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WHOLENESS AND PERIODIC CHANGE
The Dynamism of Wholeness
When a definable or identifiable boundary can be given to an energy field in which the activities of a number of elements are functionally interrelated, this field constitutes a "whole." The wholeness of this whole results from the coexistence of a state of multiplicity (the many elements the field encompasses) and a state of unity (the fact that these elements are circumscribed by boundaries). Any boundary-defined field of interrelated activities is thus a particular manifestation of wholeness, regardless of how few or many the number of its constituent elements and how limited or extensive its defining boundaries. Boundaries separate a whole from other wholes, yet all these wholes may in turn be seen as parts of a greater whole containing them all as components.
At the metaphysical level of universally applicable and therefore inevitably abstract concepts. Wholeness may be understood as the interrelatedness of two fundamental principles, Unity and Multiplicity. Moreover, the most common and primordial experience of human beings is that of continual change — a change which may alter to some extent the boundaries of any whole and the nature of the forces active within them which affect other organisms. Therefore, one is led to assume that the relationship between these two principles Unity and Multiplicity, is also constantly changing and change implies motion, whether it be the motion of material particles or the development of intellectual concepts. Motion can be observed everywhere and at all times. As Heraclitus stated twenty-five centuries ago, the only thing that does not change is change.
Motion and change may not be at first or superficially perceptible, but the more developed the sensitivity of the senses and the capacity for subtle feeling-reactions and intellectual analysis, the more evident the universality of change. What may at first appear to be a permanent, unchanging entity (or a situation involving several entities) sooner or later is understood as a relatively stable interplay of moving factors and patterns of relationship, which often undergo a rapid or slow series of transformations. Wholeness can only be given the character of a static reality when the primary and incontrovertible human experience of change is dismissed as illusory. But to do so reveals a very basic sense of inner insecurity which the religious or metaphysical mind tries in vain to hide by postulating a changeless Supreme Being who must be transcendent and therefore external to and separate from the world of change which It has created for a purpose no human mind can fathom.
Wholeness is dynamic because it implies motion. Moreover it seems justifiable to give a rhythmic, thus cyclic and repetitive character to this motion. It is an ordered kind of motion. It has a structure — using the word, structure, in its most abstract sense. The feeling-realization of structure emerges from a basic fact of human experience, to which philosophers usually have not given enough attention: the fact that some changes are experienced by a newborn human as having already been experienced. This phenomenon of recurrence radically modifies the experience of change. Particularly strong experiences of pleasure or pain, which had focused the attention of the child's organism, are remembered. Some definable change made them happen. In order to understand what the change was related to, and thus perhaps how it could be made to happen again (or be avoided if it was painful), a new faculty begins to develop in the child's organism: mind. And mind, as we shall soon see in greater detail, is the ability of an organized whole to discover, invent, and develop a mode of operation — a procedure, strategy, or device — which makes possible the repetition of pleasurable (and in general "desirable") experiences, and the avoidance of painful ones.
Another realization soon follows, which at a later stage of human development becomes crucially important — the realization that the recurrence of a desirable experience can be accelerated if the child makes use of the strategy suggested by his or her mind; for instance, by crying in a certain way, or (later on) by imitating parental behavior and doing what they apparently expect.
In other words, the primary experience of a human being is not only that of unceasing changes; it is qualified or modified by two other basically important realizations: the expectable recurrence of certain changes remembered for what they had produced in the experiencing organism, and the realization that what is remembered can be made to occur again, if specific procedures (movements of parts of the body) are followed. Thus there is unceasing change; change is at least to some extent repetitive; and the recurrence can be accelerated or delayed. Because this feeling of acceleration or delay in the satisfaction of vital needs (and later on, ego-desires) becomes an integral part of the child's consciousness as it reacts to everyday experiences, what may be called the sense of time develops. It takes specific forms according to the conditions of existence and the needs and wants of the growing child; but it is also basically affected by the attitudes displayed by the family, school, social class, and by the culture having molded their collective responses.
The Experience of Time
Because the experience of time undertones all other experiences in which change is involved, I shall at once pay special attention to what is in fact implied, though largely not understood, in it. The experience should be differentiated from that of the continuum of change, because while "change" should not be considered as having any beginning or end, "time" as an experience always has a beginning, and it must also end. Between the beginning which was in "the past" and the end which will occur in "the future," a "period of time" extends. The sense of time is not only related to the extension of such a period, but to a subjective personal factor, the desire for some kind of change to occur during that period of time. The speed at which time is "passing" while the satisfaction of the desire for a particular (or generalized and imprecise) change has to be waited for, gives this time-flow a specific character. The waiting for the end of the period may be relaxed or tense; time may seem to pass slowly or quickly.
