Mystical Experience of Eternity as a Limit of Time Experience
Authors:   Saint-Petersburg State University, Russian Federation, Paribok Andrew , Pskhu Ruzana ,   Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Moscow
Published: January 2021

This article aims to clarify two traditions of understanding time, namely the rationalistic, which includes the scientific (in the West, going back to the ‘Physics’ of Aristotle) and philosophical (going back in the West to Augustine), and mystical (the most methodically sustained is the Yogic tradition of Classical India and Sufism). The article contains several sections: Introduction raises the problem of time and sets the subject boundaries. The main part is comprised of the following sections: 1. Time as found in objects: a brief summary of the rational scientific and quasi scientific trend of time interpretation from Aristotle’s Physics to Reichenbach’s “Philosophy of Time and Space”. The physical one-sidedness of the consideration of time is completely immersed in the object domain. 2. Time as associated with the ontological subject: essential points of purely philosophical understanding of time beginning with St. Augustine via Kant up to Heidegger. This philosophical approach is no less one-sided, and comprehends time almost exclusively as a subjective phenomenon (memory, contemplation, desire, one’s own nature etc.) Both trends lack any discrimination between the initial indication of the phenomenon of time (the answer to the question ‘what is time as a phenomenon?’) and the interpretation of the meaning of this phenomenon (the answer to the question ‘how to understand the phenomenon of time?’). 3. Interpretations of the time phenomenon are implicitly based on the everyday mode of awareness. The problem of time is one of the most difficult problems to comprehend. The main thesis of the article is that the pra-phenomenon of time is revealed to consciousness from the necessarily occurring switching and comparison between two processes: orientation in the external world and attention to cogitation, i.e., between the external and internal. This duality coincides with the duality that is realized in the elementary unit of rational thought - judgment, the subject of which is recognized as belonging to the external world, and the predicate – to the internal. Separately, it is planned to consider the understanding of time in the mystical tradition. We will focus on two ways of understanding time - the rationalistic (philosophical), represented by the teachings of Kant, and the mystical, represented by the Sufis and Yogis (with an indication of the fundamental difference between them). Note that these two methods are not opposed by us, although in a sense they exclude each other. 4. Lapse of time and the notion of a mode of awareness. The ordinary mode of awareness called vikṣipta ‘dispersed’ in Yoga philosophy is characterized by a fundamental dualism of inner and outer worlds’ events. Both are processes and the non predicative comparison of their pace constitutes the ordinary experience of the lapse of time. This mode is the most habitual one and the very mode within which it is possible to speak and compose texts, however it is not unique. There exist other possibilities. 5. One-pointed awareness mode and the atemporal process. Voluntarily achieved one-pointedness has no distinction between the outer and inner world and is therefore ‘out of’ or ‘above’ time. It is well known in mystical literature (exemplified by the text by eminent Sufi author, Niffari). In European rational philosophy this position was explained by Hegel, but not in his ‘Philosophy of Nature”, usually associated with the concept of time, it was in the ‘Science of Logic’ (in the timeless unfolding of absolute knowledge). The Conclusion presents a summary. The crucial point which enables a thinker to overcome the traditional scientific and philosophical one-sidedness of the conceptualization of time is the notion of a mode of awareness and comprehension of the fundamental duality of outer world processes and cogitations’ succession. A non-ordinary awareness mode is methodologically elaborated in Yoga philosophy, witnessed in mystical Sufi texts, and finally, grasped in Hegel’s concept of a speculative proposition.