The Soul's Internal Clock
An Interview with Jacob Needleman
By Kristen Fairchild

Kristen Fairchild: Let's start with the big question. Why does there never seem to be enough time nowadays?

Jacob Needleman: We have become a time-poor society. That's the new poverty. And nobody - very, very few people - could say they have enough time in their lives. Not so much in terms of how long they're going to live, but in terms of just time as it passes in the course of a day. Everybody feels squeezed, and pressed, and tense - right?

Yes.

And it's such a common problem for young people, children, grownups, adults, everybody... almost everybody is just driven up the wall about time. Now, something has happened here and it's particularly ironic, although it's probably partly the cause, that we have all these inventions that have been designed to save us time, right? And the result is we have no more time. What has happened? Where has the time gone - what is starting to chew up our time so much? There are so many things to do, we're getting so many things that we want, we're fixing up so many things, improving so many things, that the main thing is the experience of life is becoming narrower and narrower. So the problem of the squeezing of time, I think, is partly the problem that we are somehow, for some reason, experiencing life with a smaller and smaller part of ourselves-- with a part of ourselves that is constantly having to race, to take care of things, to fix things, to pay attention. Our quality of experience is diminishing. I think there is some relation there to what's happening with time.

Is it erroneous for human beings to think of time as something we can manage or even hold?

Well, there is a kind of ordinary sense of managing time, which makes some sense. I mean, one doesn't want to "waste" time, one doesn't want to give more time to something than one shouldn't. But what is it that we're wasting when we "waste" time? We're wasting our attention. We're wasting our quality of perception.

Why can't we see time as abundant? What stops us from that?

Well, we are not in touch with the part of ourselves that is free from all this racing, this doing, this constantly taking care, of fixing things up and satisfying desires. We're not able to live in the present moment. Now the present moment is abundant. And it's always there. But it's hard - it's very hard for people to step back from the spinning, the temporal, the pathology of time, the hurry and busy-ness. And that's what I wrote about in my book, as you know - is the pathology of busy-ness. And it's very hard to simply step back for people, and break the momentum. And accept that they're there, in the moment, and that time is very full of the moment - if I bring more of myself to the moment.

Time expands?

Time expands. And my consciousness expands, my attention expands, my sense of presence expands.

.....and suddenly there's time enough for everything.

Yes. There's time enough for things, and time becomes more meaningful.

It seems like we're obsessed with the quantity of time, but not the quality of time spent.

There's no such thing as quantity of time. We only have quality - quantity of time doesn't mean a thing. Tens or hundreds of years are nothing without quality, because unless you're there to experience it, time is nothing. That's one of the illusions of time that time is an external thing to be quantified.

Time should not be looked at only linearly...

Not linearly, and not externally only. Time has become more of an external thing because of the invention of the clock, and the Industrial Revolution, and all that goes with capitalism -- the need to coordinate and synchronize everybody's movements. The ticking clock is external. But human time is measured by the quality and quantity of experiences that we have. And in order to have experiences, we need to be there and we need to be present.

Where did the idea of "managing time" come from?

Well, I think that it's actually, as many people have pointed out, the management of time by a mechanism is very old, but it took a particular form during the Medieval period in the monasteries of Europe. Clocks were used to signal the hours of prayer at specified times during the day so the clock would sound the bell and that would bring everybody together to pray or to participate in a ritual. The clocks were meant to help people perform their daily prayers. And this became one of the great ironies. Clocks then became the instrument by which the whole capitalist and consumerist revolution started, because through that kind of invention people were able to synchronize and to proliferate goods, products and services.

That's fascinating. So the original intention behind the clock was reversed.

Yes. It is an invention that has been used for exactly the opposite purpose than for that which was originally intended. The great historian and sociologist, Lewis Mumford, said that the principal invention of the Industrialist Age was the clock. Not the steam engine or anything like that. So as time became an external, objectified thing, we lost time as a subjective personal, human experience. We have a glimpse at it in certain special moments of our lives when we are suddenly experiencing something that is sensory with all our presence. We know that time has a very different quality in those moments.