A peasant who has sown seeds must wait, perhaps while hungry, for the new harvest; the individual student also waits for the results of a test which may determine his entire career. This waiting — a so often repeated human experience — constitutes the experience of time. When referring to it, the psychologist or philosopher speaks of "subjective" time. "Objective" time, on the other hand, deals with periods whose beginning and end are established by external events which a collectivity of human beings can observe and use to define and measure set periods of activity or rest — for instance sunrise and sunset, the full moon, the rise of vegetation in the Spring.
There is actually nothing mysterious about time, except the strange ways in which this basic, common experience of perpetual change has been interpreted. The many interpretations that have been presented by religions and philosophies simply reveal how difficult, if not incomprehensible, it has always been for human beings to have to wait for the satisfaction of their desires. The near-impossibility of an "instant fulfillment" of one's desires (the passionate ideal of the hippie generation!) has been translated into the binding power of time; and the fateful nature of this power has been feared, especially with the realization that death ends the period when even the anxiety or anguish (angst in German) of waiting no longer exists. Making a god of "Time" and trying to identify one's consciousness with his subliminal nature does not help the situation. Neither does modern science's attempt to divorce time from actual human experience and make it a dimension of the hybrid intellectual frame of reference, space-time. Nor does the philosopher's interpretation of time as an innate category of the human mind make individuals feel better as they wait for the distant fulfillment of their expectations. The division of time into past, present, and future, and especially into "moments," the length of which can be measured according to the collectively accepted schedule of activity of a particular community or nation, is also an ineffectual solution to what should simply be considered and accepted as the basic fact of existence: the succession of ever-changing situations which any organized whole has to meet.
The fact of change implies the experience of succession, or sequence. One sensation "follows" another, even if the first merges unnoticeably into the second. There is continuity when no mental activity has yet differentiated any one experience by relating it to a possible recurrence and a desire for or fear of that recurrence. If two experiences follow each other, one must come after the other. This is what is meant by sequence. A series of changes constitutes an ordered or structured sequence of experiences. It is only when these are entitized by the mind as events, having an assumed objective existence external to the experiencer, that the modern intellectual finds it possible to juggle pictures or abstract symbols to which a "time position" is attributed. Such a "position" can only have meaning if a starting point for the measurement of objective units has first been established, and the concept of periods of time has developed in the interpretative mind.
The beginning and end of a period are established by what I have called "markers of time." These are normally provided by common human experiences, such as sunrise and sunset, or the appearance of new vegetable growth in the Spring; but every society makes its own markers of time in order to differentiate periods of activity from those of rest if no period of time — no interval between beginning and end — is considered, only a continuum of changes is experienced. This continuum is, strictly speaking, "time-less"; it does not involve time. Nevertheless it implies the sequentiality of experienced changes. It is interpreted by the mind as a succession of events and a series of situations, many of which recur periodically.
Markers of time are special moments. They are the alpha and omega of a series of events or, in the absence of consciously noticeable changes during the in-between "passing of time," of non-events. Moments are changes upon which a subject, waiting or deliberately preparing for the experience of desire-fulfillment, focuses his or her attention. Some of the energy of the whole organism is "tensed toward" what is happening. We can measure the interval between such occurrences, as well as the speed at which they pass and attract the consciousness of the subject during a period of waiting.
A period of waiting may refer to a complex and difficult process of preparation for some final fulfillment. It may be a "test" which must be undergone, a surgical operation to be performed, or a decisive meeting with a would-be lover or adversary. Such a period may seem too brief to the experiencing person, who may then complain of having "so little time." On the contrary, the feeling may be that "too much time" may still elapse before a desired or feared event can occur — so much more waiting has to be endured! If we say that the event occurred "in time," we mean that we had accurately evaluated the interval between that event and the beginning of the process leading to it. We had estimated the value of the interval according to a standard of measurement defined by two markers of time. Our measuring was accurate; but on what basis was the measuring done?
