“Eternity loves time production”

William Blake once wrote “Eternity loves time production”. All of creation is classically thought of as being in time, and by the ancients as being merely accidental to Eternity, The One, The Prime Mover, the Good, Nous, whatever you call that final bright door towards which and from which material reality originated from, where all the roads and the River begins, and where they all End. When we’re absorbed in an experience, in a view, in a state of flow playing video games or tennis maybe, when you fall into a kiss, time seems to stand still, or fly by. Relative to you, your experience of time is either accelerated or slowed down. The stronger the gravitational pull the more space-time curves, when we lose ourselves in a moment or in play, maybe even with a person, we can literally lose our sense of time, and space for that matter. For Kant space-time is merely a function of our sensibilities, filters we experience the world through. When we lose our sense of Self, we can also experience the world with a muted sense of time and space. Picture a kid losing all sense of time or where they’re even at after spending the last 3 hours setting a new high score at the local arcade. In moments like these we find stillness with the Eternal mover that watches from outside our space-time, from the outside in. Eternity and temporal ‘reality’ are happening at the same time, in parallel, “here and now’, except for Eternity 'here and now’ don’t really make sense. General and special relativity, and to be honest Al-Ghazali is in his Incoherence of the Philosophers hundreds of years before Einstein, showed that ‘here and now’, up and down, left and right, past and future, 3 or 4 dimensions, these tools that participants in the cosmos use to situate themselves, don’t make sense without an observer to give these relative positionalities substance. We can situate the earth in space relative to the Sun, ourselves in time relative to the frame of time we extend personally, civilizationally or even cosmically. Time in itself on other hand, doesn’t keep tabs on itself, nature-in-itself, doesn’t keep one absolute clock to rule them all; Eternity doesn’t care. The other side of Time probably thinks we’re still and they’re the Ones in motion. I mean with a capacity to create a whole ass Universe like THAT! They must be bussin some moves on the other side of Time, watching the historical whole of this cosmos, its life, our lives, like frames in a movie, or words in a finished Book, projected on pages of Non-Being.

Krishna and the Milkmaids

There’s an old story of the Hindu God of Love and compassion Lord Krishna that goes a little like this. When Krishna was a cowheard, he’d gather the milkmaids every night for an evening of fervent dance. It is said that Krishna’s love as so bountiful that he danced at once in the arms of every one of his devotees that night. Like Sufis whirling in celebration of the coming spring, they twirled around the crackling fire, until one of the maids claimed Krishna’s love as her own. All of a sudden, Krishna disappeared from her arms and when she looked around, she saw only the women, moving and bobbing to a now unfamiliar beat. An important lesson in this bizarre story is that attempting to possess or cling onto love, be it the love of others, our selves, or even God, will render that love fleeting. It will cut love out of our being and our being our of Love.

The Fall of Absolutes

Around the 19th century the notion of absolutes collapsed. 19th century scientists, mathematicians, citizens of civic and academic communities alike were finding our that human beings have limited access to any supposed absolute. An absolute is a universal supposition that is not accidental to a circumstantial occurrence, in a given time or place, we treat absolutes as being enshrined in the intelligible fabric of the cosmos. Unchanging, unwavering, the notion of absolutes treated ‘Truth’ as an accessible, still and unchanging ontological thing we can hold, grasp, investigate, rather than a process of discovery that usually involves centuries of human intellectual efforts to simply approach the truth. Forget ever actually reaching it! Our individual and even civilizational observations are much more relative to the ‘observer’. Einstein was uncovering that space-time can only substantively be spoken about relative to some position in space and an observer’s experience of time. The observer’s experience is formally structured by conditions of their sensibility, these conditions, much to the credit of Kant, were the intuitions of S&T. Goedel was making a similar discovery for mathematical systems bound to the axioms set by the ‘observer'.