Time warp

Have you noticed that time passes differently based on your particular perception of it?  If we are busy it tends to pass quickly.  If we're bored, it drags.  But what time is cannot really be defined.  We can tell that a duration has passed, but we can't measure it except by tracking some cycle within space.  This is still a function of our perception.  So if the rotation of that atom or star were to change speed, we would only be able to know it by the relation of it to another object also bound in space and time.

Think of it like an airplane.  If there were no windows to see things moving past you, you'd have no idea whether you were actually moving or not because everything in the plane would be moving at the same rate, whether that rate was faster or slower, everything would continue to move in unison and you'd never know how fast it was going.  Same goes for time. For all we know, time may actually not be static and might actually pass at different rates which we can't perceive because we can't step outside of it to find a fixed point of reference.

One thing that certainly seems to slow time is expectation.  I've been looking forward to many things lately.  Not in the sense of enjoyment, but simply, a lot of things to keep track of in the near future.  This made the previous month drag like none other.  I'm glad it's over so some of those things can actually occur and time can go back to the pace I usually perceive.

But this led me to remember something Augustine, the philosopher and theologian said.  He talked a lot about time and said that what we call future is really just expectation of something coming into being.  The past is the memory of that moment which no longer exists.  So that makes the present the point between expecting something and remembering it...which really has no space at all.  If you squeeze your conscious perception of time passing down to the smallest moment you can grasp, you'll experience an infinitesimally small point at which the future is sliding into the past, the expectation becoming memory.  It seems to rocket by and can actually be quite dizzying.  Try it right now and see.  Faster than sand through a funnel, moments of potential are becoming memories and we can't hold on to any one of those points.

This tiny point that occupies no area, no space, no time, is the present.  The eternal now.  And that is all that really exists.  If I focus on it too much, I seem to see everything around me like Neo seeing the matrix code; in constant flux through an infinitely minute Now.

At this point I also usually experience a sublimity.  Something enormous and palpably greater than myself.  It's there.  And if I chase it, try to focus on it, I find that it's focusing right back at me.  And that's where I usually lose it.  My mind starts to unravel and the window closes, thankfully, so I can exist without being dissolved into that present. 

I believe that this is a glimpse of the nature and reality of God.  Not some man in the sky.  If that's what you think then your conception of God is far too small.  I'm talking about the Source of all sources.  The prime.  The thing from which all that is derives its being.  And by many other philosophical proofs, I could demonstrate why it must be personal.  In short, it can't be a nameless force or a reflection of my own infinity because it must needs be something higher than my faculty to perceive it or contemplate it.  So if I can regard it, how much more would the source have to be capable of regarding?  If I can think of it, how much more must it, first and to a greater degree, think of me.  But there are treatises (literally) on this, and I invite you to do your own homework on it.

My point is that where else could such a being (even "being" is too small a word) exist but in the only spaceless, timeless space that does exist?  That ever-present, unchanging Now. In that point, I can access the big bang.  I can understand the origin of the universe.  I can know the meaning of knowing.  I can experience what IS on a deeper level than can be cognitively processed.  It's right there all the time.  Seriously try it, see what you experience.

Chronology

I have blogged on time before, but this is not so much on the nature of time as on the timing of events. Somethings precede other things. Layers below other layers were laid down first. It's a foundational principle of geology. The beginning of a story comes before the end. I learned something before I knew how to do it. Everything happens in sequences.

But in my life, in my perception, things seem to happen out of joint sometimes. An event can come before it's cause. A explanation may come before the question. It's really bizarre when it happens.

Sometimes it isn't so much out of sequence as just vastly distanced. For example, yesterday I was talking with my boss at work about an idea to resolve a particular situation. I would need to revise a document and possibly build a program out of it. He said to take my time because there was no rush. So today, I remembered that I had already written something related in the past. I couldn't remember why, other than at the time I thought it might be useful someday. So I found the document and it was exactly what I had been asked to write the day before. It perfectly addressed the very situation that I was facing, that didn't arise until the past month or so. And I wrote it in 2007!

I wrote the answer before I even perceived the question! Before I even foresaw that the question would come! Now of course, maybe I did simply know my job well enough to think through possibilities and it was all just good planning. But come on...I didn't change anything in it. It was exactly what I needed to write. And at the time there was no impetus to write it. I just thought it might be a good idea someday and then filed it away. Even the fact that I remembered it is amazing to me. Just last weekend I completely forgot that I had written something that I wrote only a week or two before. Someone showed it to me and I didn't recognize that I had written it. They told me I had...after which time I did finally remember.