Originally, as far as human beings are concerned, time measurements have always been made on the basis of the experienceability and repetitiveness of situations referring to the dynamic structure of some "greater whole" within whose field of activity the human experiencer operated. That structure provided him or her with standardized markers of time; and by so doing it made possible the measurement of repetitive periods of time having easily definable and commonly acceptable beginnings and ends. The selected greater whole usually was our planet; its daily rotation and its yearly revolution around the sun evidenced a definite rhythm. Other kinds of greater wholes have been used: a religion featuring a series of feast days and centennial periods, the nation whose laws establish periodical recurrences (such as the date of paying income tax), or the schedule followed by a business firm for which a person works. In all cases, by establishing such markers of time in the common experience of a social community, the structure of the greater whole definitely affects the sense of time of the people of the community. It affects their general feeling of having enough or too little time, and of the speed at which this commodity is being spent.
In our Western civilization time is considered an objective commodity of which a small or large amount is available in the interval between two markers of time. We possess such a commodity; it is a kind of wealth or power. The amount which is ours to use can be measured, apportioned, and spent wisely or carelessly according to the vast number of biological needs, socio-cultural requirements and personal ego-wants seeking satisfaction. These wants may appear to be very personal. In fact, they follow a scale of values definitely conditioned and often rigidly determined by a collective culture and religion, and by the example of parents and friends.
The main events most people use for determining the amount of time available to them as particular persons are quite obviously the birth and death of their physical organism, without which no experience would be possible, at least at the present level of human activity and consciousness. Each person's life-span is the period during which the possibility of fulfilling a more or less lengthy series of desires exists. This possibility sets limits to the person's situation, first as a living organism in the biosphere, then as a participant in a sociocultural complex of activities and a partially integrated field of "psychism" (collective consciouness and mass emotions), and finally as an autonomous and self-determined individual-in-the-making in whom a conscious subjective realization of relatively unique and independent identity is developing more or less effectively. The entire life-process experienceable by such a person may lead to the at least partial fulfillment of what was possible when birth (or it may be claimed, the impregnation of an ovum by a spermatazoid) marked the beginning of time for that particular human situation. Time ends when the marker called death occurs; and as it ends, there is "no more time" in the experienceable sense of the word. One may nevertheless assume that a new situation has emerged from the old. Such a post mortem situation can be imagined in many ways, and religious and occult revelations have provided a great variety of descriptions.
The great majority of human beings, even if followers of a religion teaching the immortality of the Soul, are never too sure whether what the teaching calls "Soul" actually refers to the gut-feeling of being - l, Peter or Jane; and it is to such a feeling that they cling, terrified of feeling it vanish. The average person all over the world fears death, because he or she is not fully open to the emergence of a new situation in which an as-yet-unknown type of relationship between the familiar factors in their experiences would operate. The unknown is frightening, and entire cultures may be polarized by such a fear. They seek ways of escape, or of prolonging the existence of objective forms in which they tried to condense (as a plant does in a seed) the essential quality of their contribution to the evolution of mankind. Perhaps the most basic desire of individuals or societies is to endure — to deny the inevitability of an end to what, as time, had a beginning.
To refuse to accept this inevitability of death is not, however, to experience timelessness. What is timeless has neither beginning nor end. Change is timeless, just as Wholeness is unlimited by the particularity and dimensionality of any whole. Cyclicity, as we shall see, remains invariant whether cycles are of short or cosmic duration. Death is not the great enemy. The enemy is our binding desire to control and perpetuate ourselves.
Living in the now
The non-existence of time after the period of beingness of any whole has ended does not imply the cessation of the continuum of change, or of the succession of situations produced by the cyclic interplay of the two principles of Unity and Multiplicity. This interplay is what human beings perceive as motion, or the dynamic character of Wholeness. Motion implies the unceasing passing from one state of Unity-to-Multiplicity relatedness to the next. The word passing is stressed because as one deals with the process of change as a cyclic whole (the Movement of Wholeness), one no longer focuses attention upon moments of time, as if they could be separated from one another, but rather upon the sequence of changes. Nevertheless, if one intends to define the exact relation of an experienced event to markers of time in terms of the activity of conscious, autonomous, and responsible individuals, one has to refer to a precise moment assumed to have a specific character. One has to time (verb form) actions according to an experienced or required sequence of time-entities (moments) and the possible speed at which the actions can be carried out.
In order to make such a process possible, mind has to interpret the experience of sequence (of before and after) in terms of the quasi-dimensionality of past, present, and future. The individualization of "time units" called moments and made (consciously or not) to resemble living organisms that are born, mature, and die, is undoubtedly necessary when the ego and its desires dominate the human situation. Moreover, at this stage a clearcut distinction is made between an experiencing subject and what it experiences as if it were outside itself. But this is only a phase, however enduring and tenacious, of the human experience of change on which the awareness of existence itself is based. Whether it is the individualization of the continuum of change or that of the state of personhood, individualization inevitably engenders a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding.
