The Forgotten Dimension
Modernity has reduced time to a mechanism. The Gregorian calendar and the industrial clock have become the instruments by which human beings regulate labor and exchange. Yet this flattening of time into a neutral sequence of hours is historically recent. In the Vedic vision, kāla is a power of the Divine, both destructive and creative: “Time I am, destroyer of worlds…” (Bhagavad Gītā XI.32)¹. In early Greek imagination, Kronos was a Titan who devoured his children, while Orphic cosmology identified Chronos, primordial Time, as the source from which the cosmic egg emerged².
René Guénon warned against the modern desacralization of time, writing that the “homogenization of time into units” severs its symbolic resonance and reduces it to “a mere quantity, deprived of quality and significance”³. To reclaim time is to re-enter its symbolic dimension, where every moment bears a specific weight, color, and orientation.
Planes of Being
Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between the physical, the vital, the mental, and the psychic being⁴. These are not separate compartments but planes of experience. Time strikes each quadrant differently: a winter dusk will weigh upon the body with lethargy, stir the vital with longing, sharpen the mind with clarity, or draw the psychic inward to prayer.
The Ompyrean Doctrine of Time affirms that one cannot live merely in clock-time (chronos) but must perceive the moment in all four quadrants. The fracture of modern man — body exhausted, emotions frantic, mind restless, psychic silent — is a fracture in time-experience itself. Our work is integration.
Cyclical Arc of the Cosmos
The ancients mapped cycles in order to live in tune with them. In the Ṛg Veda, dawn (Uṣas) is praised not as a repeated phenomenon but as a goddess who “awakens every living being to motion” (ṚV I.48)⁵. Hesiod described the succession of ages (gold, silver, bronze, iron) as epochs of declining consciousness (Works and Days 109–201)⁶.
In Chinese cosmology, the twenty-four solar terms (jieqi) punctuate the year not with uniform divisions but with markers of seasonal energy. Kazantzakis, in The Saviors of God, spoke of human life as rhythm and ascent: “We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life”⁷.
The Doctrine of Time restores this cyclical sense: lunar phases, solar progressions, stellar transits, historical epochs. Each cycle is not repetition but spiraling recurrence on a higher or lower octave.
Sat–Chit–Ānanda as Temporal Key
In Vedantic metaphysics, Sat–Chit–Ānanda (Being–Consciousness–Bliss) are eternal attributes of Brahman. Śaṅkara affirms Brahman as existence (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda) in his Brahma Sutra Bhāṣya (I.1)⁸. Yet these are also perceptible in time as modes of experience:
- Sat (Being) in time is the sense of reality’s weight.
- Chit (Consciousness) illumines the mind and awareness; its eclipse leads to delusion or mechanical living.
- Ānanda (Bliss) descends unexpectedly — a spring morning, a lover’s glance, a feast day. Its absence is felt as everdayness and anxiety.
Practical Guidance
The Doctrine of Time is not an abstract speculation. It offers practical counsel, re-attuning action to the current of the hour:
- When Fire ascends (solstices, Mars transits), act decisively.
- When Air thickens (autumn, Mercury retrograde), reflect and edit.
- When Earth presses (Saturn hours, winter), complete duties and endure.
- When Water flows (lunar fullness, Venus conjunctions), reconcile and celebrate.
This is not astrology as fortune-telling but as pedagogy of time: an education in how to live rhythmically rather than reactively.
Toward a Living Archive
Every ritual, festival, meditation, and act of art must be placed within this temporal consciousness. The Ompyrean Doctrine of Time is the scaffold for a Living Archive. It prevents our writings from becoming static documents; instead, they are keyed to cosmic hours. As Ananda Coomaraswamy observed, “Art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation”⁹. So too must thought and ritual be timed to the breathing of the cosmos.
To live unconsciously in time is to drift in borrowed hours. To live consciously in time is to become a co-worker with the gods. The Ompyrean Doctrine of Time does not offer escape from history but immersion in its deeper currents. It calls forth the Vigilants — those who would reforge the human being, uphold hidden tradition, and establish a living archive — by teaching them to live the hour as myth, cycle, quadrant, and presence.
In this way, time ceases to be enemy or commodity. It becomes sacrament.
References
- Bhagavad Gītā XI.32.
- Damascius, De Principiis, citing Orphic fragments on Chronos.
- Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Ch. 3.
- Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. Book II, Part IV.
- Ṛg Veda I.48, Hymns to Uṣas.
- Hesiod. Works and Days, 109–201.
- Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises. Prologue, §§1–3.
- Śaṅkara. Brahma Sutra Bhāṣya, I.1.
- Coomaraswamy, Ananda. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art. p. 41.