Time and the Spirit’s Space

From a letter to a friend. December, 2000

"…We spoke a while ago of "it", the “z” ingredient, the seat of being and the creative energy behind thoughts and identities.

There is no question from experiential data that "It" is a real part of existence; but it is equally true that "it" gets very squashed and hemmed in by physical universe mechanisms and gradually from overwhelm begins to imitate them, getting more and more like a reaction and less and less like an author.

The entrapment of life force in the physical universe is the biggest and most important single puzzle to be solved in our time.

Of course, in order to solve it, there are a couple of heuristic obligations we have to take.

One is to steer clear of overlays provided by the not-quite-bright or the too-heavily-persuaded. These overlays, for want of a better term, include all the mystic rag-tag solutions to terror and darkness ever dreamed up by confused humanoids in the history of our species: including, but not limited to, gods, demons, after-death tortures (and after-birth tortures, too!), cosmological control mechanisms, saviors, goddesses, ghosts angels and premature ectoplasm foofaras, baroque and bizarre explanations which do not explain anything, and other distortions of simple clear thought.

Another heuristic obligation is to quell the semiotic fires of past meaning as a form of overlay.

A third is to be constantly on the alert for premises and assumptions which are hidden in data and which send the mind reeling into a warped nest of implications and old freight-hauls by simply using terminology that is too rife with assumption. A key example is the old lemon "Do you believe in God?". Wow -- talk about an unanswerable question riddled with hidden premises! Worse than "Have you stopped abusing your wife?".

A special set of such premises and assumptions is the world-view we have grown accustomed to by driving bodies. As an analogy, consider how it would be if we became so addicted to driving cars that we would not be able to recognize a cowpath, or a meandering foot-trail, because it wasn't appropriate for the vehicle we were addicted to. Anything not a driveable road would gradually become filtered out of our windscreen perspective.

Similarly, our sensory mechanisms would get very tuned into bumps, rattles and steering pressures -- the sort of sensory perception a car gives you -- but we would gradually lose the ability to detect other frequencies, such as the subtle changes of air moving through grass, the rhythms of seasons, or the smell of snow the night before it starts. Wouldn't be part of the sensory package allowed by our addiction.

One of the more interesting premises which we inherit from the body's perspective and tend to automatically depend on, as described above, is the sense of space and time. The physical universe depends for its illusion on the persistence and universality of spacetime. Without that great shadow-show, we would find cracks and holes riddled throughout it. It may be that we once did, back before we animated so much of it with central heating, alternating current lighting systems, broadcast media, poured concrete, and other neat devices of human comfort.

Anyway, this addiction to space and to time are two things which we learn about from the body, which is firmly embedded in the continuum and which sends us painful messages of pressure, hurting, nausea, or even death if we try to step too far through the envelope of the continuum while still dragging it (the body).

We should give reflection to the possibility that space is a by product of viewpoint, and the only reason we have a common physics of space is because we engage in an average of illusion of viewpoint, and surrender certain abilities in order to support that commonality, like good taxpayers supporting a town fire department. If we all give up 90% of our abilities to generate spaces at will, why then we can have a common Monopoly board and all agree on how the game looks. Isn't that NICE?

Instead of accepting this "Monolithic Space" view, let us assume for a moment, in spite of the body's insistence not to do so, that space is generated by a viewpoint seeking dimensions to view. Why wound a viewpoint do this? For the fun of the experience, I suppose.

Anyway, if that were the case, then what appears to the body as a single spread of unbroken space from Toronto around to Reykjavik and back, including all the myriad contortions of awesome Orion and the numinous nebula of endless galaxies around... may actually be a composite of trillions of points of view left on automatic. More important, if this is the case, the individual viewpoint should be able to reduce the addiction to body identification by selecting spaces and separating them from the uniform monolith, or at least practicing seeing the many components in space, noticing their beginnings and ends, rather than just buying the TV show of uniform space.

Time is a similar subject -- if it is simply the constructed knowledge that things will persist, and therefore that one moment's creation HAS to be considered as a direct extension from the moment before, which is more or less how the body sees it, then a similar "reduction of habit" might start up if one began insisting that each now was only linked to the next to the degree one wished it to be so. This could be scary in social discourse, like a visit to Smallville.

And try insisting, for fun, that time is not one directional but bi-, tri-, or n-directional according to the will of the time-maker. Another slip of the old habit would be to try, meditatively, to sense the millions to the nth kinds of time being created in every moment. That sounds paradoxical, like the person who wrote a letter saying "I meant to send you the check with this letter but I had already sealed the envelope when I remembered..." . But it is not; only the adamant habituation of basic unidirectional definitions of time make it feel impossible; and thinking about it can give a body a nauseous reaction, because nothing is more uncomfortable to a body than hitting space or time irregularities.

Here are some exercises for the fun of it.

Pat your body on the head and say several times "Good seeing-eye dog".

Spot three spots in the body, then three spots in the room, over and over until you are comfortable being near but not the same as either one of them. You can extend this to the city or area around the room/building if you feel comfortable spotting spots there.

Get the idea of creating some time. Then get the idea of throwing away the time you just created. Make some more and throw it away. Invent different kinds and get the idea of other people agreeing to have it be your way. Then throw it away and invent some more. Get the idea of your body agreeing to travel through time in any direction you say.

Get the idea of time running so fast that you live a whole lifetime between 9 and 9:15, with all the emotions and experiences and rich perceptions you have grown accustomed to thinking of as a lifetime: puberty at 9:03, wealth at 9:06, etc...hmmm.

Try some other styles -- time so slow it takes a year to even assemble a single perception. Time which splits, and split time streams which mysteriously reunite, or run counterpoint to each other, like a fugue writ large in the heavens, a cognitive symphonic work.

Fun stuff.-- Lemme know what you think.

A.