The concept of action "in the present" is particularly confusing. The reason is that, strictly speaking, the present is only a dimensionless line of demarcation between past and future. It has no more dimensionality than, in geometry, the lines forming a triangle have thickness, or a mathematical point has spatial extension. The present separates the future from the past but it is also their merging into each other. Where the future meets the past is a very vaguely defined yet extensive moment or series of moments called "now." When philosophers, psychologists and mystics speak of "living in the now," they refer to a more or less brief period of transition which actually has a time-dimension, though it may be characterized as "timeless" because of its special quality as the moment at which the human capacity for decision and action should be focused.
What is meant by "living in the now" (as we are acting or taking decisions) is to be neither affected (or even haunted) by the memory of past experiences — our own and/or those of our ancestors, educators or associates — nor fascinated by an over-idealized and unrealistic subjective longing for a future state, or by an unrealistic, fear of what it may bring. It is also to face in a thoroughly awake condition of consciousness, and with focused intent whatever situation may be just ahead.
The situation has not come; it is not "present" Yet one should be in a constant state of readiness to meet it. For instance, if the driver of a car allows his feelings to dwell upon a deeply depressing past experience of frustrated love, or lets his imagination be entranced by the glowing mistiness of Utopian expectations, so that attention is not focused on the road, he may fail to react effectively to the erratic action of another driver suddenly in the wrong lane, and a fatal head-on collision may occur. In this case, of course, the computer-like level of the mind may have been programmed or trained to react automatically in the correct manner. But any training process implies a reference to and use of a knowledge based on collective past experience, and it even includes a certain amount of expectation — the expectation of possible results.
When a modern philosopher-psychologist eulogizes living in the now, he or she actually means meeting life's experiences as an individual being no longer motivated and deeply affected by the way of thinking-feeling-behaving which family and culture had imposed upon mind-development since birth. Theoretically, living in the now should mean being totally unconditioned by any past. But one is always conditioned by the past, whether it be the past of the long process of biological evolution which built a human body and its brain, or the past of a people and their culture which provided a language with definite words and a syntax establishing rigid structures of relationship between all the elements of experience. The more intense (as well as traumatic or fame-producing) the events of the first part of a person's life have been, the more impossible it will be for the biological, psychic, and intellectual impressions of these events to be totally eradicated, especially if the person claiming to live in the now has been motivated (consciously or not) by the occurrences to build on them a philosophy of life.
The phrase living in the now may be a convenient way of systematizing and perhaps glorifying a somewhat self-conscious approach to human existence, stressing the specific quality of a newly activated center of individualized consciousness. Having succeeded to some degree in freeing itself from the binding pressures of culture, and being eager to emphasize the value and excitement of that "liberation" — however relative it may have been — this new center of consciousness is, as it were, mythologizing its feeling-responses.
The basic issue is always the nature or stage of evolution of who it is that "lives in the now." Plants and wild animals live in the now, because life "lives them" in terms of its indismissible needs and instinctual modes of response. In his Epistles, Paul states that he is no longer a separate individual entity that "lives," because God "lives him." To many mystics and theosophists, living in the now implies living in the presence of God or the "Master." But the realization of such a "presence" should not be confused with what, in relation to past and future conditions of existence, is called "the present." Nothing can be done in the present, for the present — I repeat — is only an abstract line separating past from future. Yet it need not be considered a dimensionless line; it need not separate any condition of being, if the passing — the moment of being — is experienced as a presence, as the dynamic aspect of Wholeness.
There is motion always and everywhere. That motion is structured, operating as wholes of change, as cycles or eons. Living in the now implies a focusing of the attention of the experiencing subject upon one particular phase of the cycle of change. In the fullest experience possible to a human being, any phase of the Movement of Wholeness is lived in terms of what it reveals of the structure and meaning of the whole eon — thus sub specie eternitatis. The moment is lived in the presence of Wholeness. Through it the entire cyclic interaction of the two great principles of Unity and Multiplicity is envisioned.
This interaction operates always and everywhere, yet it is ever-changing. Because variations are possible it is always new; yet, as we shall see, it is also invariant in its total structure because every variation is balanced by a compensatory action. How puny is any "now" unless one can feel in and through it the immense resonance of the whole cycle — the "always and everywhere" of unconditioned Wholeness!
