It is dismaying to observe how many Christians, and other religious and spiritual people, get drawn-into saying (and trying to believe) stuff like:
All Time is Now - Time is unreal -- Past, Present, and Future are simultaneous - Everything is always happening...
The intent behind this kind of Time stuff is various. Usually to seek significance, to assert that "everything matters", to explain why all is linked.
Often to "affirm" that all is One.
For whatever reason; the people who have "discovered" that all Time is One always seem to announce it as if this is wonder-full, life-enhancing, hope-full, joyous!
Having demolished the straw-man that is mainstream, materialist clock-time; they present their insight of the TT as a liberation.
Yet, I believe it is a Trap.
Time is not real, Time does not exist...
This is what I mean by the Time Trap; and it is a trap because it is half-baked: a pseudo-explanation.
"Pseudo" because it is put forth to explain experiences and phenomena; but the "explanation" is so incoherent and abstract, that the explanation itself requires further explanations...
Explanations of explanations... And all the time we are getting further and further away from that which needs to be explained...
Mystical Time-talk is also "pseudo" because these Time assumptions have consequences that are not considered.
The implication is that nothing matters.
Nothing makes a difference - because nothing can make a difference.
There is no possible freedom, no possibility of learning; no possibility of betterment of any kind.
Indeed there is no-thing At All - except what is, was, always, and evermore... An unchanging situation, that might equally well be nothing as anything.
What appals me about the Time Trap assertions are that the statements of no-Time are put forward as if they were a wonderful insight, an enhancement of life, a hope-full way of apprehending reality.
This can only happen because the logic has not been followed-through, because the implications are ignored or have not been grasped - or are incoherently being denied.
The Trouble Is...
My understanding of how things work-out spiritually, is that people (broadly speaking) get what they ask for - or, at least:
What people want, is what they experience - in the end, ultimately.
So the misguided souls who have thunk themselves into the Time Trap, and who have not bothered to trace-out or have denied the implications; may find that (later or sooner) they come to experience that which they have advocated:
They will then (more or less) experience living without Time, without change, without hope...
In other words, living with just the barest minimum of here-and-now awareness, and zero memory, and no imagination.
Well, it takes many types to make a world - and a Time Trap is really what somebody wants for himself... Fine.
But is this really what people want for themselves?
Is that the best that can be envisaged? To exchange this mortal life for... Nothing?
great post.
ReplyDeletehaving myself been once in awe of the timeless oneness, i can venture an explanation for its appeal.
i think it’s because this feeling, and it is a feeling, is a result of powerful experiences of ecstasy and inspiration, where moments seem to stretch to infinity, and clarity is immediate and undisputed. this feeling of peak experiences points to something true. even fundamentally true. about our being, and our relations with other beings. that we mistake this, momentarily, for something abstract like being as such, is only natural. we’ve all been drunk.
but the thing is the dull moments, the sober, uninteresting moments, the doubts, the impasses, the valleys, are also integral to our being, and our relations with other beings. answers are irrelevant without questions. faith is meaningless without doubt. meaning in fact is only a means to an end. because purpose is necessarily a future state.
in other words, the timeless oneness is wrong, and a terrible goal, because contrast is the fundamental law of existence. which is why, when the idea is pursued to its logical end (though it rarely is, in my observation, and thank god), like any erasure or dismissal of contrast, it's ultimately an affirmation of non existence.
Laeth
A very important point because it's easy to go from one extreme, time is all there is, to another, time doesn't exist. The beauty of creation and God's purpose for us is that it combines the spiritual and the material and makes of them something new and better than either by itself. The one and the many both exist and from their union come love, beauty, goodness, all the things that make life something rather than nothing.
ReplyDelete@Laeth - "having myself been once in awe of the timeless oneness"
ReplyDeleteMe too - indeed the fact is evidenced by some early entries in this blog.
Experiences that indicate the mundane, mainstream, materialist model of Time is false are surely valid; but the common mistake is to assume "therefore" there is only one possible alternative explanation - and that that alternative is timeless-oneness.
After all, nobody *really* experiences absolute timelessness or oneness; because all experience takes time and involves change (before and after); and because the one who is aware of the oneness is, to that extent, Not one with the oneness!
@William W - It frustrates me that people assume that they must choose between only two pre-described understandings; when neither of these two models are coherent, and both have untrue/ unacceptable implications.
ReplyDeletePeople who find what seems like an answer then need to ask "What then?"; need to move on from their first decision to believe Theory X, and then find out what a belief in Theory X would actually mean.
For me I think its appeal is that it is something like a paradox or an incongruence and therefore can possibly stimulate contemplation. Like Jesus being a son of the Church and at the same time Her husband. Such theories of time are part of orthodox Christianity because of such teachings as the Eucharist and immaculate conception. It seems according to the Gospel accounts of the resurrection that our relationship with matter may change once we are glorified through resurrection so maybe time as well. It seems though that potentially both are valid: there is the importance of consequential time and there is the importance that Jesus (is it because he's God?) is somehow a center of time and his saving life and death and resurrection acted retroactively.
ReplyDelete@Owen - I take your point that this, like a wide range of ideas, can be and has-been a phase en route to something better and more coherent. But it is clear than Many people have got stuck in this.
ReplyDeleteFor example, you comment about salvation being "retroactive". Once people habitually entertain such ideas, and begin to regard this as a possibility then reality; then the harmful potential implications are at best terribly confusing - and at worse their genuinely nonsensical incoherence can push people into a state of de facto apostasy, and despair.
For example: Charles Williams, who wrote a novel "Descent into Hell" based around the supposed truth of retroactive salvation - which superficially seems like a hope-full possibility...
But CW was honest and rigorous enough to recognize the appalling implications of his conviction
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-implications-of-believing.html
And this led him towards a terribly bleak, and almost inverted, conception of what should surely be the *Good* News of Jesus.