I would just think this is one of those weird coincidences and explain it away if it weren't for the comments of my spiritual director a while ago. He said to me while we were talking that I had been seeing things happen out of time sequence. I hadn't told him I was having that happen. He just knew it because that's what happens with spiritual directors. It's a relationship arranged by God. But I hadn't thought about it before. He told me that this was common among contemplatives because reality is beyond time and when we start to move in that world, this one becomes far less stable...or rather we begin to see how unstable this world really is.

It's really true. From time to time, I'll have a moment click and it feels like tumblers fall into place, unlocking a bit more of the door. In that click, I can see how all the other dials and plates had been turning to align across time so that at this one moment the tumbler would fall into place. Some of those plates are nearer, others are behind, and they don't necessarily align in sequence.

Light of Mind

I recently had the opportunity to watch an old Japanese animated series that I haven't seen in awhile. It's one of those deep, classic ones from the 'golden age' when there was money and creative freedom enough to produce some very artistic and sometimes controversial works. Every time I see this one, I learn something more and like rereading a good book, am retouched by the whole thing.

I once wrote a lengthy treatise in college about this series, so I am not going to rehash all of that work here. If you want to read that, let me know and I'll post it on worthyofpublishing.com or something. Rather, I want to explore an aspect of the series that grabbed me again.

We so often let our circumstances dictate our personality. We become what we perceive others think we are, or a reaction to it. While we need boundaries to help define us in a real sense, we must remember that our entire reality is mediated by our perception. If the lens is cloudy or flawed, the image will be as well. And we so often only see "as through a glass darkly". It is a common condition of humanity.

But perhaps it is only in pain, suffering, and difficulty that these illusions are thrown into sharp relief. Perhaps that is their main purpose...to wake us up and drive us on. In difficult circumstances we cannot stay where we are, but must move, must change. In the moment of that metanoia, we can see clearly if only for a moment. We can reset our path, go another way, repent, to use the archaic word without its religiously skewed connotation.

Here's the trick, though. If our world is a construct of our perceptions, we can truly change it simply by changing our mind. We can turn the process around and drive it within our own being so that our self is not made as a result of the world, but our world is made as a result of our self. In this set-up, the light of mind-- the seat of our soul, that space within each of us where no others should enter, is sacred and uninvaded. It exudes from the soul and fills the space around it, keeping those that would harm our being at bay.

Alas, we don't have the power to do this, even in the best strength of our own will. It will always come to some perversion. I think this is one of the messages of the series that I had missed before. "The tragedy of the project is its people. And I am one of them." Misato says.

Enter here that which is not of our world. That which is alien to us and beyond us. It can challenge us, invade us, understand us and remake us...not in a coddling, cushy process, but in blood and fire. How else could a whole world be brought down? Only in the razing of those constructs can the heart of the matter, our perceptions, be laid bare and be remade. Thus that which is evil can be used for our good. Thus in the kernel of our being, at the root, we find that we are not what we perceive, nor what others perceive, but something other that is not defined by ourselves or our circumstances. Something original. This is the source of the Light of the Soul and Mind. This is who we are.

Impermanence

This is a concept I have never quite grasped. I get the idea on the surface. We die, things decay. We are not permanent. But what is? Love? No, we like to say that in romantic ways, but it isn't true. The truth is, I don't have anything in my experience that is permanent, none of us do. Therefore, I can't understand it really. But I can take clues from my experiences and infer what permanence must be like.

Still, even this inference has always alluded me...the images of perishable and imperishable, of type and archetype, or ideals, of illusions, they all fell flat in some way. But recently, I was rereading something my teacher, Jack, wrote and it fell into place.

Every bit of our existence is composed of atoms, of motion and energy and space. These things do not sit static. They are constantly turning over. We borrow them for a while and then they are released again. This matter is part of the whole of the universe. To bring it to a more human, observable level, my cells are constantly dividing, constantly being replaced. The building blocks for that replacement are received through food, which comes at the expense of some other creature's life. I injest its matter to make more of my own, which is then lost through skin replacement, blood cell recycling, waste, and replenished again through food and sun and complex relations with microscopic organisms and larger organisms. All of what is physically me at this moment will not be me in several years, it will be something else. And what will be me then is something else now. I am not solid. I am a constant flux of matter and energy over the duration of my existence. All things are.

Upon realizing this, it was like Neo seeing the matrix code actively transpiring through the world around him. He had seen through the illusion of it. I am not a constant thing. I have never been and will never be in this life. Nor is anything around me. All things are flux and change, even those that seem permanent, are merely constant reconstructions of the same structure moving through time. As Jack says, I am the curve of a waterfall. It seems solid, shaped, but is actually made up of a constant torrent of water droplets replacing the ones that just passed at such a speed that it seems to hold a shape and a place.

