Toying With Time

So far as we can tell, time has no frequency—but everything else does. Everything else has a cyclic pattern of existence and a dual character: things manifest as waves, which have periodicity (frequency) but also simultaneously manifest as particles. The time dimension happily accommodates either version of reality. It is necessary for measuring frequency, which we do in units of time. At the same time it happily accepts particles too. Thus we can at least imagine a totally static and stationary particle, never changing at all, but it also requires time in that form of it we call duration. Movement combined with change gives us a sense of time that flows—but it’s not time but everything else that does the flowing. Maddening, in a way. Not surprisingly, some conclude that there isn’t any such thing as time—by itself; it is simply a necessary aspect of human perception. Immanuel Kant had this take on time.

You don’t have time for this philosophical twaddle? Okay, click away and speed up your time. Time also has a subjective aspect. We can accelerate it by increasing our stimulation or we can slow it down. Just take ten breaths, slowly counting up to five on each inhale, five on each exhale. That’ll do it. The less we do and the more monotonous our action, the slower we perceive time’s flow—or the nothingness that it is.

Our own mode of being is yoked to cycles. The most basic wave we know is that between birth and death, more precisely between awakening to consciousness and our passing. All through this wave we are individuals, particles. And we cycle between sleep and wakefulness.

I got off on this not very fruitful tangent because it occurred to me, after the last post, that higher religions differ from earlier forms because they have very distinct time dimensions, whereas earlier forms of religiousness have annual cycles matched to the seasons. In Hindu cosmology, great cycles follow each other. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim (call it Western) traditions, one cycle suffices. It begins in a creation and ends in the final judgment. The Mazdean religion (Zoroastrianism), apparently the oldest of prophetic religions, also begins with a creation; Ahura Mazda’s creation arouses a cosmic opponent, Ahriman; a great war between Darkness and the Light commences; the cycle ends when the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian Savior) appears at the final defeat of Ahriman. Zoroaster lived in the period between 799 and 750 BC. Our materialist cosmology permits either a single great cycle, ending in heat death, or many cycles each beginning in a Big Bang and ending in a Big Crunch. A Big Crunch is in our future if the mass of the universe is sufficient eventually to slow down, stop, and the reverse the expansion we claim to see as a consequence of a Big Bang that started things about 14 billion years ago. Civilization produces big cyclic cosmologies.

Mazdaism, incidentally, later gave rise to an interesting concept of God. The religion is uncompromisingly dualistic. The Persian imagination projected an infinite column of Light in one direction, of Darkness in the other, and the created world situated at their boundaries, the mixing region. We might call that the border zone. This view produces a tremendous logical tension that most humans feel. Our concept of God is unitary. Thus, over time, a heretical version of Mazdaism appeared, Zervanism. In this conception a divine person higher than Mazda and Ahriman was imagined as the father of these two. His name was Zurvan, Time. Time has thus at least in one cultural tradition been imagined as the Absolute Ultimate, beyond good and evil.

I find it interesting that the Hermetic saying (“as above, so below”) applies here as well as elsewhere. The individual’s cycle is the same as that of the great cosmic process in which the individual exists. The individual appears to have been “created” at birth—no memory (for most) of having been before. It ends in a great final battle or “end times,” death, which is supposed to be followed by a judgment. With these facts before us, and with the individual experience much more accessible (and unavoidable—as sure as death and taxes) it is easy to dismiss cosmologies by simply saying that they are a projection of individual fate onto the collective. The truth of the matter may be more interesting. What if Hermes was right? I would suggest that the reader visit this site and play with some of the fractal images presented there. The organization of reality may indeed be analogous to the fractal, where the ever smaller retains the basic patterns of the larger, while yet always changing…despite the steady flow of time which is the ultimate dimension.