The Undivided Nature of Time

The Undivided Nature of Time is Almustafa’s account of time as immeasurable in itself, even as people measure it into hours and seasons to guide their conduct. In answer to an astronomer’s question, he contrasts this useful division with a deeper continuity: the timeless in human beings is aware of life’s timelessness, and the present holds both recollection and expectation. Time can be watched as a stream, but it cannot be reduced to the separate moments along its banks.

Measurement and the Flow of Time

Almustafa begins from familiar habits of measurement. People divide time into hours and seasons, then adjust their conduct and direct the course of their spirit according to those divisions. The language makes measurement more than a way of naming duration: it organizes action and gives human life a schedule. Yet the divisions belong to the act of measuring, not to time understood in its fullest sense. The measureless cannot be contained by the measures made for it.

The image of a stream sharpens that distinction. A person sits on its bank and watches the water flow, imagining time as something that passes by in a visible sequence. The image grants the observer a position outside the current, but Almustafa’s account unsettles that distance: the one who watches remains part of life, whose timelessness the timeless self recognizes. The stream therefore describes an ordinary experience of succession without establishing that time itself is only succession. Its flow is a way of seeing time, not proof that the whole of life is divided into isolated moments.

The Timeless Present

The central claim is that yesterday is today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. Past and future are not treated as absent territories wholly cut off from the present. They are present through the forms in which people experience them: remembrance reaches backward, while dreaming and longing reach forward. This formulation preserves the difference between what has happened and what is anticipated, but places both within the consciousness of today.

Almustafa extends this continuity beyond personal recollection and expectation. That which sings and contemplates within a person still dwells within the bounds of the first moment that scattered the stars into space. The cosmic beginning becomes a measure of enduring presence: the contemplative and creative life within the human being remains connected to the moment of origin. Time’s apparent passage does not erase that connection. The contrast is between finite divisions that help arrange conduct and an inward awareness that participates in a duration broader than those divisions.

Love as a Figure for Unity

The comparison with love gives the teaching a second vocabulary. Time, Almustafa says, is undivided and paceless as love is. Love serves not as a clock or a sequence of events, but as a figure for continuity that does not proceed by measurable steps. The comparison also links the teaching to the life of thought and action: the passage evokes movement from one thought of love to another and from one loving deed to another, then refuses to treat time as merely the interval between such acts.

This does not make hours or seasons meaningless. The answer allows that people may need to measure time in seasons. Its emphasis is instead on how those divisions are imagined and inhabited. If time must be divided in thought, each season should encircle all the others. The image replaces a row of sealed compartments with a form in which each part contains a relation to the whole. The seasons remain distinguishable, but their boundaries no longer imply that one is utterly separated from the rest.

Memory, Longing, and the Shape of Time

Almustafa gives this encompassing image a human expression: today should embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing. The instruction does not ask the present to discard memory or expectation in favor of an empty instant. Rather, both are gathered into today through distinct acts of consciousness. Remembrance gives the past a continuing place; longing gives the future a presence before it arrives. The present becomes not a narrow point between two vanished or unreal worlds, but the meeting ground in which both are experienced.

The teaching thus holds practical division and inward unity together. Hours and seasons can direct conduct, while remembrance, dreaming, and longing make apparent that lived time exceeds those divisions. The movement from the astronomer’s question to the stream, the first scattering of the stars, love, and the encircling seasons develops one answer through several scales: daily measurement, human awareness, cosmic origin, and recurring natural time. Its final image does not abolish difference between past, present, and future. It asks that their relations be held within a present capacious enough to remember and desire.