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Have You Time for A Think?

Have You Time for A Think?

Last updated on: November 16, 2017 at 12:54 pm by Father Seán ÓLaoire, PhD

Have You Time for A Think? 2017-11-16T12:54:09-08:00 Father Seán ÓLaoire, PhD

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

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In 2011, life expectancy at birth was almost double what it was in 1841. So, isn’t it strange that, even as we live longer and longer, we have less and less time? We rush about complaining, “I’m running out of time!” or “I don’t have time.” So, what’s the scoop on time?

A. Time as a limitation

Time is a fabrication, a limit, a condition for membership in particular species in a particular dimension. Outside of those species and such dimensions, it does not exist even if members of those species in those dimensions attempt to impose it as a “sine qua non” of life itself for all species in all dimensions.

Time is just one “ground rule” for a particular game. As an example, an NFL player is allowed to grab another player violently and haul him to the ground; if a soccer player were to do that, he’d immediately be shown a red card and sent off the field.

So, a limited brain with the inability to grok the entirety of the reality gestalt is standard issue for the game of human life on planet Earth.

B. The chinks in the armor of time

But the solidity of time begins to waver as we pick up speed. The algorithm is a fairly simple one, but the bottom line is that for somebody traveling at the speed of light, time shrinks to zero. But there is also a more prosaic and quite common circumstance in which time can’t seem to make up its mind. Here, the subjective experience of time changes, but not the objective experience. Imagine a young child engrossed with a Play-station; time flies by for him – indeed, it ceases to exist subjectively; but for his older sibling, charged with baby-sitting him while their parents are having their weekly date night, time drags its sorry ass; meanwhile, the clock on the mantelpiece chugs along at its pedantic, plodding measured pace, with ne’er a nod to either child

C. Time’s purpose

Like any constraint in any game, time has a purpose; it teaches something. In particular, it creates a buffer between the thought, word or deed, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the consequences. It does this to protect us against the immediacy of behaviors that have negative consequences – until we become more evolved and can risk more immediate outcomes. Imagine the freeway carnage if each bad, murderous thought of the harassed drivers immediately translated into curses come true.

In other dimensions – e.g., the dream state – the thoughts create the whole experience immediately with no buffer. Lucid dreaming is a way of controlling and utilizing that ability for good or ill. Lucid living is the ability to behave only in love.

D. Imposing time on things

Humans want to impose time on everything including the notion of the afterlife. I remember, as a small boy in first grade, hearing a very zealous nun, committed to keeping us all out of hell, by using the following image to impress upon our young, malleable minds, just how long hell would last. Imagine, she said, a very high mountain (Everest at 29,029 feet will do); and every one thousand years a bird flies over the top of it with a long silk scarf trailing from its beak. The scarf lightly brushes the mountain top. Imagine, she repeated, how long it would take for these millennial visits to wear the mountain down to its toes; and now for the punch line: when the mountain had finally become a plain, eternity would still be in its infancy. Now that is a decent chunk of time, befitting the zeal of a nun and the sins of a six-year-old.

But it is not only religion that creates weird scenarios; science is equally culpable. The following, in my opinion, are two scientific howlers. Firstly, the Big Bang is an attempt to explain how the cosmos and time began, and the high priests of that particular cult insist it is futile, unscientific and even philosophically meaningless to protest, “Yes, but what happened before the big bang?!” The big bang is actually a pathetic attempt at a “scientific” explanation to circumvent the notion of a superconsciousness e.g., God, who plays in a dimension without either the constraints of time or space.

Secondly comes relativity theory, a relatively dumb explanation for the greater reality of games that don’t have time or space constraints.

E. Altered States of Consciousness and time-warping

ASC’s that happen spontaneously or are induced by practices such as meditation, entheogens, fasting, dancing, drumming… can deliver a version of the game without those two limits. The problem begins (see, I had to use a time-locked word!) when we attempt to import that experience into the “normal” game. Hence the mystics aver that such experiences are ineffable e.g., “Neti, neti”, and “those who know don’t say and those who say don’t know.” NDE’ers constantly report that frustration in trying to convey the wondrous nature of their journey out of the body and out of the brain.

Jesus, in his own inimitable fashion, went straight to the core truth – and infuriated his audience in the process – by saying, “before Abraham came to be, I Am!” An old adage says, “time and tide wait for no man.” It may be true for this species in this dimension, but it is even more true that, for a fully-awakened soul, time and tide are pieces that belong in some incarnational puzzles, but cease to exist when that particular game has delivered its lessons.

Let’s call a timeout!

ASC - altered states of consciousness

cosmic consciousness

evolution of consciousness

ASC - altered states of consciousness

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