A Parapsychology of Time
It’s probably fair to say that a great many things are not as they seem… or, perhaps more specifically, they are often a function of what they seem. At the risk of briefly revisiting painful high school memories, a mathematical function is the formulation of a set of variables in a way that relates a specific input to a specific output. Additionally, in cryptography, complex hash functions are used to conceal data in a way that can only be deciphered by someone with the key. Without this key, the message appears to be a meaningless string of digits.
So what does any of this have to do with time? Well, if you ask someone what time it is, they will likely look at their watch or phone, and, without a second thought, give you a short numeric answer because they have been taught the key to that function; but if you ask them what time is, which is by far the more important of the two questions, they would likely look at you quizzically as if you had incoherently babbled some random string of ones and zeros. And it’s really no wonder, since even the bleeding edge of theoretical physics has failed to reach a consensus definition of time that isn’t at least partly circular, relying on terms like passage, duration, sequence, or progress which can themselves be broken back down into the same fundamental units of change and entropy.
We have derived, throughout the ages, increasingly precise ways of measuring time, from the reliable movement of celestial bodies and pendulum motion, to the electrically-induced oscillations of quartz crystals and the rate of radioactive decay, all without making much progress at all in understanding the underlying dimension itself. So, rather than venturing further into the exposition of time as a physical phenomenon where those far more insightful than I have come up short, I’d like to switch gears to a more visceral, experiential exploration of how and why time matters to us.
It’s frightfully easy to attend to the things of life as though the explicit in each moment is the appropriate level of address. However, it’s not uncommon to then arrive at day’s end, feeling as though what was demanded of us to see it through had drawn us away from where it happened, and we were nowhere to be found in it. But where, instead, were we? It isn’t so much a question of position or location, but rather one of relation and orientation. We were, of course, there… but we weren’t there at all…
This was the sort of trap I had found myself in for quite a large part of the past couple years. It felt almost as though I had made the right decision at the wrong time, and chose the right path for the wrong reasons — like reading the same book two different pages at a time. In order to hopefully illuminate the distinction I’m trying to make here, I hope you’ll bear with me in making a short detour into our ancient past.
One of the most primitive psychotechnologies that enabled humankind to survive in the tribal, hunter-gatherer landscape of prehistoric times was the molding of our cognitive processes around the development of projectile weapons. The idea of target-directed, goal-oriented projection is so fundamental to our familiar modes of being that it permeates all aspects of our daily conduct. We exist always in relationship to an idealized, yet unrealized future. Like an idea without expression and a soul without a body, it demands of us targeted precision to clarify, and sacrificial action to reify.
We see it perhaps most profoundly in our fascination with sports (notice how many center around the movement of a projectile towards a target). Ask any sports fan how the world is meaningfully changed by a ball thrown down a field or kicked into the back of a net, and they may not be able to answer — after all, the most fundamental truths are those hardest to communicate, since their justification relies more on a presumedly shared understanding than a well-articulated argument — but you can see in their eyes that it does when it happens.
Cumulatively, we pay billions to bear witness to the kinds of collaborative and competitive engagement found in each of these microcosmic worlds. We too want to die alive one day, scoring that goal or running that ball into the end zone. It’s an exhibition of how to live and how to die rolled into one, since there is, in fact, no technical distinction to be made between living well and dying well. Everyone knows that a goal deserves the fan chant and that victory merits an ovation. It’s all a liturgy of its own kind and an embodied philosophical arena for the non-abstractly inclined. The athletes and audience are brought together in the mutually uplifting pursuit of a game well-played and a triumph well-earned.
We elect the best among us to represent the best in ourselves, and we outsource their discovery to the theater of creative endeavor. From athlete to artist and author to actor, we all live in service of our various definitions of success. The irony is, however, that most who find its summit also find out the hard way that living in the limelight is cold, and worship was meant only for God. Few indeed are adequately equipped to carry their own expectations, much less the collective will of a generation. It’s the burden of the many realized only by the few — one of too much potential and the never-ending judgement of too lofty an ideal — a soul paralyzed by its birthright. Power, honor, beauty, knowledge, freedom — such things are the crowns of this world, twisted from thorns, which carve lines in blood all over our royal bloodline. Virtue is seldom unattended by vice, and temptation frequently follows fortune.