Yet the destiny, function, or dharma of humanity requires both that the expansive power of desires for self-actualization and that the capacity of the mind at the human level to objectify, entitize, analyze, and measure, should experience their fullest possible development in Man. The pressure of the principle of Multiplicity compels men and women to focus their attention upon parts and the mutual interaction of these parts, rather than to resonate to the rhythm of Wholeness in any whole. The same pressure leads the human mind to dimensionalize the continuum of change. That pressure must be obeyed during the phase in the evolution of human culture in which the dominant desire of the subjective factor in human experience is to express itself as an ego. The ego is unconcerned with the deep tide of human evolution because it feels essentially separate from other individual persons with conflicting ambitions. Then the human mind has to measure all it perceives, because it is urged to control the energies latent in nature for the satisfaction of ever-new desires.
The most crucial and fateful application of the power to measure is the measuring of time — time now objectivized as a commodity and no longer whole, no longer cyclically structured; the time of stop-watches and electronic interferometers and of the abstract equations of the Einsteinian Theory of Relativity.
Objective Time, Causality, and The Measure of Time
The foregoing discussion dealt with the experience of subjective beings who have desires (or at the biological level, vital needs) and seek satisfaction of them in and through situations able to provide it. This satisfaction has two basic features: the process of fulfillment "takes time," and it usually involves the concept of causation — a definite sequence of cause-and-effect, the effect being the cause of further effects. If the principle of causality as it is usually understood today is to be taken as universally true, the categories of "before" and "after" are also to be given an absolute character. A cause occurs before its effect. It occurs in what has ambiguously been called "linear" time. A particular cause, believed to be past or present, can be expected to produce a definable future effect.
Thus interpreted, a series of experienced situations assumes an objective character. Objectivity, however, refers to the fact that a relation between the experiencing organism and another entity occupies the mind's attention. A subjective experience, on the other hand, refers to the change directly affecting a whole organism and its centralizing consciousness. When a person is burned by a hot stove in the dark, there is in the experience itself no immediate realization of the stove as a source of heat. However, the mind is called upon to establish both the existence of a hot stove and the precise character of the gesture which brought about the relation between the hand and the stove. Relation generates objectivity. The world around us is objective only because we relate to its many components.
Therefore what is involved in giving objectivity to time — and in a similar sense, to space — is the fact that when consciousness is dominated by mental processes, it deals primarily with relations rather than with experienced changes (events) in themselves. Objective time refers to the succession of changing relations; objective space, to a complex group of "positions" occupied by entities with which a human being can, conceptually if not actually and experienceably, relate himself in terms of measurable "distance" (proximity or remoteness). Whether we refer to objective time or dimensional space we are dealing with a substratum of relatedness; that is, with an abstract factor or principle of existence without which there could be no experienced relation. Within this substratum, events occupy positions. The substratum — whether it be space or time, or today in science space-time — contains time-sequences and/or space-positions; but in either case the relations between experienced events and entities are at least partially determined by their distance (in spatial terms) and by the before-and-after succession (in terms of time sequence). Space and time are assumed to be empty containers. As spatial and temporal entities move within the containers, the relations between these entities change; but space and time remain a theoretically infinite possibility of relation. Whether the human mind sees this space and time filled with events or apparently empty, in either case they are abstractions. Their only meaning is as frames of reference which make measurements possible.
If, however, there is an infinite possibility of relations, two of the basic concepts of Western science and of "commonsense" human knowledge, namely, causation and gravitation, may turn out to be neither sacrosanct nor theoretically unchallengeable. Time-sequence may not follow only one cause-and-effect line. The sense of position in time natural for human consciousness may be superseded not only by a much more inclusive fan-like unfoldment of effects, but even by the transformation of the before-and-after sequence. Causation is, of course, an experience common to all human beings; yet today the mind claims the ability to imagine time-sequences not subject to the cause-and-effect (or even before-and-after) sequence, as well as space-relations between masses which would not obey gravitation. In a gravitation-free universe, the concept of physically measurable distance would not be a determining factor in controlling the motion of spatially-determined entities.
