Is our time ours?

äyuñaùkñaëaeko ‘pinalabhyasvarëa-koöibhiù
nacennirarthakaànétiùkäcahänistato ‘dhikä

Even one moment of life spent cannot be regained for millions of gold coins. Therefore, what greater loss is there than time spent uselessly?

Most of us are convinced that we are the controllers and enjoyers of the world. We believe that we are the rightful owners of our bodies and senses, and that means, we assume, that we are in control of our lives; we also extend a considerable effort to control the lives of the people around us although, nominally we give them the status of independent enjoyers as well.

Perhaps the most important claim we lay is on time because everything enjoyable in our lives happens in time. We accept as an axiom that we are the lawful proprietors of all of our hours, days and years to live. As such, we are owners of everything that exists. According to some, this claim became truly substantial since the moment people invented the clock. As Neil Postman remarks in his book “Amusing ourselves to death”:

In Mumford’s* great book “Technics and Civilization”, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In theprocess, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, forin a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature issuperseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of theclock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of humanevents. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, theinexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with theweakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophersof the Enlightenmentthat is to’ say, the clock introduced anew form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears tohave been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included anotherCommandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.

Thus, according to Mumford, the clock is the most important archetype of all other machines. It serves to change the status of time from a supreme and independent representative of God to another commodity meant for our enjoyment.

The trouble with the assumption that we own “our” time is brilliantly exposed by C.S. Lewis in his famous “Screwtape Letters”. Here the senior devil instructs his pupil in the science of temptation as follows:

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-a-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption “My time is my own”. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon his chattels…When I speak of preserving this assumption in his mind, therefore, the last thing I mean you to do is to furnish him with arguments in its defense. There aren’t any. Your task is purely negative. Don’t let his thoughts come anywhere near it. Wrap a darkness about it, and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they “own” their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love’s sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counselors, should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.

We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion…And all the time the joke is that the word “Mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.

Joke it might very well be from the perspective of a spiritually enlightened person; still, from the point of view of an ordinary man all these claims of me and mine (in Sanskrit this translates as “aham mameti”, the double delusion that I am this material body and that everything connected with my body is mine) are the only plausible reality. Hence the materialistic idea of a wholesome, good quality life is to be able to exercise full control and to enjoy all the facilities that the Universe can offer for as long as possible. It is something like having a permanent party where you are the party maker and all others play a role according to your whims. Useless life on other hand is the life without sufficient amusement, spend in performance of boring duties and obligations.

The truth however is that the selfish pursuit of pleasures does not bring real happiness. This is expressed by the saintly Vedic King Maharaja Prahlada:

In this material world, every materialist desires to achieve happiness and diminish his distress, and therefore he acts accordingly. Actually, however, one is happy as long as one does not endeavor for happiness; as soon as one begins his activities for happiness, his conditions of distress begin.

It seems that, for this reason, the happiness and satisfaction are rare commodities in the contemporary world and especially in the industrialized countries. As pointed out by Devamrita Svami in his book “Searching for Vedic India”:

More than a few sociologists and psychologists – all with no solution – have warned that human core of modern society has thoroughly rusted, beset by inner emptiness, existential uncertainty and cosmic dislocation. For instance, already in 1999 Time magazine reported that the USA had undergone a 300 percent increase in childhood depression since the 1950s. More than three times as many American children now suffer from mental and behavioral disorders as compared to only twenty years ago. 47 percent of the college students in USA suffer from at least one mental disorder which requires professional help.

No one will deny that the particular type of technology pioneered in the West since the Renaissance is incomparable in the memory of humanity. Nevertheless, an essential question hags us: Is this pursuit of production and consumption the only criterion for an advanced civilization? Have we actually witnessed human progress or only our perverted dream of it – a mirage peculiar to our time and peoples?

The Vedic concept for a good live is not opposed to having fun and being happy, it just finds happiness in different type of activities. Or even more accurate, in a different type of consciousness. True happiness comes naturally as a by-product of performing properly our duties. We don’t have to endeavor separately for it. The Vedic definition of happy life is to perform our duties to the best of our abilities and to give the result, or at least part of it, to someone else. Ideally, this someone else is God and the saintly persons. But even if the result of our work does not go directly for the service of God it will still bring more happiness if it is given in charity instead of being selfishly enjoyed.

Mumford’s* – Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic.