Faith, Love, Hope, and Time, Part I

 A good deal of my writing over the last 10 years has emphasized the fact that modern science, and we ourselves, don’t really understand what consciousness is. 

Consciousness, awareness, is a fundamental property of the universe; and I’ve written about that quite extensively, especially in Metaphysical Humanism.

This brings me to another subject we don’t understand properly at all. That subject is time.

The relationship between time and consciousness is essential. Time and its passage can only be perceived through consciousness; they’re intimately related. The perception of time passing is, furthermore, subjective, and completely unique to the individual impressions of it. 

It is, furthermore, functionally relative in a physical sense, one of the essential points of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Time passes differently in relation to other objects depending on the speed that an object is traveling at.

This raises the question of whether there is a relationship between velocity and consciousness. Yet what I want to point out now is that time is far from a linear process.

Because consciousness perceives time outside itself, we sense a separation between consciousness and time. This separation may seem theoretical, but masters such as Meister Eckhart have spoken for many centuries of eternity, that is, the state of existence outside time. 

Gurdjieff proposed God as a separate entity from time, which he called the merciless Heropass. Calling it merciless separated it from God even more in a conceptual sense, because God’s essential component is mercy, and time has none. In this sense, while God is totally aware and totally loving, such to the extent that it is, time is a dead and utterly unconscious thing. 

We now need to examine this from another point of view, that is, the perspective of meaning. Time appears to impart meaning; after all, we presume to derive meaning from the relationship of cause and effect through time. Yet once again, here the metaphysical thinker departs from the traditional view of time, because in eternity — a state of awareness that Meister Eckhart insists we’re able enter — meaning is ever greater than it is within time. It assumes an absolute, rather than relative, nature. To be within eternity is to discover the absolute consciousness and eternal love and mercy of God. Outside of eternity, we enter the realm of the infinite subjective. 

Thus we say that the flow of the universe and Being itself is infinitely objective within eternity, and infinitely subjective within material reality.

Time is ubiquitous within material reality. That is to say, the linear perspective imparted to it by our process of awareness does not actually exist. As with the quantum state, which is a single whole fabric from which the universe perpetually and instantaneously arises, time is a single whole state from which causality and meaning instantly and perpetually arise. This has been recognized by modern physics, in a general sense, because physicists agree that time as we understand it does not exist — mirroring the statement by Gurdjieff at the end of the first essay in “Views From the Real World.” He says, “time does not exist,” but what he really means, what he is saying to the protagonist in this story, is “time as we perceive it does not exist.” 

Time runs both forwards and backwards. The philosophical and metaphysical propositions I’ve just stated result in some interesting consequential observations about the nature of time as we do perceive it.

We perceive the past as creating the present and leading to the future. Yet it’s just as exactly true, from a metaphysical point of view, to say that the future creates the present and leads to the past. That is to say, time’s reach extends in both directions and imparts both directionality and inevitability backwards from now into the past. 

This implies that the entire act of creation is essentially deterministic, that is to say, there is an inevitability to it. This inevitability is not, however, inflexible, because the sense of the universe is such that everything that ever can happen must happen, a proposition that modern investigators of the quantum state have already forwarded. One of the consequential results of this is the theory of the multiverse, that is, the theory that there are an infinite number of universes realizing all the possibilities that can ever be realized. My own point about this, raised some years ago, is that the multiverses are co-incident, that is, they all share the same material at the level of the quantum state. This condition would explain some of the peculiar aspects of quantum nature.

The question of determinism, otherwise broad enough to serve as a starting point for many other discussions, thus becomes moot, because determinism is locally inevitable, but globally meaningless. Not in the sense that it has no meaning, but that encompasses all meanings and thus obviates the need for a detailed examination. We can simply say that its ubiquity renders the collective action of subjectivity unimportant in the largest sense. 

This may not be much comfort to us. We live, after all, in an infinitely tinier, much more focused sense of unawareness inhabiting a specific timeline of determinism.

One might say that the universe is built upside down from our ordinary perception of it. Our own future in this specific timeline of determinism is what determines our past. 

The future reaches back into the past to create itself. 

Thus each object, event, circumstance, and condition that we encounter is not of necessity an act of creation taking place now and moving forwards into the future; it is quite equally an act of necessity taking place now and moving backwards into the past.

In the next post, we'll examine this in more detail, and uncover some surprising relationships between these questions and Gurdjieff's propositions about the matter.

PS. Readers should take note of the Egyptian Ankh in the above photograph (taken at the Louvre) in comparison to the illustration in the next post. The relationship will be obvious.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.