Perspective on loss

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.

Perspective

The eye of the beholder

Perspective

Perspective is the change in perception relating to a different angle or view. Perspective alters the internal reality and adds layers to understanding of some thing, some idea, some person. The layers are facets of the “real” thing, idea or person. (Were these already there, or do they depend on our seeing them?). Let us imagine for the moment that the “ideal” or “reality” exists without us knowing it, then these aspects lie waiting hidden, curled up, as dimensions to be discovered.

However, that which is perceived is altered by observation. (As demonstrated by quantum mechanics). Therefore perspective weaves together both prior existence and new creation. The angles or perspectives that we as individuals have yet to discover have a proto-existence. Not yet within reality, yet potent. (With high potential), which we activate through perception, and with that – create something entirely new.

Is this what Bion understands in his insight (perspective?) that ideas exist independently and before thought?

“Thinking is a development forced upon the psyche by the pressure of thoughts, and not the other way around” WR BION 1962

Perspective therefore involves processes of discovery (or rediscovery) of what already exists – AND creation since the observation changes what is real. The pressure of pre-existing thoughts create the apparatus for thinking. The thinking transforms the thoughts.

There are two further aspects. Firstly externality. The very nature of perspective requires a boundary. One has to have an observer and observed. Secondly change. Perspective is most useful when there is something new – a change of angle. This allows and opens up the possibility of comparison. This viewpoint ADDED to and COMPARED with that viewpoint. It is this accretion of understanding that is useful and most probably implied when we use the word – perspective.

Perspective. A word with four attendants. Potential, Creation. Externality. Change.