The Reification of Time - VI
Linear time is the matrix of our separated, lower self. Self and time arise together and fall together (dissolve into selflessness and timelessness). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, like infants, didn’t have anywhere near as much sense of a separated self as we moderns do. They were not as individuated as we are today. They paid more attention to their feelings, their intuition, than to their thinking. Ancient humans lived in a more timeless frame of mind, a sense of belonging to the universe. Their mental processing wasn’t a matter of constant thinking, but rather of direct knowing what their ancestors, spirits, and the earth were telling them. They felt themselves to be part of an ongoing, natural process in the same way that we feel ourselves to be part of our society. Because they were not as separated as we are today, they felt less Angst than we do, because they had no future to worry about.
If the future didn’t exist, would we care about it? If we stop thinking so much about the past and future, then the past and future lose much of their meaning. They are just not as important, so they are not as “there”, just as they aren’t as “there” for infants or ancient humans as they are for us. Infant and ancient human consciousness isn’t a matter of the constant dissatisfaction and relentless striving which enables modern humans to focus enough attention to think.
When humans were still hunters, they did not draw as sharp a distinction between being awake and being asleep as we do today, since they slept in snatches when they felt like it instead of in long stretches during the night. Similarly, they didn’t draw as sharp a distinction between past and future as we do now because they didn’t need to – they were more centered in the now moment, hence they experienced their past and future in a more immediate fashion than we do today. They didn’t define themselves as much in terms of personal history (moods) and future aspirations (concerns).
We say, “I am no longer who I was back then” – separating who we are now from who we were at an earlier age. We say, “Someday I will be or do such-and-such” – separating who we are now from who we fantasize we will become. But our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have that much of a sense of separatedness – things that happened to them a long time ago, or that would happen to them some future day (what we would call prescience or sense of destiny), were more a part of who they conceived themselves to be now than they are for us. They were in closer touch with their intent – the feeling of their past and future; they didn’t have as many thought forms interposing a linear order upon their consciousness, imposing some ponderous past and inexorable future upon their present.
It’s precisely us moderns’ caring and worrying about the future that conjures up its existence. We care about the future, it’s important to us, because we believe there’s glory for us somewhere in our future – that we’re going to win the lottery, or find true love, or become famous, or go to heaven, or some other such malarky. What impels each of us individuals forward is the mirage of instant relief from our sufferings and release from our bondage – that miraculous change of luck that we imagine is just over the next hill.
The other side of that coin is our past, the things that we are ashamed of and are trying to forget about (as well as hide from other people). That striving towards a future and slinking away from a past is what creates the illusion that there is such a thing as a future and a past. When striving ends, so too does linear time. This is what we experience in altered states of awareness. In altered states we just don’t give a damn about the past or future – we’re too centered and joyous in the present.
(continued …)