Another relevant illustration of this perplexing predicament is the practice of archery. The exaptation from the ideal arc of an arrow to the moral trajectory of its archer lagged only slightly behind the technology of the arrow itself, and the very etymology co-opted for “sin” in the Bible echoes back to this notion of missing the mark. But, as every good archer knows, to hit a distant bullseye, one’s aim must be high. The parallax between the eye and the tip of the arrow at full draw guarantees an arrow pointed at the center of the target will land too high at close range and too low at distance. Even with the much more powerful ammunition used in today’s firearms and artillery, gravity, wind, atmospheric pressure, and even the rotation of the Earth can factor in to the ballistic function required to actually hit the intended target.
Although projectile motion in the physical world is a fairly straightforward mathematical derivative, when it comes to proper engagement with life itself, there’s a necessary element of faith involved in approximating the correct aim. This might be at least partly what Jesus meant by directing his disciples to seek first the Kingdom of God so that all the rest can also be added unto them (Matt 6:33). In the beautifully upside-down, backwards, and inside-out realm of God’s kingdom, the object of our desire ought not to be our own desires.
These examples I hope serve to expand upon the proposition that often the most obvious, seemingly justifiable reactions to the conditions of life can be precisely what get in the way of our contentment with and fulfillment in what we are given. This dissonance accounts for the frustrating feeling we get when it seems like the target was moved once the arrow had already left our bow, when, in fact, it was our aim that was not adequately adjusted to offset for the relevant variables in our daily conduct. Only once we understand what the function of time is doing can we then proceed to adjust some of its variables to achieve the intended equilibrium.
Now let’s return in earnest to our dilemma du jour: Man as he exists today is an uncommon phenomenon. The Swiss cheese theory of a postmodern life is the expenditure of time to accrue less money to afford even less valuable things, or, in the best case, purchase a sliver of that time back in which to do what truly feels like living. At each stage of this voluntary transaction, we are somehow surprised by what little we’re left with. Aspiration is converted to expectation, expectation to realization, and realization to routinization, each devaluation seeming even more necessary than the last in an increasingly desperate attempt to reverse engineer the previous. We guard fiercely the precious remainder of time that we manage to scavenge for ourselves, and, when we finally find a bit of it at our disposal, we promptly dispose of it into the dumpster of various distractions, as if we had forgotten in some previous age our calling to anything greater. In the words of the Joker, we are like “dogs chasing a car, we wouldn’t know what to do if we caught one.”
We’ve all, at one time or another, fallen prey to the singular sensation I like to call “leg lag”, where, in the course of running, the upper body unwittingly outpaces the lower. We know how terrifying it is to experience this feeling ourselves, and how equally hilarious it is to watch it happen to others. Its entertainment value is usually proportional to the amount of time the unfortunate victim manages to remain more or less on their feet, before inevitably grounding flat out in spectacular fashion. It can seem, at times, as though entire weeks, months, and years of our lives can be spent in this state of delayed inevitability — the already, but not yet — bumbling like blundering fools downhill trying desperately to catch up or slow down enough to sync up with the prodigal parts of ourselves that are somehow always elsewhere.
We are therefore relegated to life on the defensive, barely holding it together within the walls of our own skin, failing to effectively extend ourselves out into the world in a manner that could possibly respect its rarity. Far too many find themselves in the catch twenty-two of a Red Queen’s race where it takes all the running they can do to merely stay in the same place. Suffice it to say, when you’re running as fast as you can and don’t seem to be going anywhere, then it’s probably a good time to get off the treadmill.
As we grow up, we quickly learn that time is money, and is therefore best employed in pursuit of such. And as we grow old, we slowly realize that money is time, and is therefore best spent in recovery of the same. But, in reality, both are a means to an end, and only time is time. No second ever passed can be bought back with any amount of money, and no increment of wealth will be able to forestall the ultimate decrement of health. If we really stop to think about it, we already know that, but what we don’t know is the answer to the pesky, ever-present inquiry where the rubber meets the road, “How, then, shall we live?” We want the good times to last and the bad times to pass, but the more tightly we cling to a moment, the more quickly it seems to flee from our grasp. Like water held in the hand, its nature is to escape its container. The past quickly fades, the present evades, and the future parades a new day always just one more away.