If we think of a measurable space between entities, or of measurable time between the emergence of a desire and its satisfaction, we have to give space and time a definitely objective reality. This reality can only have an altogether abstract character, difficult to understand and impossible to experience. It is a construct of the mind which may reveal the natural way for the human mind to operate at this stage of the planet's evolution. The activities of human beings seemingly require such an abstract frame of reference in which events occur and physical masses are located. Events and material objects must have positions in space and time, for without positions there can be no way of measuring when and where to act. Without one-directional causation sequence (before-and-after), commonsense daily expectability and the scientific prediction of events would be impossible. Such an impossibility would deny any meaning to human efforts at transformation and to moral values, since any act might cause any reaction. For the mind to assume the reality of such a non-ordered situation would be in fact suicidal. Such an assumption would separate mental processes from the experience of being as an integrated whole in a consistently organized structure of situations to which a meaning can be given. This is in fact only possible through the use of words and relations between words divorced from experienceable reality.
The act of measuring is most likely an important part of even the most primitive types of cultural and collective activities. But the principle of measurement in ancient times was certainly not what it is understood to be today in a Western world mentality which, because of the spectacular way in which the principle has "worked," has made it the basis of the only kind of scientifically acceptable knowledge. Not only the practice of measurement, but also the concept of quantity as a defining factor in all relations, have acquired — particularly since the sixth century B. C. in East-Mediterranean regions — a rather new and all-pervasive character. What seems to have been a mostly intuitive sense of proportion and rhythm became intellectualized and objectivized by the increasingly precise reference of events to standards of measurement accepted by philosophers and scientists all over the world.When Pythagoras taught his disciples how to refer personal experiences of tone to a measurable length of vibrating string (the monochord), he may have given the impetus which led the Greek culture to glorify the practice of measuring and the meaning of "proportion." Yet for him, Number and Proportion were not merely abstract concepts but were cosmic principles which could be experienced directly, or at least reflectively. Pythagoras is said to have been able to experience the "Music of the Spheres"; but when he referred to planets and the spatial intervals between them, and to what became known as the Pythagorean scale, he was not thinking of the physical mass of celestial bodies, but of principles of organization of what he already knew to be a sun-centered cosmos (heliocosm).
In ancient Greece the term intellect had a highly spiritual meaning, essentially different from the modern use. What was then the "new mind" was a mind of pure relationship and proportion, rationality, and beauty; and its measuring power was believed to be the means to give concrete, experienceable form to cosmic order. This concretized order was the invariant foundation of "the Beautiful" it was only during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. that an abstract formalism developed, substituting itself for the experience of pure proportions.(1)
1) See my recent book The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Shambhala Publications, 1982, chapter four. Now available free online at the Rudhyar Archival Project.
The monochord was a rather crude instrument; and so were the sundials and clocks used to reveal the time at which the bells of churches and city halls were rung as vibrant markers of time for a whole integrated community. But as social and business processes became increasingly complex and required more precise "timing" of exactly when to begin and end a particular activity, time-measuring devices became more exact They also became individualized, providing for each person his or her own time, thus breaking up the wholeness of personal experience into a series of fragmented happenings.
When changes which affect and to some extent transform an entity (or group of entities) are measured in precise quantitative terms, what is measured has to have an objective character; it is perceived as being external to the measurer. Moreover, the entity in question must have a beginning and, however remote it may be, an end. The process of change being measured should be divisible and commensurate with a previously accepted standard of measurement. While in olden days the standard of measurement necessarily had some kind of relation to the experiences of the measurer — a life-span, certain proportions of the human body, etc. — in modern science the units of measurement, at both ends of the scale of quantitative values, no longer have any experienceable or even rationally imaginable meaning. This leads to the belief that what the atomic scientist and astronomer attempt to measure actually belongs to a level of being which transcends, if not the human condition of existence, then at least the interpretive power of the modern mind. It makes one suspect that the most basic postulate of science — i.e. that "laws of nature" are true everywhere in space and at any time (even at the Big Bang!) — is not true, because the method and perhaps the very concept of measurement apply only to the space "in the neighborhood" of the measurer — which may mean in astronomical terms our Milky Way galaxy, or what the experience of human eyes can observe and directly measure.
One might phrase the issue differently by asking whether man should trust his mental processes of interpretation rather than his senses. So stated, the issue seems easily answered by the obvious unreliability of human senses in many well-known situations. Yet what is unreliable are the sense-perceptions of an individual human being. They are unreliable because they originate not only from one local point of observation, but also from the specific perspective of a particular culture; and perhaps above all because they are affected by the subjective state and the desires (unconscious though they be) of an individual perceiver and experiencer.
