Tag Archives: experience

Perspective on loss

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With time comes loss, and its companion. Grief. Suppose this is just an illusion? Imagine a different perspective if you will. Suppose that time is, as in the words of TS Eliot “eternally present”, and that to be conscious is to be outside time. This is not some crazy notion, indeed Einstein showed that time and space are one – space-time, and that time is relative. For instance as you go faster, so time slows. Many phsyicists and philosophers also subscribe to “panpsychism”, which holds that all of the universe and all matter and energy is conscious. Reality is just more than we normally perceive it to be..

If then all time is then eternally present, then it is our experience which designates it as a flow. It is one perspective amongst many.

I prefer the reality. Every moment is eternal. So then, my brother and my mother and father are still with me at tea in the sunshine of my childhood garden. Always, and no less true than this particular moment sitting alone in a park in a foreign northern city.

Without time – outside time – in our shared consciousness all of these fragments are with me in our treasure house and library.

This is a point of view that also calls me to live fully and lovingly, since also the ripple of my unkind actions remain. Always.

Time as a field?

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It appears that the physical world is governed by fields. Mass and energy depend upon them.

Electricity and magnetism, and therefore the cinema, facebook, light, our e-mail traffic and our clean clothes, are underpinned by the electro-magnetic field (James Clerk Maxwell).

Gravity, and therefore mass itself – structure, form, atoms, molecules and things, result from the gravitational field (Newton, Einstein).

Time results in our sense of experience. Without it nothing is. We sense and experience anything and everything NOW (Alfred North Whitehead). It isn’t the past or future – the “late and soon” of Wordsworth’s poem – where we build existence, it is here and now – the present. The experience of NOW is though only possible because of time. I am not a mathematician, but it seems logical to me to think of time as a field which makes possible NOW. In the same way that the gravitational field makes possible MASS, matter.

I am deeply convinced of our joyful and interconnected existence beyond space and time. We are part of “the Word existing beyond time”. I have a sense that we are droplets here, in this material world. We are boundaried as water is within a droplet as opposed to infinitely inter-connected as within an ocean. Boundary brings loneliness (if we let it), but is essential for experience.

Perhaps time is the field within which this transmutation occurs. Gravity has been described as a “field like treacle that sticks down energy as mass”. Is time the equivalent – a field like treacle that allows spirit to be stuck down as experience? As being.