Time does take on different qualities in different moments. Why is it that when one is suffering, time seems to slow, and when one is joyful, time speeds up?

I think that's an interesting question - there's no simple answer. When you're with someone you love, for example, two days can seem to be like a lifetime, but at the same time they pass very quickly. You meet the person and you have two whole days to be with the person, and before you know it, it's all over. At the same time, there can be such intense moments of presence in the love relationship that time stands still - you are outside of time. So, on the one hand, there is a certain kind of pleasure and happiness where time seems to pass very quickly, and that is probably because we don't accept that what is present is passing. We wish to hold onto the happiness so whenever it goes away, we feel that it wasn't there enough. If we were allowed, if we were free enough to let it come in and let it go, we wouldn't feel quite this way about time so much. And it's probably the same thing with suffering: if we were really able to accept our suffering, it probably would not seem as long as it does. It obviously has something to do with what's happening inside of us, rather than what's happening outside.

You say that, ?The soul's answer to the problem of time is the experience of the timeless being.? What do you mean by that?

The timeless being is something in us which is not affected by the external world of time, clock time. That part is really deep in our real nature. And we're not in touch with that part. When we're in touch with that part more, then we experience a kind of quality of time that is completely different from the usual.

Within the Christian belief system, there is this idea that eternity is something that happens after we die. Do you think this belief has contributed to our misunderstanding of time?

I think that's a great mistake ? the idea that eternity is just a kind of unlimited clock time. Eternity is, at the very least, another kind of time. It may be a kind of timelessness, but it is certainly another kind of time. And it begins when the self appears and the self is not bound by linear time. This kind of experience of the timelessness of the self is what gives people the sense that there really is something that can survive death because if it transcends our self in this life, it can possibly transcend death too.

You're saying we can experience that timelessness now. We don't have to die to experience that.

It is possible to touch it now, to glimpse it, to make more of a steady contact with it. And everybody can have moments when they've touched it, and glimpsed it, and know it exists. We don't have a cultural language to speak about it. People speak about it in cliches and things - immortality and all that. That maybe doesn't do it justice, really.

You have an exercise in the book to help people change once their perception of time. How does it work?

Of course, it's only an experiment. It's just something I found. A way to change your sense of time is to try to regard everything that happens to you as though it has already happened before - that you are just sort of going through something that has been fated, and is already scripted out and taking place. Somebody rings the doorbell, that person has been destined to ring the bell. If you burn the toast, you are destined to burn that toast. The toast has been burned already.

You are just an observer to experiences in your life.

Yes. You are just an observer of what's happened, and it's very interesting what appears when you take that exercise and try it seriously. Suddenly you're free of something you didn't realize you were bound by - this sort of neurotic sense of ?doing? that goes on all the time. So the first stage of the exercise is to regard everything external as already having happened. The next stage is to regard everything that you do, everything that you say - like right now, everything I'm saying to you, as if it has already been said; my mouth is just going, saying, and it's already happened. That intensifies this feeling of inner freedom. And the third level, which is the hardest one, is to try to regard all of one's thoughts and feelings as already there. That can produce a glimpse of another quality of presence and consciousness that we didn't know was ours. And that's a taste that leads toward the search for the soul

Well, it's an interesting exercise because it seems to factor out human will and ego, and the inflated sense that I can maneuver and manipulate my life exactly as my ego is directing me to.

And that's one of the great illusions about time that eats up so much of our selves. Most things that are happening are going to happen no matter what I do anyway.

One of the things that you say that I think is really very clear is that our relationship to time is involved with our false beliefs about ourselves. We can't see ourselves clearly due in part to the fact that we misunderstand time.

People find that very surprising when they first hear it, that the relationship of time and the relationship of self are so intimately connected. And we know that time is passing, but that young woman you were when you were 15, she's still there, isn't she? She's there. And what would it be like to be able to just be present to her, to watch her, even to communicate, take care of her? If you were able to meet her, it would give you a whole different sense of yourself and where you're going. You'll see that the aim of life doesn't have to do with something particularly that you're going to be building up with the passing of years, but has to do with some movement - vertical to time - in this moment.