The preceding statement, however, should not be construed to imply that anything depending upon a subjective factor is unreliable — though this is the general approach taken by modern Western science. There could be a unanimous as well as an individualized kind of subjectivity, and I shall deal with the former when speaking of the Pleroma state of being. Indeed, a gradually emerging desire to base collective decisions on a consensus (thus the principle of unanimity) rather than on majority rule has recently become noticeable. This may be not only because of the irrational assumption that the decision of 51% of a people is wiser than that of 49%, but also because of the deep feeling that anything having a fundamental human validity should involve the whole of mankind. It should command unanimous acceptance at the level of subjectivity, rather than in terms of a system of intellectual concepts mathematically proven to be "true." But how could all human beings reach a state of unanimity of desires? How could they all have the same desire expressing a unified, all-human subjective self as they are confronted by a fundamental experience implying a crucial choice?
Majority rule and the statistical approach in general are concepts whose validity is evident where strictly intellectual processes operate. They belong to the level not only of formalistic theories, but to the concept of form itself. Modern science has recognized the pitfalls of such thinking by stressing the need for any experiment to be repeatable under varying circumstances for a relative consensus of trained observers and theorists. Likewise, modern democracy since the foundation of the United States of America has more or less reluctantly accepted the existence of self-evident truths and inalienable rights belonging to all human beings, not just to the majority or (even less) to a ruling minority. Nevertheless, the powers of perception and the mentality of "trained" observers, as well as the essential beliefs imbedded in a particular culture and the particular conditions of collective existence, do not necessarily have the same character at the level of mind. In human experiences, mind is the interpreter; and interpretation implies a frame of reference which can differ in various cultures. If a frame of reference is to be acceptable to all human beings, it must be based both on the realization that there is a superhuman structure of being underlying the diversity of culture-conditioned collective mentalities, and on the vivid awareness of a more-than-human Being — a "Subject" whose subjective selfhood encompasses in a transcendent manner and unifies all individual selves.
Such a Subject has been given the name of God; and the superhuman structure of being subsuming all natural or cosmic "laws" formulated and formalized by the human mind has been defined as God's Plan of Creation and the manifestation of His Will. This manifestation has a mysterious, humanly incomprehensible and non-rational purpose; but as human beings we are part of it, and we find ourselves existing on a planet whose regular motions provide a sufficiently reliable and effective frame of reference for our sense of time as long as we relate our desires and our basic activities to its simple rhythms.
"Natural time" is God's time; and long ago I spoke of it as "God's compassion for chaos." But in a practical, experiential sense it is planetary time. It is time which all human beings have to use as the substratum of their collective and individual feeling regarding the succession of events and the timing of their vitalistic activities. It has to be used until the phase of human evolution comes at which the development of particular cultures challenges, transforms, or deviates from the planetary rhythm of natural time. When our Western civilization succeeded in imposing upon human experience interpretations derived from the rationalistic, analytical and individualizing mind, natural planetary time based on the relation of earth-localities to the sun became superseded by "clock time."
Clock time is a collectively accepted but also an individualized kind of time in which any position of the hands of a clock can be taken as "the beginning of time." In its most characteristic form, clock time is time measured by stop watches, and in a far more sophisticated way, by electronic devices using the speed of light as a basic frame of reference, instead of the sunrise and sunset of planetary time. Clock time, in the most general sense of the term, is the frame of reference enabling human beings — whether in institutionalized groups or as individuals — to schedule their actions in order to satisfy their collective or personal desires. Scheduling activity implies dividing time as an available commodity into small individualized entities (moments) whose duration (or length) can be measured and thus given the character of dimensionality. A standard of measure has to be used, and Einstein's revolutionary concepts emerged in the young scientist's mind in answer to a question concerning light — light whose speed he assumed to be constant and unsurpassable. Yet for him, light was not meant to be a fact of direct natural experience (as is the rising sun) but was a generalized mental interpretation which had been validated by complex measurements and mathematical formulae. A system of interpretation — a "theory" — was formulated in an abstract language based on a frame of reference (or syntax) in which time is only one of four coordinates. These four factors are needed to establish the exact position at which anything can be found and when any "event" occurs.
The question, "Why should this position be known?" is very important, yet rarely asked. The answer one gives has a crucial bearing on the concept of measured time and on the validity of science in general. The only realistic answer is that man must know the exact time and place at which an event will occur in order to be able to control it. To control any process is to exert power over it for the purpose of using its results for the satisfaction of a desire. The kind of desire to be satisfied varies, of course, with the personal or social situation; but the value attached to precise scientific knowledge in our present-day world cannot be doubted. It is used to increase chances of survival and material comfort, and in the conquest of new territory and the utilization of its resources. This territory is at first physical; but during the last centuries the conquest and development of a mental kind of territory, and the control of intellectual processes involving research, observation, and a systematized body of interpretation, have become dominant factors in the evolution of Western civilization.
