Anantham Ajnatham Avarnaneeyam

Time and space are infinite and indefinable. We are accustomed to linear or cyclic patterns of time and space. The common belief is that everything has a beginning and an end. People in Europe, at one stage, believed in the flat shape of the earth. Even today there are many doomsday cults predicting an end of the world or an apocalypse.

According to the Hindu cosmology, the process of creation moves through "time cycles" or Kalachakra. Creation begins when God makes his energies active (up at the end of night kalpa) and ends when he withdraws all his energies into a state of inactivity (up at the end of day kalpa). Since the process of creation is cyclical and never ending, it "begins to end and ends to begin".​

God is timeless. The past, the present and the future coexist in him simultaneously. Time is relative and ceases to exist in the absolute Brahman. Time is just another aspect of Maya that creates an illusion of birth, life and death. The living entities in the universe are bound to the perpetual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth until everything merges with the infinite Brahman (called Laya, to dissolve into Brahman, PraLaya, Dissolution etc). When we overcome time, we become immortal.

We perceive time in different ways. Time is often depicted as a snake (Anantha). The time that we measure is the interval between the happenings of two events. What looks like a day in the cosmos of Brahma could be millions of years in human world.

This cyclic manifestation is often referred as Purna, being represented spherically or as a circle. The universe is described as a cosmic egg (Hiranya garbha) that cycles between expansion and collapse, being described in puranas as day and night of the Lord or a Kalpa period.

The famous peace invocation in Isa Upanishad is

Om Purnnam adah Purnnam idam Purnnat Purnam Udacyate | Purnasya Purnam adaya Purnnam eva avashisyate || Om Shantih Shantih Shantih ||

- Purna means complete - Refers to zero, infinity, emptiness - Represented by the symbol chakra or a full circle - Take out infinity from infinity, what is left is infinity

Essentially what is whole will always be whole. Wether you take or give, it will always be whole and complete. No beginning, no end. The same can be said about Brahman also. Brahman is complete and his creations are also complete. The philosophical meaning is that the material world, originated from the infinite Brahman, is also infinite. Both are so complete that if you take the whole complete from the complete, still they are complete.

The properties of infinity and zero, referred here as purna, are equivallent. Krishna is considered as the pari poorna avatar, but he is so simple (zero) for a casual observer.