Time ..unreal?

[undergroundpanther]

When we measure our accomplishments, the progress of our lives, in terms of clock time, what happens when we find that that measure is a chimera (="a fanciful mental illusion")?

Perhaps what James Taylor, in his song The Secret of Life, described as "enjoying the passage of time" is really just letting go of linear 'clock time' and living at least in part in Now Time, the time that (according to some biologists like Peter Beamish) all non-human creatures live in, except in times of great stress. It's not so much that we enjoy the "passage" as that we don't notice it, we don't 'pay attention' to it. And perhaps then we realize that it is an illusion, a construct.
Our sense of mortality creates a scarcity of time, such that we have to "save" it, and that's what causes us to pay attention to it, and to invent constructs to 'account' for it. I think other creatures are aware of their mortality but in an entirely different, non-cerebral way. So for them, time is abundant and need not be conserved or meted out. They have no sense of "wasting" time, so they live in 'Now Time', an eternal present.

Time is not the only artificial limiting construct, the only life- and behaviour-constraining model we modern humans have invented. We invented language and numbers, for example, because we needed a means to convey instructions to subordinates in the early days of civilization. Until then, our cultures were egalitarian (the way indigenous cultures are even today) and people learned what they needed by observation, not by instruction. We needed to invent language to narrow their focus, keep them in place and time, prevent them from dreaming.


Meanwhile, the rest of all-life-on-Earth, including those pesky indigenous tribes that have no words for time, understand that time is a chimera, a construct, a falsity, meaningless outside of the artificial context of other elaborate, fragile civilized human hoaxes.

The 'moments' when my life has had most meaning, when I have been most alive, in the real world, connected with all-life-on-Earth, have been those moments when I escaped from time, lived outside of it, became utterly unaware of its absurdity and its constraints. At those moments I was infinite, aware beyond any semantic definition of awareness, so full of love that I became love, and free from everything that has constrained, limited, subdued, deluded, indoctrinated me, made me everybody else. I became naturally myself, and naturally a part.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2007/08/01.html#a1939

[Az]

1. You can't escape the illusion of time

You are a product of it. But you can remover the focus on it and just let yourself be. You are still defined in large part by linear time. You can't be here and there at the same time. You can't be in the future and you can't be in the past. But you can realize the now and stop trying to be in the past or the future. It is that obsession that many have to trying to figure out what went wrong or what is going to happen that takes them out of the now. Living in one's head is what creates a lot of these temporal problems. You are only now and sometimes it is relaxing to realize this and simply enjoy it.

[1620rock]

2. Now that I am retired and growing old this concept can at last be

grasped and practiced as the time intense rituals of the work-a-day grind can be discarded.

It has been said by someone who is religious/spiritual that God existed and exist beyond the confines of time and space. Before the big bang God existed there, and exists there now.

Only the universe since the big bang now exist within the confines of time and space.

[undergroundpanther]

5. This is weird

I have no sense of time. I forget the days, the months .I get pretty embarrassed when I am asked a day or date or even my own age because I don't feel an age. It's awkward because I don't know what day it is.I have to think or ask them.. It is very hard for me to do anything "on time" because what is 5 minutes? I really don't know what that IS.I can't get the concept.. I show up too early or I am late. Maybe time really confuses the hell out of me.And as crazy as it seems I cannot read a analog clock,it makes NO SENSE..to me. I need people to tell me exactly what number they want me to be there. And I use a digital clock and keep counting until it gets to that number.Kinda like a stop watch that is the only way I can understand anything about time.The sun is what determines time to me more accurately I ask where is it? The moon where is it?
If someone told me be there when shadows grow long I'd know when. But phrases like quarter after I just don't understand that.
It's really strange.I really don't understand time I never got it.

[Kip Humphrey]

3. BINGO!

[villager]

4. One of my favorite of the Salon blogsters

Thanks, U.P....