Questioner (Q): What is Time and Space?
Acharya Prashant (AP): The answer is actually pretty simple, and you do not need a physicist to answer this question. The answer is that time and space are properties of your mind. Mind means time and space. There is no time and space except in your mind. Because you have a particular quality of mind, so you watch things in time and space. There could be another species for which there is an entirely different quality of space.
Your space is three dimensional. There could be another species for which the space is, for example, seven dimensional, which you cannot even imagine. We cannot even imagine seven-dimensional space. We always imagine things in three dimensions. Time and space are properties of the human mind, nothing more than that, nothing less than that. Difficult to understand but that’s what it is.
We do not exist in time and space, time and space exist within us. The definition that you gave: if there is time, there is change—yes, time is very closely related to change. Because the human mind perceives things as changing, because the human mind perceives certain objects here and there, the variable that measures this change is called time. There is nothing except that. Similarly, because the human mind sees things as distinct from each other—there are two different things, so that variable which quantifies their distinction is called space.
Time and space are nothing but variables that measure the degree of isolation. Given one particular time, the variable that measures isolation is called space. If at one particular moment I want to know how different you are from each other, then variable is space. And if there are two different moments, then the variable is time. That’s all there is. Human mind is fragmented. It sees things in distinction to one another, and it only considers two variables while making the distinction—time and space, and both are related to each other, that’s it.
