Time as Chimera

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, poorprisoners of our mind’s absurdities, cannot begin to fathom it.