patterned state. Therefore, ditch the billiard ball view of ‘particles’; and ditch the materialism as a worldview that gets entangled with its use!
An evolution into process thinking, timing, and organic science
The time has come to start thinking ‘process’ everywhere. Matter is beginning to loosen up into stabilised vibrational patterns. These, of course, can flow and merge or split probabilistically like liquid mercury under the right circumstances; like our subjective thoughts and feelings. Now informational processing and timing becomes more important than matter, as a way to make sense of life. Matter emerges out of inter-relating, informationally intelligent, systemic processes…

Time, in this view, is the wholeness of relationally communicating movement. We participate in this movement. We can free wilfully contribute to its stabilisation, or disrupt its harmonies if we so choose, or perhaps if we are unaware of its harmonies in our inner hearts. Life is not an accident of separate material parts bouncing around, like lots of billiard cues dropped all at the same time in a clatter and getting in amongst our feet… Life is the peaceful, muffled, dimly lit and highlighted baize of the table top where the game, and its background dance of interactions, rolls on with harmonious rhythms and occasional conversations. Timing is all. No rush. Turn-taking in proportional balance, like the Golden Ratio shaping nature’s steady growth everywhere, is the rule of life.
Three analytic perspectives; three time types add up to timing
In my book Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks that Hide Reality (Buy Here) I display 3D-printed models of a triune process that could represent wholeness (the quantum field that curves movement in space) in unending synergic movement. It extends into an interweaving triple helix model of informational exchange between subsystems. These subsystems diversify spontaneously within wholeness, and therefore communicate with each other. People are subsystems of wholeness who get into various inner states that affect their communications, as all living creatures are. The model may show the simultaneous birth of matter and consciousness within an intelligent, loving and grieving wholeness, holding all change together in its conversational unity of organic growth.
We participate even now in this conversational wholeness. We intuit its movements at heart and in our imaginal life if we give time enough to become sensitive to the unconditional love that can transform us from within. The thoughts of our heart steer our contributions in the bigger whole.
We also have the brain power to take a mental step back from this conversational engagement in life. Transactionally, this empowers us to analyse the processes we had formerly been participating in, and therefore to learn something new about it. The I-thou of participation converts then into I-it, however, as Martin Buber described. This triune process model describes three different types of resulting I-it, and three different ways to understand time within the partially incompatible worldviews that shape up like a photo shoot when analyses are pushed to their smiling extremes: materialism, informationism (ordering any sort of chaos), and vitalism (pre-material life force views). Time takes on a different hue in each of these…
- Materialism: time is a linear sequence of cause-effects, the arrow of time moving in one direction only, past-present-future. This sort of time can be measured because one line can be compared with another for ‘length’. This is the limited assumption of scientific materialism. All else unmeasurable is deemed to be ‘subjective time’.
- Informationism: time is a timeframe with a beginning, middle and end in which a certain amount of change from one state to another must happen. It is ‘story time’, a narrative with comparative meaning within its own timeframe, or perhaps by comparing one measurable timeframe with another. Within that timeframe, however, information can flow in any transitioning pattern, not necessarily starting at ‘the beginning of the story’. This cannot be ‘measured’ by comparison against anything else, so it is full instead of subjective meaningful connections for the people telling and hearing these stories of life. Timeframes are the context for consciousness, which is itself a comparative process by internal systemic feedback reflection. This is however a different type of ‘comparison’ to external measurement against a scientific standard. Informationism is thus halfway between an objective and a subjective view of time, both require comparisons of some sort.
- Vitalism: time is the eternal now. A life force courses through space and our embodiment, with which our eternal soul needs to harmonise in order to purify and progress along its journey. Eternity is the wholeness in which the soul will find rest. In this worldview, eternity is not the endless string of ‘present moments’ that a materialist imagines. The now is an ever-present doorway to step into that eternity, like a view to the distant horizon of our local landscape. This is ‘African time’, where ‘things’ come into their time for their duration, and collective relationship quality is all important – ubuntu. In this sense, the eternal now is not even the subjective time decried by scientific materialism as valueless. The eternal now is simply unmeasurable existence. That is because my now cannot be meaningfully compared with anyone else’s, other than by an apparent obedience and submission to social norms of behaviour.
The Zen paradox of the archer, and timing
Time sequence (linear time, the arrow of time), time framing, and the eternal now… All three are equally logical and true ways of seeing and living life as far as they go, but each perspective on its own cannot describe the whole truth of a lived life. They all derive from slight shifts of the same triune process base that shapes both our thinking and our actions in the world. They each stand on a different pair of the triune inputs to the triple helices of wholeness, and take a perspective from there on the third. Thus they construct an analytic perspective on conversational life, creating a dualism of I-it.
When fully re-integrated into a conversational engagement in ecological life, like pulling up resistant bramble roots, these three perspectives on time become the intuitively proportioned timing of a rhythmic conversational exchange. Balanced life becomes like a musical theme being transferred between different participants in an orchestra, or in the gaming of a billiards room, or in the beautifying of a garden.

Timing can be pictured as the Zen paradox of the archer. Archer, bow, and arrow are all one whole diversified embodiment. The archer is tensioned because there is a time-framed story behind this scene giving meaning to the aim and balance being sought. This opens the possibility of a free will choice when NOW fulfils the purpose of that doorway into the eternity that holds this soul’s story in the physical world. The arrow released is then on its linear path, no going back. But a second arrow may be chosen if the story seems unfulfilled, or feels unbalanced…
Without the timeframed story, and the eternity that gives a higher purpose to it, the linear path of the arrow is meaningless. The context of meaningful connection is the intelligent love of wholeness in which we all move, but the stories of which tell of love’s joy and grief modes. They could move our inner hearts to see through matter, to the conversational life we all share before words in its relational depths.