Allow me to begin with a confession. I am muchly in the orbit of both Kant and Whitehead. For them of some philosophical background that ought to sufficiently reveal my orientation, if not my prejudices. Having also been obliged to digest Heidegger’s Being and Time more than once, I am undoubtedly under some umbra of his umpirage.
Time is a constituent of our referencing. Opposed to the idea of eternity, it is spoken of as something finite, a finitude that ultimately defines us, for we come, we are, and we go. And where we go, seemingly, has a terminus. That terminus is variably called death, or the end of life, or being “hidden in God”. Compared to our “now”, it is the end point, the point where “here” and “now” cease to have any more “place” to go. There is little to argue with in these considerations. They are our common understanding of this flux of knowing and being we call our life, our world. But often in our everyday going about things we glide over the depths of things. This, of course, is why we have such things as philosophy, theology, religion, and art in all their varied splendours to command our deeper attention.
We must understand that when we speak of time as a finitude, we are speaking of an entity within a certain context. This “finitude” is always in a tensor, a bracket, “here now” between “forgetting” and “being open to”, between a passing away and a coming into, a “here now” held in place by a past and a future. This now, this present moment, is to my awareness of it, is according to my awareness of it, always a point floating on a gossamer, always tethered to a past, always arcing out to a future. Time opens out to us. We subsist on the premise that it always will. We exist upon the hope that it always will.
There is, however, a problem with this talk of time as linear we tend not to notice. We are picturing time. The representation of time as a stream ever flowing, as a line we move along, or even as a line curving back on itself into a circle, is simply that, a picture, a pictographic idiom for a non-idiographic entity. We might better represent time as a stratified entity with one moment stacked atop another, compressed and compressing, constantly collapsing onto and into itself, constantly formulating a world out of and on the world, unfolding out of actuality and potentiality, neither vanishing into a past nor a future, but always revealing a surface of the world to our passing attention of it. There are, of course, problems with this pictogram as well. Talk of stratification may give rise to thinking of time as a non-malleable structure such as stratified stone, as opposed to a more delectable stratification such as a trifle. We must always be cautious in handling the products of imagining lest we not remember their innate plasticity.
Time is an aspect of space, and like space it does not “go away” when we are not looking at it. Yet, we do look away from space and from time; our consciousness, our awareness, does so. Consciousness is, however, malleable, controllable. While it tends to flitter here and there, it has the capacity to centre itself and focus. There is much in the world of contemplation and mysticism in both East and West worthy of investigation here.
I have observed in another place that our awareness of time, of a moment, may flow away and fade, but that does not indicate the moment does so. All moments concretize, cohere, endure. In them we have our concretized and coherent endurance. Therein religions find the basis for speaking of heaven, hell, eternity, immortality. We can think of life eternal only because the time, the moments we create, past, present and to come, endure forever, linked, meshed, interwoven together in absolutizing endurance, purest history. We can move from moment to moment building with creative, positive and loving acceptance. We can fixate on some moment and with tortured heart revisit it incessantly to weave into ourselves, into reality, a knot of frustration and deformity. We can and we do create for ourselves, for all, really, concretely, and eternally, heaven and hell.
Time is light. The relationship is one of virtual identity, of intimate praxis. Light is the primary, the primordial, manifestation of time. Both time and light are revealing in their dispersion, concealing in their concentration. We think of light as we do time, as something linear, radiant beams travelling outward and reveling place and space as it disperses. But light also holds things together, makes things; knits itself, and forms itself the structure of things. It whirls about itself, and whirls out the world of things. In this it underlies what it also reveals. This concentration of miniscules of light conceals itself from our immediate experience, yet forms the groundwork of our world. And on the greater scale it also conceals itself, for at its concentrated intensity we cannot gaze. We tend to “sense” light as we do time—as it disperses itself over the surface of things it itself weaves. But, reason, imagination, spirit, intuition—the sundry organs of internal vision—are also lights, lights that can atone for us the fracturing of common perceptions and the depths of things.
I realize Einstein may be cachinnating, but pace, Albert. This is philosophical speculation as much as talk of monads, attributes, concrescences, etc. Yet, speculation has always been mother to investigation. The theory of relativity is that, a theory, a paradigm about how the universe functions. It is viable only in so far as it is operational within the parameters of gathered experience, a given and delimited gestalt. Ptolemy had a working paradigm, and then came Copernicus and Galileo. Newton’s theory had enormous gravity until Einstein threw his curve ball at it. The Laws of Nature are nothing more than our own gathered insights into how things function. These “Laws” were not written up in some type of pre-time and then Nature established the next day to obey them. Perhaps we tend to operate on that assumption on a quotidian level, but that assumption is as much a myth as the heavenly proto-existence of Torah or Koran.
