Time as concept

When a Maori villager came to visit London for the first time, he was amazed at so things, and he tried to make sense of everything from his perspective. After spending over a month, he returned to his village in New Zealand. Every evening people from his village would come to his house and he would tell them stories about London, and entertain them.


He had figured our most to the things in his own way, there was one thing he could get a handle on it; it was the concept of Time. He noticed almost everyone carried a watch, there were clocks everywhere. Most people would look at the clock and rushed to some where. When he tried to talk to someone or ask a question, people would say, ‘haven’t got time’.

He could not understand why these people did not have the time, what happened their time. Sure, eh did not had any schooling, but he understood that day was divided into 24 hours and every body’s day had the same length. He felt he had abundant time, at least full 24 hours at his disposal, what happened to the 24 hours of those people, who say that they do not have the time.

Let’s look at the time, from where we started with the story of the Maori villager. What is Time and why people do not have enough time.

At the beginning the Time did not exist not even the idea. Obviously the man did not exist to develop the idea; so one moment in time was no different from billion years.

When our planet Earth came into being, in the process of its creation like billions of other planets, the material came together with the motion of spinning of each planet.

Our planet started to spin not only on its axis, but also around the biggest planet in this galaxy the Sun. When man came into being and it tried to make sense of the day and night phenomenon; it divided the full circle of day and night into 24 parts and called each part an ‘Hour’ and so on divided it further in to minutes and seconds.

Then the earth’s annual circle around the sun created different seasons and the year came into existence. Then plants and other life on the planet adapted to the annual cycle of growth and decay. Human life also adapted to this annual cycle. Since each plant, animal and humans has the capacity to last only limited number of these cycles. The human being, as it has developed another concept of counting (the language of book keeping) started to keep tab on number of years, months, days and hours etc.

Man developed the concept of Time only for its own book keeping, as it has created the concept of Money for the same purpose. These elements are important to keep this modern world going; but Time and Money are relevant only on this planet, the earth where we live. Once we leave this planet both these elements Time and Money has absolutely no value.

The modern man got carried away with these two elements using counting as a language for book keeping, and it started to cram each hour/minute with an agenda what it would like to excel in procuring its second beloved element of money. Modern man has come to a point that it is counting each minute in the terms of money.

As a result modern man has not enough time or the money; whereas half a century ago, the same man had enough to time and the money.

When you stand back and look at the universe, everything is in abundance; to be more precise, it is limitless, what Guru Nanak called ‘Anant’.

Since the universe is the material expression - Sargun of the Universal force Nirgun. As Nirgun the Brahman itself is limitless, so is everything else the universe.

Everything in the universe not only limitless, but very delicately balanced too. The space, the material/atoms, the gases, the water, the gravity, the heat and light of the suns in each galaxy is just of the right amount. In scientific terms, the universe is created and held together by four essential elements - the gravity, nuclear force, the strong and the weak Force to exist. If either of these forces was a fraction more or less, the universe could not exist or would have collapsed immediately.

The same abundance and balance percolates to keep everything working on our planet earth, further to human life and even down to every atom.

Then one would ask the question, why there is so much poverty/shortage of food, water, and the shortage of time comes from? The newspapers are full of warnings of shortage of one thing or the other every day.

Man’s greed and poverty

According to the figures available today, every year there are more than enough cereals grown, to feed every one on this planet. So is everything else in this world. There are two reasons for the shortage, one is easier to understand, the ‘unfair distribution’. To understand the second reason we need to go little deeper, that we shall discuss in the part 2 of this article.

Let’s deal with the simple reason; its the human greed, using resources such as food and water as tools of control and dominance over the others – the weaker ones. It happens on personal level, on group level, national level as well as on global level. Here is an example from the book ‘How the other half dies’ by Susan George, who worked for FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of UN) in Rome.

In the late 1960s, Egypt was looking for ways to increase its cereal production. Though Nile delta has been one of the seven centres of early civilisation in the world due to the fertility of the land around Nile River, as was the case of the Punjab, the Babylon and others. Due to fast increases in Egyptian population, Nasser government was anxious to meet the demand locally as was the thinking in many other newly independent countries.

The US government was looking to increase its influence in the Middle East, offered to help. They sent in a team of experts, who tested the soil, the water and climate, produced a report. The conclusions were the local conditions were not the best to produce wheat, but it was a good place to grow tomatoes. The report also offered to send an American company that would set up couple of factories to process tomatoes and export to the US and other countries. It also pointed out that US was producing enough wheat to meet the Egyptian needs.

Trusting Egyptian government of the day accepted the recommendations of the report in 1968 two tomato processing factories were set up, and the local farmers were encouraged to produce tomatoes as cash crop.

The tomato production worked for 3-4 years, the local farmers got used to the process and started to depend upon the cash crop, the company running the two factories brought in new rules – any tomatoes which were one day under-ripe or one day over ripe, would get only half the price. The tomatoes are not a crop that you hold back, store like wheat, until the buyer’s offers the full price. The farmers had no choice but to accept the new regime and get reduced price. By 1972-3 the farmers were getting more or less half price of their produce of that was agreed at the first place.

In the meantime, the US government to create a shortage of wheat in the market place, to raise its price on global market, it subsidised its farmers to either hold back the produce or just to burn the crop, to create shortage. As a result of this policy of the US government, the wheat prices doubled and where as poor Egyptian farmers were getting half the price of its tomato produce. As a result they needed to sell four kilos of tomatoes to by the same amount of wheat that they could with one kilo five years ago.

When Egyptian government objected to this, the company packing the tomatoes, they reasoned that there was over production of the tomatoes in the world and it’s not economical for it to pay more. When Egyptian government put little pressure on the company it decided to close the two factories, and the poor Egyptians were left with no demand its tomatoes and had to pay increased prices for it demand for wheat.

At this very time, in the US, meat producers to hasten the process of put more meat on the bodies of cows and pigs, they were feeding them on corn. The fact is that to gain one extra kilo of beef, they need to feed the cows around 15-17 kilos of corn, and around 7-8 kilos grains to a pig to get extra kilo of ham.

So a meat eater in the US is consuming 15 times more cereals that a vegetarian would do in India. The world average is that meat takes 5-7 times of more resources to produce one meal of meat than a meal of the same calorie value of vegetarian meal.

This is just one example how ‘the other half dies’ as was book title of Susan George’s book.

So it’s not the universe that is unfair, it’s the human greed that is creating the poverty and the wars and most of other sufferings in the world.

Its not a good idea to leave you with this note helplessness; in the next article we shall discuss were this idea of greed of resources and the power came from, and if we change our greed into generosity, the abundance starts to flow into our life naturally.

Avtarjeet Dhanjal