The legendary quest for immortality, properly constituted and in its uncorrupted form, is not some vainglorious attempt by the fearful and self-centered to defy ultimate evanescence. Rather, it’s the literary equivalent of the familiar attempt we all make to invest ourselves deeply in the present moment — to somehow capture its lightning in a bottle, and do justice to the gift of being.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero journeys to the bottom of the sea to recover the herb of immortality so as to ensure his stake in eternity, but it is stolen upon his return by a snake attracted to its aroma. Although this account might appear at first to be rather strange, we know exactly what its like to search the submarine depths of our consciousness for the means to preserve our place in the present. However, our category seems incompatible with such a possession, and we inevitably fail to return with the medicament in hand. Like a shadow chasing its caster, we seem to be caught always just one step behind and one dimension shy of the real thing. Of course, once you wake up, it’s hard to remember the dream, always ending too soon what began too late.
In some ways, however, we reflect eternity even now in the fractal ripples of our composition throughout creation. We are made of the same trinity of elemental particles that comprise all matter in the same remarkable formulations that enable the continuous recycling of life’s circle. From dust we are formed and to dust we return. None of this, however, diminishes in any way our exceptionalism. Quite the contrary! Rather, it paints our eccentricities against the backdrop of a truly exceptional universe. How could anything else proceed from an ultimately exceptional Creator?
For these and other reasons, we resonate with certain people, places, and things along our way that enable us to anchor ourselves in the tides of time. We affix ourselves to the artifacts of life and expand our experience so that we might justify our claim on it and our part in it. We try our best to imprint on each other our various essences — the color of our souls — and to etch ourselves indelibly into a collective memory. It’s our own humble attempt at bioluminescence. Things often glimmer, glisten and glow because they want to be seen; they want to be found.
We see parts of our meaning scattered along the many disparate paths unfolding before us, beckoning forward into the unknown. It’s the mythological golden thread weaving itself throughout the world, connecting person to place and soul to space. We journey through life to find more of it, and, in the process, more of ourselves. The Nobel Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot thought that, “the end of our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” It is to realize what we have while we have it and to recover as an adult what we left behind in childhood.
And perhaps we are all still children, looking out into the world through a half cracked closet door — a view from somewhere we could only ever partly belong toward a place we can only vaguely imagine. The only common language we all share is the uniquely familiar sensation of same-but-different: one thought in a thousand, one mind in a million, one being in 8 billion. We all bear the mark of our Creator, the mastery of transformation, to give form to the things of the mind and bring about redemption from corruption. Such is both our burden and honor, and not for the faint of heart. So where are you daring greatly? And where would you dare to believe that lasting life is found? What do you fear? Who do you love? The answers to these questions illuminate much more completely the parameters of our lives than those the more indeterminate features of time and space express. We don’t decide the nature of these constraints, but we do determine what story will be told within their boundaries — the account of the capacity and extent of our humanity.
Some are touched by love and some are in touch with no small part of its source, while others fall prey to pain and begin to covet the cover of darkness. After all, the world is a complicated place, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by both the joy and the suffering. Deep cries out to deep for us to ponder their depths, to live with all we have, and to spend ourselves in search of what might reverence their cry. Take note of what you find in the world that takes your breath away and returns it tenfold; that awe is the response to being captured by your unconscious ideal. Think on such things and treasure them in your heart.
Enter lightly, but come in force. Exaggerate your passion, befriend your enthusiasm, practice your gratitude. Set your heart ablaze and cherish its light. Always be intent on the small. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung insisted that, “Modern man can’t see God because He doesn’t look low enough.” For none who romance the minute are divorced by the day, but many who dwell on the day miss most of its minutes. We find our place in time when we lower ourselves into it — when we bathe ourselves in its present — embracing the stellar brilliance of our passage through it, burning across the sky, one time for all time, each blazing trails of glory toward the timeless One.
