Introduction
“In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and the physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position.”
-Arthur
Eddington
The mystic seeks to understand our place in the world. The relationship
of the individual to the universal, of the part to the whole, is fundamental to
the paradox of Existence.
Paradox, or contradiction, defines the limits of our
understanding, and therefore our world. It marks the bounds of sense, where
non-sense takes over. This edge is the domain of the mystic: and the scientist.
Freud called the history of science the history alienation, as the method of
Science is the method of alienation, of separating and reducing the whole down
to the parts. The scientist examines the physical nature of separation in time
and space. Time straddles that wall of separation.
|
Time ÷ ø divided whole |
The mystic tries to put it all back together. This is the purpose of religion, to relate the
part back the whole. Religion means literally to connect back, from the Latin
re-, as in to re-turn or re-trace, and lig-, to connect, like lig-ature or
lig-ament. Holy shares its origins with whole. Thus the Eastern Yogi seeks
through contemplation to reconnect his ego, separated in time, with the
transcendent Deity. Yogi in Sanskrit means to join, and is the root from which
our English word yoke comes. The Yogi wishes to yoke his soul to the universal,
to realize the sacred formula Atman=Brahman.
‘Philosopher’ is usually translated as ‘lover of wisdom.’ Sophia
is indeed Wisdom, the immanent spirit of God. I prefer then to think of a
philosopher as a lover of Sophia, and wisdom is then understanding through
union in the spirit, and we have again the mystical endeavor of re-connecting
the individual with the whole.
The history of science has also been called the history of
stealing topics from philosophy, and the subject of time is no exception.
Already at the dawn of Western thought the philosophers, while examining the
relationship between man and rest of creation, arrived at something of a
paradox concerning time. Heraclitus and Parmenides came to symbolize the
problem of the one and many, and the nature of time most clearly illustrated
their different perspectives: Heraclitus insisted that there is only now, and Parmenides countered that there
is no now. It was the classic case of
Becoming versus Being.
Heraclitus is the one who said you never step in the same river
twice. He insisted the only true reality is flux and that the apparent
persistence of objects is a purely subjective experience, history an artifact
of our observation. Change is the only constant: the past does not exist, and
the future does not exist. There is only now.
Parmenides of Elea argued the exact opposite. Non-existence is
impossible. Since it is impossible for something to not exist, then all of
reality must exist all at once- all possible worlds through all time. There is
no now, it is an artifact of
subjective observation in a static and eternal cosmos.
|
Time ÷ ø Parmenides Heraclitus |
Modern scientific orthodoxy tends to agree with Parmenides. The
edifice of Classical Physics describes a timeless Universe. Even Quantum
Mechanics, while giving us statistical outcomes, is essentially time
independent, as it relies on time-reversible classical equations. The paradox:
The Second Law of Thermo-dynamics,
however, states that energy flows only
from a concentrated state to a less concentrated state, from order to disorder:
It gives us a one-way arrow of time.
Time
÷ ø
static dynamic
Einstein said that God does not play dice. Our subjective
experience tells us otherwise. Where is the room for humanity in a static universe
where all of history is laid out causally, each of us reduced to an automaton
acting out the laws of physics? Time is more than the crux of the relationship
of man to the cosmos, of the individual separated in space-time to unification
in the Spirit. Somewhere in the meaning of time lies human freedom.
|
Time ÷ ø causal free |
Time ÷ ø classical complex |
Meditations at the edge of time is then a mystical endeavor. In an
effort to re-connect with ourselves we will focus in on the paradox at the edge
of time, hopefully pushing the bounds of sense outward; making room for human
freedom in the process.
