Senior: “OK Junior, I’ll leave you now for 100 turnings of this world on its axis so you can complete your final graduation assignment. Do you have any last-minute questions?”
Junior: “If I see problems in the dominant species’ behavior, can I set them on the right track?”
Senior: “Definitely not. Their way of relating to their world makes that impossible anyway. They believe they can alter the future by adjusting what their prior actions have set in motion. Anything you added would just be absorbed into the momentum already underway. Record your observations and draw any conclusions that might benefit other species in the galaxy. I’ll be back in what the subject population here calls ‘a hundred days’.”
One hundred days later, Junior was waiting at the transfer point on the roof of the Empire State Building, nervously going over the report that would count for 50 % of his final grade.
Using Time in Place of Space
Observations:
Once upon a time, in a world spinning around a medium-sized sun in a galaxy spiraling through the ocean of space, a species has evolved who consider themselves radically different from their cousins swimming in the seas, flying in the air, and walking upon the land. Their capacity to calculate and plan, to harvest and preserve, has gradually hardened and split away from their natural awareness that they are just one of many in a global wholeness. In place of this core awareness, assumptions of superiority and unfeeling behaviors have progressively been woven into their consciousness.
As a species, they have learned to keep for themselves whatever they could get, leaving too little for the land to replenish itself and for other species to have what they need to live naturally. This exploitation is most strongly present in certain individuals who not only treat other species as objects to be manipulated, but treat their own species as of value only for their utility.
Some members of this species look out into the universe and feel welcomed by the openness in which their planet rocks and sways. But many look no farther than their immediate surroundings, noticing only what they deem useful or harmful, and ignoring everything else.
Some of them look into their own being and find a potential for understanding and caring. But many just look for ways to secure their own place. As their world becomes increasingly fragmented, the strategy of trying to pick up enough scraps to survive has become prevalent.
Analysis:
While all the animals on this planet experience the world from the perspective of their own bodies and are driven by their need to eat, have companions, and survive, the human species has built upon that physical foothold in space. They have devised ways to entrench themselves at the center of their own experience. They not only, as do deer or wolf, see their surroundings from the perspective of eyes anchored in a particular place, they see themselves as rooted in a particular moment in time. Recognizing the need to survive for more than one season, they make decisions that can only be implemented by trying to control the local flow of time.
This pathology goes by several names. One such name is “time” itself, which they think of as being divided into a past that lasts forever in a frozen state; a future that is similarly infinite because it can never be exhausted; and a present that is a fleeting connection between those two massive reservoirs, neither of which can be directly entered by an embodied being.
Because they have their appetites, their fears, and minds that are often overwhelmed, they imagine themselves driving through time, trying to get what they want, avoiding what they fear, and ignoring everything else.
Conclusion:
The human species has replaced the openness of Space with a world of things. Instead of the open realm in which every facet is the moving face of an integrated, seamless whole, they imagine a complex of things, which they have identified, named, and to which they have assigned unchanging characteristics. Since, like all living beings, they do not in fact live in a world of objects with fixed characteristics, when their expectations for these objects are inevitably dashed, they are shocked. And since they have forgotten the Space whose presence they interpret as a complex of fixed objects, they try to harness the dynamic presence they call time to hold those things together. They assign to the dynamic of deep Time the task of repairing objects that keep breaking down and that sometimes break their hearts. This impossible task is assigned to a kind of time, which (rather like the space they imagine has been shattered into objects) has been shattered into a series of moments. Within this sequence of moments, they imagine that there are future moments which they will be able to control.
For a long time, I couldn’t understand the nature of their delusion. Then it came to me.
They act as if a precious vase has been dropped and shattered into 1000 pieces. They believe this so strongly that they don’t realize that no artifact of creation has actually ever been dropped.
Under this impression, they have replaced the vibrating, resonating field of space with a catalogue of supposedly known things. But, since their own interest in this world of things keeps changing, they have to harness time in an attempt to continuously adjust their life among objects that don’t actually exist.
They have had to invent a form of segmented time in order to make their way among the things with which they are trying to replace the natural wholeness in which they live.
Even if we were to intervene, in an effort to spare this species from their isolation and to ameliorate the damage they are inflicting on their world, it couldn’t succeed. As long as they think of space as an assembly of separate things and time as a sequence of separate moments, they will not be able to recognize that the world in which they actually live is a gift given unconditionally by the true openness of Space and the unquenchable dynamic of Time.
Wonderful!
Terrific!!