The mind may be timeless, so when we dream we enter a timeless dimension. Think about the precognitive dream, or the slowing down of time in a dream in which we may dream of a long series of events that took place during a split second it took for an object in the room we're sleeping in, that fell to the floor and made the particular sound when it hit, and which triggered the series of events in our dream that seemed to take a lot longer than the thud with which the object hit the floor (does this labyrithine last sentence read like gobbledygook?)
Time for a life-form that lives only an instant, is much faster than for us, who live, if we’re lucky, eighty years or more, since for, the aforesaid life form, the instant it lives, encompassing its birth, youth, maturity and death, is as long to it as eighty years is for us. If we could observe this life-form we would see its past, present and future in our present moment. When we sleep and enter the timeless zone we may see the past present and future of our corporeal self as if it is the present, from the vantage point of our dreaming self in the timeless zone.
If there is a timeless zone, that part of us which enters it when we sleep will never die, and this part may be the essential us.
And time-travel isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, for we travel back in time constantly, in our memories and in our dreams. We can recall our past any time, at any moment. What power. And we, the glib children of twenty-first century enlightenment living our unexamined lives, just take this for granted.
Imagine actually travelling back in time, and perhaps visiting that great-great grandparent whose stern Victorian visage stared at you from out of a black-and-white photo or "likeness" in your family photo album that you gazed at when you were a child and which you've never forgotten.
How well would the two of you communicate, given that your putative great-great grandparent wouldn't know about the first or second world wars or about the atomic bomb or 747 jetliners or 9/11 or television or cell-phones or the birth-control pill or George Bush or........
Your great-great grandparent might well experience you as an alien from another planet and be appropriately terrified.
2 comments:
If we could solve the riddle of time we might solve the riddle of death, for death and life are, to use a terrible cliché, inextricably intertwined.
The mind may be timeless, so when we dream we enter a timeless dimension. Think about the precognitive dream, or the slowing down of time in a dream in which we may dream of a long series of events that took place during a split second it took for an object in the room we're sleeping in, that fell to the floor and made the particular sound when it hit, and which triggered the series of events in our dream that seemed to take a lot longer than the thud with which the object hit the floor (does this labyrithine last sentence read like gobbledygook?)
Time for a life-form that lives only an instant, is much faster than for us, who live, if we’re lucky, eighty years or more, since for, the aforesaid life form, the instant it lives, encompassing its birth, youth, maturity and death, is as long to it as eighty years is for us. If we could observe this life-form we would see its past, present and future in our present moment. When we sleep and enter the timeless zone we may see the past present and future of our corporeal self as if it is the present, from the vantage point of our dreaming self in the timeless zone.
If there is a timeless zone, that part of us which enters it when we sleep will never die, and this part may be the essential us.
And time-travel isn’t as far fetched as it sounds, for we travel back in time constantly, in our memories and in our dreams. We can recall our past any time, at any moment. What power. And we, the glib children of twenty-first century enlightenment living our unexamined lives, just take this for granted.
Imagine actually travelling back in time, and perhaps visiting that great-great grandparent whose stern Victorian visage stared at you from out of a black-and-white photo or "likeness" in your family photo album that you gazed at when you were a child and which you've never forgotten.
How well would the two of you communicate, given that your putative great-great grandparent wouldn't know about the first or second world wars or about the atomic bomb or 747 jetliners or 9/11 or television or cell-phones or the birth-control pill or George Bush or........
Your great-great grandparent might well experience you as an alien from another planet and be appropriately terrified.
Yes they are inextricably intertwined, though you have to have been around enough of both to know it.
No gobbledygook, by the way.
Talking about instant lives vs. longer ones, has always been present for me. You touch on something deep.
We can recall "our past any time, at any moment," but narrative of the month, week, hour shifts that past to a new moment any time.
I for one would love to visit the vintage past in my family. Instead I dream.
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