The Ritualistic Human and Suspended Time

There are days when the experience of being alive is measured in fragments. Hours chain together in tasks that push one another forward, and life ends up reduced to a straight line advancing without surprise toward its end. This is profane time, everyday time, governed by usefulness, productivity, and continuity. It organizes existence, yes, but it also flattens it. It levels it out. It removes all space for the spiritual and for anything that is not useful.

And yet, certain practices radically alter this temporality. A monk in his chant, a martial artist repeating the same movements, a meditator who sits each morning on the same cushion, a woman bowed over the precise ritual of the tea ceremony. In these acts, something shifts. Time seems to stop. It does not advance. It does not weigh. A different zone opens up, a way of being that does not fully belong to the everyday world.

Mircea Eliade called this sacred time. It is not a different time on the clock, but a different kind of experience. The sacred does not begin anywhere. It requires a qualified space separated from the ordinary world. A temple, a sanctuary, a lodge, a room set aside for ritual. There a threshold is drawn, a symbolic boundary dividing two orders of the world:

on one side: the profane
on the other side: the sacred

Crossing it is not a metaphor. It is an act that consecrates. Upon entering this separated space, the subject abandons the utilitarian spatiality of the everyday world and enters a place where existence acquires another density. The threshold transforms the relationship with space and, consequently, with time.

For Eliade, within sacred space an origin is re-enacted. The ritual does not remember; it repeats. It does not commemorate; it makes present. There, linear time is interrupted, and a circular, primordial time opens, a time in which divine deeds become actual once again. The ritualistic human being does not seek to affirm himself as he is, but to become what mythical models reveal. He aspires to resemble the gods, the heroes, the archetypal ancestors. Ritual offers him this temporal and ontological access.

Pierre Hadot, from the perspective of ancient philosophy, understands this suspension differently. Spiritual exercises do not return to a mythical origin; they reorganize perception. Attentive repetition creates presence, clarity, and inner vigilance. It is not about imitating the gods, but about becoming someone capable of seeing in another way. Sacred space, in Hadot’s terms, is a space of practice, an inner workshop. A boundary separating distraction from attention.

Lacan adds a third level. He does not speak of sacred time, but of subjective time. Human time depends on the chain of signifiers that articulates the ego, desire, and lack. When the subject passes through a separated place, a space symbolically charged, the ego loses the need to sustain its narrative continuously. The ritual signifier momentarily covers lack. The pressure of desire decreases. Then subjective time is suspended.

For Lacan, this sacred space is not a divine sanctuary but a stage where the subject relates differently to the Symbolic Other. Crossing a ritual threshold reorganizes the economy of jouissance and lack. Time seems to stop because the ego stops pushing. The chain of signifiers slows down. The subject feels less divided.

From the convergence of Eliade, Hadot and Lacan, four decisive points emerge:

1. Sacred space is the primary operator
For Eliade, it is where the sacred erupts. For Hadot, it is a frame for attention. For Lacan, it is a symbolic stage where the structure of desire is reorganized. Without a separated space, there is no threshold. Without a threshold, there is no transformation of time.

2. The threshold divides two modes of existence
It is not a metaphor. It is a symbolic rupture. On one side lives utility and dispersion. On the other, meaning, attention, and suspension. This passage is as important as the ritual itself. Sacred time only opens within sacred space.

3. What is suspended is not physical time, but subjective time
For Eliade, it is the reopening of primordial time. For Hadot, the concentration of the present moment. For Lacan, the interruption of the desire–lack–signifier circuit. Three languages for the same effect: the ego stops narrating itself.

4. Ritual reconfigures the subject
For Eliade, it elevates him toward divine models. For Hadot, it refines perception. For Lacan, it reorganizes the subject’s position in relation to the Other. Conscious repetition transforms because it reaches the root of the subject.

With these keys, the question arises: can a repeated practice truly transform the experience of time?

Yes, but only when it is framed within a separated space and supported by conscious presence. A gesture becomes ritual when it crosses the threshold. There, ordinary time loses its power and a denser time appears. A remote temple is not required. A marked room, a corner, an object, a way of entering and exiting is enough.

A church, a cushion, a notebook, a quiet room. These are not sacred in themselves. They become thresholds when consecrated by repeated and conscious use. What transforms is not the object, but the way the subject inhabits that space and the way that space reorganizes temporality.

Suspended time is not far away. It does not live in ancient myths or lost temples. It is embodied when space is set apart, when the gesture is repeated, when the subject allows himself to be affected by the symbolic form. Through small, constant, intentional practices, we learn to live not only in the straight line of obligations, but in the depth that appears when certain thresholds are crossed.

The world does not change. Our relationship with space, with time, and with desire does. This is the profound challenge of the ritualistic human being: to step out of the threshold of ritual and carry, even for brief moments, that way of being into the profane world.