We perceive time by virtue of the changing of our thoughts. It is common that after a panic situation, a person will report that everything seemed to have happened in slow motion. What occurs in such situations is that the person’s mind drops all concerns of distractions normally keeping the mind in semi-chaos and focuses on the imminent event. In such a state, the few thoughts required to analysis the person’s situation occur very much more quickly as every detail is assessed. Later, the person can’t recall as much time occurring between their thoughts and thus are left with the sense that reality slowed down.
Kung Fu masters practice removing distractions so as to fully and quickly assess a situation before acting. They are the opposite of what you see people doing online. They notably can move very quickly and precisely seeming to be able to counter objectionable events before there is any evidence that the event is going to occur. This is often expressed in their famous personal combat techniques. They simplify their thoughts through an understanding of harmony which allows for a mere few thoughts to fully express all that is to happen and thus yields very quick analysis. Interestingly, they learn this by first slowing themselves down.
If all of reality were to magically come to a stop, frozen in place, there would be no changing and thus no measure of it. One could not ask of how long reality has stopped. If reality were at this moment stopping and starting again, there would be no means for being aware of it as nothing would be affected because to have affect, change must occur and thus time.
But the question becomes, “If all of reality stopped, how could it ever start up again?” It couldn’t. One might suggest that God could start it up again, but that is not really valid because God is presumed to be a part of reality (unless you believe God to be not real) and the condition was that ALL of reality stopped, that would include God. Who could kick-start God? Or more importantly, how could they do it without changing anything, doing – an action, since they would also be stopped?
The general notion is that God is an entity who thinks and thus has a flow of thought yielding changes of mind and this was occurring before the universe was created. But if God was thinking, something was changing and thus time already existed even if the physical universe didn’t. Of course, it has been said many times by many people that God does not change. Generally that is taken to mean that God does not go back on His promises. But to some people, it is understood that God is not an entity who “thinks”, but rather that God is an immutable force and fully compensating every minute effect throughout all of reality, physical or not. Thus God is all-knowing and all-powerful in that nothing can occur without God’s attention and nothing can prevent God’s compensation. With this kind of understanding, God becomes the cause of changing, the cause of time and the cause of all reality being what it is. But such and understanding does not have God sitting around for any length of time before acting and any action constitutes time.
So we are left with the idea that the cause of time, the changing, whether that be God or not, could not have itself changed. As it is said, God is “outside of time”, meaning that God doesn’t change as time would require, but is a constant and eternal force, a Father, having no time associated. But if such an entity is going to cause time, cause changing, it could take no time in doing so else time would already exist. This leaves us with the conclusion that whatever began the changing, the time, has always been.
A cause is something necessarily associated with an effect. We often say that something is a cause when we really only mean that it is a causal factor, one of several combined concerns that together lead to the effect. We say that smoking causes cancer, yet we have smokers who never get cancer and cancer patients who were never near smoke. Smoking can be a contributor, but cannot really be the cause. And thus when we talk of the cause of time, we are not talking about merely a contributing factor, but the actual one-to-one instigator. When the cause is present, the event is necessarily present else the proposed cause wasn’t really the cause, but merely a significant contributor. The “cause of time” is referring to “ALL necessary for time to occur” and thus time will occur. And thus when the cause of time is present, time is immediately present.
This leaves us with the notion that the cause of time, God or not, could not have existed without time immediately occurring. The cause of time could not wait for something to come about before it caused time, it would start time immediately else not be the cause of time. So if time exists and is caused, then it has existed ever since its cause has existed and that cause could not ever have changed before causing time. This means that the cause of time, and thus time itself could have had no beginning.
