The path between time and its essence begins by asking the question:
What is time?
The question is a universal one. It is shared among seekers, mystics, philosophers, and scientists. It is a question we all have asked at least once. It is an answerless question, not because it doesn’t have an answer, but because its answer stretches from the very center of this “circular” reality we are experiencing, into everything we have or haven’t observed yet. Instead of asking “what is time?”, one should ask “what is the essence of time, and how can that essence be known and understood?”
The Nature of Its Essence.
The essence of time is simple and indivisible, but its manifestations in the very fabric of space are multiple (or even “infinite”). Complexity and the multiplicity we see in the universe are a derivation of simplicity itself. This means that if one wanted to describe time through one complex phenomenon, one would only be describing one aspect of time. So surely if each complex phenomenon was understood, one would then answer the question “what is time?”; an approach that requires one important ingredient: time, and lots of it to identify and understand each and every time-dependent complex phenomenon we see in the universe. Assuming that one can get through this insanely difficult task, all one would have in the end is a multitude of understood complexities, and pages upon pages of answers to what time is. This means that someone has to take it further and find the common thread in the complexities. In other words, one would have to find a pattern that points to a simple origin from which multiplicities are derived.
The Path of Knowing.
So in trying to understand time through its complex manifestations, one is naturally drawn to its essence. For it is in the essence that knowing and real understanding occur.
There is an essence to anything and everything. In trying to understand anything one should seek the essence of the very thing one is trying to understand. The paths towards an essence are numerous, and so are the journeys. The steps taken by a seeker towards the center are in the form of questions and answers, reflections and realizations, and rituals and unveilings. Reality is in control of all parameters, subjects, and experiences.