This is not the place to elaborate a complete theory of knowledge, but the use of knowledge and the approach to time are closely related. From a historical point of view it should be evident that the concept of "knowledge for knowledge's sake," and the belief that all that is known should be available to anyone, at any time, in any place, and under any conditions, are very new factors in the development of the human mind. In all previous cultures the value of knowledge and the advisability of imparting it have been conditioned by the state of being of the person who would receive that knowledge, and therefore by the expected use this knower would make of it. This use is evidently motivated by the nature and quality of the knower's desires — thus by the level at which his or her subjective self operates — which in turn depends upon his or her state of evolution as a living organism of the homo sapiens type and as a participant in a sociocultural system of organization. Science is usually considered today as the product of a basic human impulse to ascertain more and more facts, and to discover the invariable laws according to which matter, life, society and individual persons operate. But only in our mind-dominated culture is this impulse to know isolated from its basic, even if unconscious, motive: the control of the power which can be released and used in any situation a human being may face.
There are evidently many scientists motivated in their research and their complex intellectual operations solely by what can be rightfully called the "search for knowledge." But it can be so defined because such persons have their consciousness focused mainly at the level of intellectual processes of formulation and (more specifically) formalization. The mind factor dominates their experiences, at least at the level of culture and institutionalized social relationships. They are born to take new steps in the development of the collective mind of their society. It is their dharma; and naturally they give to their (in some instances) obsessive impulse a meaning to which a high social value is attached.
The desire to control is in itself a fundamental characteristic of the human state. Because human beings can to some extent control the sequence of natural changes and introduce into it unnatural releases of power, they are able to take, consciously and deliberately, the next step in the evolutionary process operating within the all-inclusive field of activity of the earth as a planetary organism. And, of course, they may also refuse to take it for a variety of reasons. Human beings are apparently endowed with free will. Free will is the ability to control situations in order to satisfy individual or group desires; and this ability implies the operation of mental processes that provide a technique which can be used to release latent energies — whether biological or social — in order to serve a desired and sustained purpose. The essential factor is the quality of the desire.
The process of effectively and reliably controlling a sequence of changes (or events) requires the act of measurement. As already stated, one has to know precisely where and when the change will take place in order to control it. A frame of reference has to be established in which the elements in an evolving situation which is to be controlled can be accurately defined and exactly located. This is the basic function of calculus. Since Einstein, this frame of reference is generally understood as four-dimensional space-time. In that frame of reference, time loses its subjective meaning. Nothing is being revealed of the motive for control, or of the quality of the experience of waiting for the possible actualization of the potential change. The dimensionalizing of time leads to the experiential absurdity of "traveling" backward in time, unless one considers the possibility of moving faster than light away from the earth while retaining a human consciousness — which may be just as absurd.
The basic issue always remains the motive for the control of natural processes. To accelerate the evolution of humanity in the direction pursued by the Movement of Wholeness (the great cycle of change) may indeed be a supremely valid purpose if based on what I shall soon define as "Compassion." On the other hand, the desire to control situations for the sake of experiencing, at the level of the ego, a subjective feeling of power and personal or collective pride, inevitably leads, sooner or later, to destructive results. This kind of desire unfortunately is very powerful in the approach our modern civilization takes to time. Behind such an approach is the increasingly feverish multiplication and complexification of desires which the consciousness of the individual person, operating at the ego level of subjectivity, seeks to cram between an immense number of narrowly separated markers of time, and especially of course between the two fundamental ones — birth and death — the beginning and end of measurable time.
Because an over-stimulated mind presents to the ego an unaccomplishable array of possibilities to be desired, there seems to be never "enough time" to actualize them. The more time is measured in small units, the more crowded it becomes, and the more the end of time, death, is feared. Yet if the individualized consciousness could relax into a state of desirelessness and accept the cyclic rhythm of change, death could be but a rite of passage from one level of experiential situations to another.
The fragmented concept of measured time finds its opposite in the realization of the wholeness of time. The isolated moment so rapidly passing, and the anxiety of "not enough time" can vanish or be transcended when the consciousness accepts the cyclic nature of existence. Cyclicity is indeed the dynamic aspect of Wholeness. Always and everywhere Wholeness operates in cycles of motion.
The Fullness of Human Experience
