Time and the Soul

Of late, I've been thinking about the relationship between Transcendent Time and the Soul. Transcendent Time is, according to Iamblichus, an image of Eternity and the three noetic moments. However, Transcendent Time is in the realm of the soul rather than the intelligable and intellective realms that are prior to the realm of the soul or psychic realm. The three moments of Time coming from Eternity, as found in In Tim. fr. 65, are “the idea of ‘was’ and ‘will be,” “becoming younger and older,” and “coming to be at the same time or having now come to be or destined to be on another occasion."

What does this have to do with the soul? The soul, our souls, are in the last part of the psychic realm, with the World Soul and Whole Soul above. Individual souls are the third moment of the psychic realm, as it were, coming from the World Soul, which comes from the Whole Soul, which is Nous, or the Divine Mind, as reflected into the realm of the soul.

This is where we connect with Transcendent Time. The Whole Soul should be related to "the idea of 'was' and 'will be." The World Soul to "becoming younger and older," and individual souls to "coming to be at the same time or having now come to be or destined to be on another occasion."

To me, that last part sounds a whole lot like incarnation. Iamblichus talks about the lives projected from a given soul. For instance, a soul can project a Mercurial or Venusian life, and that incarnation will live in accord with the projected life. Individual lives are bound by mundane time. But the soul is not. It is not so much that the soul is outside of time but that it is bound by a different kind of time, one which transcends mundane time. Which is probably why it is called Transcendent Time in the first place.

As you can see above, final moment of Transcendent Time consists of three elements, and souls are doing all three of them. Because it is only in mundane time that we have things like before and after, we can presume the soul, in Transcendent Time, doesn't have these and is so engaging in all three elements of the final moment of Transcendent Time all at once. So we might change the wording a bit to "coming to be at the same time and having now come to be and destined to be on another occasion." The soul is all of these at once.

And this, I think, may help explain our relationship to our souls, as we are simply a particular projected life, and while we're bound up in mundane time, experiencing our life in a mono-directional way, the soul is experiencing all the lives it projects at once. Importantly, though, any given projected life isn't the soul itself, but an activity of the soul. What happens when that projection is over (from our point of view, anyway), I've no idea. Certainly, from our perspective, we experience death and we, the individual is gone. The soul, though, I don't know. I would think the projected life is, again from our point of view in linear time, withdrawn back into the soul. From the soul's perspective, the life is simultaneously projected and withdrawn.

Perhaps this is an explanation for at least some of the experiences of union people have in meditation and ecstatic ritual, a momentary experiencing of our life from the point of view of the soul. Maybe.