This is impermanence.

To follow the metaphor, something more solid, more permanent, can actually reach into a waterfall and pass through it...this is a new thought...so if Jesus gives us a glimpse into that permanent humanity after His resurrection: He passes through space and time. He appears in a locked room. Therefore His body must be more permanent than space and time. A less permanent object can't pass through a more permanent one. A vapor or thin paper is dispelled by the waterfall, only something more solid can pass through it! Wow!

Time

What is time? We can tell it passes, but can we really define it? Is it always the same, or does it change?

Physicists say that time is not always the same. It shifts with gravity and speed. I don't understand all that really. It's been proven they say...I guess as much as something like that can be proven. Of course those kinds of proofs aren't like proving that there is an oak tree behind the building. I guess it's something like a philosophical or mathematical proof. It is all an abstraction.

So what is time really? I guess it has to do with movement, becasue that is the only way we track it, by counting things that move in a cyclical pattern: the sun, clock gears, atoms. In our experience of time, we can all certainly think of instances where it seemed to go faster or slower. Of course, empirically, we say that is just our perception, because the cycles we count by continue to pass without alteration even when our perception of it changes. But that is just the thing. Our perception is really all we have to go by. Even counting the cycles is mediated to us through our perception. So, if I can only notice this thing called time through my perception, maybe we can rightly say that it does speed up or slow down based on our perception of it!

What about the cycles we are counting then? Well, if those cycles are bound in time, then perhaps they speed up and slow down as our perception does such that the gears actually take less time to rotate when we perceive time to go by quicker. This is confusing, so I'll try to clarify...if our universe is bound in this passage of something called time, then everything in it is bound in time. It takes time to cross from one place to another. It takes time to type one letter after the other as I write this. I can't get out of it. Even the clock and the atoms we coutn by are bound in time. So if it changed durations, we could never perceive it in the world bound in time, since it would all speed up or slow down at the same time. We'd have to be outside time to tell.

But humans are half spiritual, and spirits are not bound by time. So perhaps when we disengage from such focus on the things around us, like when bored, or sleeping, or engaged in a consuming activity, time is actually changing speed and the way we perceive it is because our spirits, which are outside time, recognized it.

St Augustine examined time as well. He lived before there were clocks, so his world was not so strictly bound to the seconds and minutes of the cycles of gears and atoms, but more like cycles of days and years. Still it was an interesting topic for him. What is time? He says that if we break it down to the smallest moment of our perception we can realize that it has no substance...like a mathematical point is the present that the future (our expectations) squeeze into and the past (our memories) squeezes out of. The present is an infinitesimally small point through which expectation become memory. So, there is really no present. I see a moment coming and as soon as I try to apprehend it, it has become a memory. So the present really doesn't exist at all! But then, the future doesn't exist either. It hasn't come to be yet. And the past doesn't exist either because it's already gone. So all of existence is really a series of infinitesimally small, massless presents, smaller than a moment. How fragile our life is! Remember this isn't my logic, it's St Augustine's!

This line of reasoning seems to color so many things. I think of the Matrix, and time travel, and so many other ideas all rolling through my presents at the speed of time...whatever that is!

A Dream

I once had a dream that Jesus came to me and took me into a room where there was a large round table. On this table, something like a holographic dome appeared in which He showed me every detail of history and how it fit together. He showed me how He had orchestrated the whole of all happenings in the universe. And He showed me how current events were all woven into the plan. I watched as the universe and human existence unfolded before me like a fantastically beautiful symphony of complex interrelations, events rippling and folding into each other. I watched as the symphony passed beyond present time and continued into the ultimate end. I saw how the world and all sufferieng and all joy played together and how it would all unfold in vivid detail.

When it ended I was awed and honored at being shown and understood that even though I couldn't see how things played together from within my life, I now knew specifically how it would go and that it would all be well...better than well actually.

Then Jesus touched my mouth and said that He would erase the details from my mind because it was not for men to know.

When I awoke, I had no memory of the dream at all. I dressed and left for work. On the drive I was listening to the radio when...I know the exact spot it happened...something in a song, just a snatch of it, reminded me of the dream and the whole memory I just described flooded back, minus the details I had been shown. I remember the dream vividly, and I remember the clarity and sense everything made, but I can't in the least remember what specifically I was shown.

So, I know that history is not random. I know that the future is orchestrated and that the universe and our entire existence form a wonderfully beautiful work of art. Best of all, I know it will all end well...This is an unbelievable grace to someone like me who has so much trouble seeing the good in so much bad. And I know that I would not be able to fulfill my portion of that symphony if I knew all the details. So that too is a mercy.