Psychologically time is quite a strange phenomenon. St. Augustine famously said about it that he perfectly understood what time was … till someone asked him to explain.

In a talk with the children of the Ashram school, the Mother described how it operates in the different inner worlds.

Sri Aurobindo gave a marvelous short summary of the role of time in different stages of one’s sadhana at the end of a chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, called “The Four Aids”. He writes there:

Time presents itself to human effort as an enemy or a friend, as a resistance, a medium or an instrument. But always it is really the instrument of the soul.

Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal, Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument.

The ideal attitude of the sadhaka towards Time is to have an endless patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an ever-increasing mastery and pressure of rapidity till it reaches the miraculous instantaneousness of the supreme divine Transformation.

Our only problem is how to make enough time to grow into that attitude.