The realization that time is not linear, is not just a dimension like
the dimensions of space, could change our perception and understanding
of everything. When we spend so much of our life inside our own head,
what happens when the foundation of that life suddenly vanishes? When
we measure our accomplishments, the progress of our lives, in terms of
clock time, what happens when we find that that measure is a chimera (="a fanciful mental illusion")?
Perhaps what James Taylor, in his song The Secret of Life, described as "enjoying the passage of time" is really just letting go
of linear 'clock time' and living at least in part in Now Time, the time that (according to some biologists like Peter Beamish) all non-human creatures live in, except in times of great stress. It's
not so much that we enjoy the "passage" as that we don't notice it, we
don't 'pay attention' to it. And perhaps then we realize that it is an
illusion, a construct.
Our
sense of mortality creates a scarcity of time, such that we have to
"save" it, and that's what causes us to pay attention to it, and to
invent constructs to 'account' for it. I think other creatures are
aware of their mortality but in
an entirely different, non-cerebral way. So for them, time is abundant
and need not be conserved or meted out. They have no sense of "wasting"
time, so they live in 'Now Time', an eternal present.
Time is
not the only artificial limiting construct, the only life- and
behaviour-constraining model we modern humans have invented. We
invented language and numbers, for example, because we needed a means
to convey instructions to subordinates in the early days of
civilization. Until then, our cultures were egalitarian (the way
indigenous cultures are even today) and people learned what they needed
by observation, not by instruction. We needed to invent language to
narrow their focus, keep them in place and time, prevent them from
dreaming.
Language, like time, is a model, a very rough but (in
some contexts) useful representation of reality. Now, language has
become a filter through which we perceive reality; everything real gets
digitized, approximated and reduced to the words that merely represent the astonishing wonders of the world.
Another
such model is God, the reduction of everything that we do not control
or cannot understand to a single word, a symbol, a limiting construct.
Beckett
spoke of a 'matrix of surds', the oxymoronic structuring of the
irrational, of what cannot 'really' be structured. That is what these
constructs of time and language and God are. Like all models, they are
interesting and sometimes useful approximations of reality when viewed
generously (as a parent views a child's haplessly glued model airplane)
from a distance. But up close under closer scrutiny, they are, like the
giant picture of Bush made up of the faces of all the dead American
soldiers, absurd, just silly, fabricated, unreal.
Unfortunately,
we are now so addicted to these constructs that we can't function
without them, or see them for the constraining misrepresentations that
they are. We hear their veracity spoken of so often, from the moment we
are born, that we start, in the process of becoming everybody else, mistaking them for reality.
So
the most brilliant and sober scientists spend their lives trying to
prove our feeble, stifling, inadequate languages are somehow an
inherent and inseparable aspect of being human, and when a tribe emerges
that uses utterly different language, we deny vociferously and insist
it must be fraud. They insist there must be fundamental particles and
forces that simplify the makeup of the world, and construct convoluted
11-dimension 'string theories' to try to make their models 'real'.
And
they insist there must be a beginning of time, a Big Bang when time
suddenly started and has continued in a straight cartesian line ever
since.
Even the Now Time enthusiasts are determined to develop
a mathematical model of this time-out-of-time, to explain it in
civilized human language.
We scrupulously ignore evidence to
the contrary. When indigenous peoples say they have no 'creation myth'
about time zero for their culture, we shake our heads and assume they
must be stupid, or unable to understand what we're asking. We look at
the Hubble 'time exposure' photograph of a tiny piece of sky
(illustrated above), containing 1500 galaxies, and we find it
fascinating, but can't conceive that if we made it a longer time
exposure it would be a display of pure, infinite light, trillions of
galaxies superimposed on others. The very idea of the infinite is intolerable to us. It doesn't fit the model.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. There is a fundamental
particle that cannot be subdivided. Space is finite. There is no such
thing as the square root of negative one -- it's an 'irrational'
number. We are the crown of creation, the pinnacle of evolution over
time, moving inexorably forward, because we are only creature that can
understand that time is real, and linear!
Meanwhile, the rest of
all-life-on-Earth, including those pesky indigenous tribes that have no
words for time, understand that time is a chimera, a construct, a
falsity, meaningless outside of the artificial context of other
elaborate, fragile civilized human hoaxes.
The 'moments' when my
life has had most meaning, when I have been most alive, in the real
world, connected with all-life-on-Earth, have been those moments when I
escaped from time, lived outside of it, became utterly unaware of its
absurdity and its constraints. At those moments I was infinite, aware
beyond any semantic definition of awareness, so full of love that I
became love, and free from everything that has constrained, limited,
subdued, deluded, indoctrinated me, made me everybody else. I became
naturally myself, and naturally a part.
Those desperately trying
to reconcile this sense, this unarticulatable truth, with the
established models will try to express it as something spiritual or
transcendent or supernatural. It is nothing of the sort.
It is
just the experience, until we are dragged back into our restraints, of
being truly and simply alive. Even an aphid knows that. But we, poor
prisoners of our mind's absurdities, cannot begin to fathom it.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