It is no accident that the Genesis myth of creation begins with “Let there be light”. Light and time come into being together, in the same moment, the same manifestation. As soon as there is a beginning, there is light. Light is the externalization of time and time the internalization of light. This is not about epistemology, not about a priori conditions of our ability to understand. It is about the very structure of being, of the stuff of the universe, physical, psychical, spiritual, metaphysical. All these aspects of “that which is”collapse into one another, into some sub-/meta-photonic moment. Thing and moment collapse into each other. All things are always moments, and all moments are always things—in a swirling, gyrating, fleeting flash. And the totality of this “all” exists as constantly and consistently as its past, as its present, and as its future. All dichotomies, all opposites, are ultimately reconciled here, just as “present” is the reconciliation, the resting space, between past and future.
Understand light and you will understand time. However, an un-focused consciousness is that—unfocused. It pivots, gyrates, flutters. So we doom ourselves to talk of flux, strings, vibrations, or in other words, our own lack of acuity.
Religion today lacks something of its ancient acuity. In its attempts to be relevant, to address the present, it has lost a sense of past and future. Without a sense of past we are alienated from a sense of sin. Without a sense of future we are at loss for the groundwork of healing. But, without sin and healing, both forgiveness and forgetting fall away. Without forgiveness and forgetting, remembering and celebrating totter, because we can only exist in the tension, the tensor, of a present that is beholden to its past and future simultaneously. We are not uni-dimentional beings. Yet, less and less we seem not to want our sins dredged up, our plans for tomorrow critiqued; we merely want our meager “now” patted on its head. Churches may feel inclined to “go along” with that attitude and so shy away from the profundity of existence, but they do so only at their own peril and relevance. Churches exist to widen our horizons not hide them. And despite whatever societal or cultural tug there may be to delimit the true scope of our existence, there is in each of us a secret depth that knows that “all that is and was and ever will be” is above and beyond us, that “all that is and was and ever will be” is somehow within us and encompasses us, and that “all that is and was and ever will be” carries all into an unseen vastness either without us (our entropy, our death) or for us (our hope, our promise of one more tomorrow). Thus the Absolute of Absolutes is always Transcendent and Immanent and Dynamic, and always each distinctly and inseparably.
Christianity names that vision of Absolute “Father, Son, Spirit”, but those are primarily culturally conditioned terms. The essence denoted by those terms expresses a truth. Again we are in the presence of mythos, not logos.
At times I slip into using “mythos” to avoid the negativity that accrues around the term “myth”. Too often the latter is—incorrectly–taken to denote something not true, something “made up”. Myth, mythos, is sacred narrative. It is always dominated by the fundamental inexpressibility of that which it beholds. It always denotes a truth so profound that it cannot be stated literally, merely shrouded in a story. By logos I mean an idea, a concept (I am speaking colloquially and not trying to create an epistemological distinction), we feel comfortable handling practically, something we can easily treat as an empiric matter, something we can treat as if it has sensible foundations, be it something of our world external or internal. I realize my definitions or denotations do not make for a clear divide, but our want to rationalize always spills over into realms where it cannot venture, realms wherefrom it has its foundations.
I have been reading a text on aesthetics by a confirmed Hegelian. Like many scholars, this philosopher is enslaved to a system and its terminology. Every aspect and thing in the scope of art is taken apart and reconstructed within the unyielding vision of a definitive dialectic. Such formidable servitude to an omnipotent formula is in itself contributory to the rise of the novel. Dostoevsky, Proust, Camus, and (occasionally) Sartre, each had distinctive visions of man and the world but sought to transmit them by telling stories rather than concocting systematic analyses. The novel approach is considerably more diffuse than afforded by devising a system, but it does allow one to celebrate the immense diversity that confronts us when we dare gaze toward the mystery of life or beyond it to the Mystery of Mystery. When I use terms like “mythos” and “logos”, I am not setting parameters around realities. I am not weaving a system, or a formula of analysis. I am simply trying to succinctly elucidate a view.
When we stand before the Mystery of Mystery we can only gaze, we can only wonder, we can only say: “Wow! Do you see that?” This is the place for awe, not answers. This is where philosophy, theology, religion must always stand. Any other place is factitious systematizing and facinorous idolatrizing. That is why we are told: “Take off your shoes, the place whereon you stand is holy!”. Here we approach the sacred. Here we can only, must only, bow down, submit. To bow to the Holy is to begin the journey to being holy. How wondrous.