The timely and untimely adventures of Mister Groundhog. Author's Profile
Monday, November 16, 2015
The Mystery of Time - A Groundhog Letter
THE MYSTERY OF TIME
From Groundhog Days – Intercourse on Time
By Melina Costello & David Arthur Walters
September 20, 2003
Dear Madame Melina,
As you know so well, Ouspensky contemplated the mystery of ‘time,’ said he knew nothing, and said that to understand time, one has to know it:
"In reality, of course, no one knows anything. The mystery of existence before birth and existence after death, if there is such existence, is the mystery of time. And 'time' guards its secrets better than many people think. In order to approach these mysteries it is necessary first to understand time itself."
Thinking about time bores most people while good science fiction about time travel does not. Yet the origin of the best science fiction on the subject is abstract speculation about the nature of time. Furthermore, some of the best thinkers throughout time have had an undying interest in speculating about time.
There are many answers to the question, What is time? One being that there is no such thing as time; to which we respond, "All right, then, but what is it that is not? What do you mean by time?"
We have many conceptions of time, but they are not time itself. Psychologically speaking, time seems to be an intuitive faculty, prior to experience, that allows us to order experience in a linear series with three phases: what has happened, or the past, which is all that we really know to some extent; what is happening at the moment, or the present, which we do not know until it passes; and what is to come in the future, which we do not know until we reflect on it after it happens. That is, all that we know has already past, and because of the apparent order of its events, we expect that order to be repeated in the future. It is as if we live in one phase of time, the past, and who can say for sure if there are three phases? Maybe everything has already happened and we are just remembering it over and over as it eternally recurs. Thus do absurd speculations denying time begin; our speculations cannot escape the common sense of time.
Prehistoric and primitive people did not have the sophisticated objective or mechanical conception of time that we do. They might find our everyday tenses incomprehensible; but they had their seasonal and astronomical clocks, regularities which they used to mark or time significant and crucial events. Of course human birth and death are crucial moments; a third is the marriage of birth and death in sexual union, where two die to make a new life - the three Fates attend birth, marriage, and death. Death, a name for whatever is before birth and after death, is no doubt the greatest mystery of all; we wake up every day, therefore we expect to live forever; at first death other than by accident or murder seems to be due to some unnatural or supernatural cause.
Death is very strange to a self-conscious creature used to living. Anthropologists tell us that the awareness that we will die and our response to death is at the very foundation of being human beings. It is said that elephants know they will die and therefore they go off to a secret place to do so; that is somewhat at variance with the recent film of bewildered male elephants trying to get their dead female companion on her feet by using every means at their disposal including lifting her and repeatedly mounting her. But she did not budge. She was dead. Her time was past. Or was it? On that we can speculate while her friends are totally stumped.
Time is somehow bound up with our lives, is essential to our lives; our devices for measuring time may help to maintain and perpetuate life; at the same time, we fell that clocks measure the loss of the individual life as it approaches the great unknown. Some say there is nothing to the unknown as far as the individual is concerned; dust returns to dust and clocks tick for the living; and if none are left living, the great clock wound up still runs on and on until the universe winds down, if it does. Others want more time, in a future life.
Ouspensky said, "The mystery of existence before birth and after death, if there is such existence, is the mystery of time.” He pointed out that we normally associate the three phases of time, Before, Now, and After, with Before Birth, Life, and After Death.
"It is precisely here that the fundamental mistake lies.... Outside this life, outside the usual perception, the interrelation of the three phases of time can change; in any case, we have no guarantee that it will remain the same. And yet, in ordinary thought, including religious, theosophical, and 'occult' thought, this question is never raised. 'Time' is regarded as something which is not subject to discussion, as something which belongs to us once and for all and cannot be taken away from us, and which is always the same. Whatever may happen to us, 'time' will always belong to us, and not only 'time', but even 'eternity.' We use this word without understanding its true meaning. We take 'eternity' to be an infinite extension of time, while really 'eternity' means another dimension of time."
Faithfully Your Mr. Groundhog
From Groundhog Days – Intercourse on Time
By Melina Costello & David Arthur Walters
September 20, 2003
Dear Madame Melina,
As you know so well, Ouspensky contemplated the mystery of ‘time,’ said he knew nothing, and said that to understand time, one has to know it:
"In reality, of course, no one knows anything. The mystery of existence before birth and existence after death, if there is such existence, is the mystery of time. And 'time' guards its secrets better than many people think. In order to approach these mysteries it is necessary first to understand time itself."
Thinking about time bores most people while good science fiction about time travel does not. Yet the origin of the best science fiction on the subject is abstract speculation about the nature of time. Furthermore, some of the best thinkers throughout time have had an undying interest in speculating about time.
There are many answers to the question, What is time? One being that there is no such thing as time; to which we respond, "All right, then, but what is it that is not? What do you mean by time?"
We have many conceptions of time, but they are not time itself. Psychologically speaking, time seems to be an intuitive faculty, prior to experience, that allows us to order experience in a linear series with three phases: what has happened, or the past, which is all that we really know to some extent; what is happening at the moment, or the present, which we do not know until it passes; and what is to come in the future, which we do not know until we reflect on it after it happens. That is, all that we know has already past, and because of the apparent order of its events, we expect that order to be repeated in the future. It is as if we live in one phase of time, the past, and who can say for sure if there are three phases? Maybe everything has already happened and we are just remembering it over and over as it eternally recurs. Thus do absurd speculations denying time begin; our speculations cannot escape the common sense of time.
Prehistoric and primitive people did not have the sophisticated objective or mechanical conception of time that we do. They might find our everyday tenses incomprehensible; but they had their seasonal and astronomical clocks, regularities which they used to mark or time significant and crucial events. Of course human birth and death are crucial moments; a third is the marriage of birth and death in sexual union, where two die to make a new life - the three Fates attend birth, marriage, and death. Death, a name for whatever is before birth and after death, is no doubt the greatest mystery of all; we wake up every day, therefore we expect to live forever; at first death other than by accident or murder seems to be due to some unnatural or supernatural cause.
Death is very strange to a self-conscious creature used to living. Anthropologists tell us that the awareness that we will die and our response to death is at the very foundation of being human beings. It is said that elephants know they will die and therefore they go off to a secret place to do so; that is somewhat at variance with the recent film of bewildered male elephants trying to get their dead female companion on her feet by using every means at their disposal including lifting her and repeatedly mounting her. But she did not budge. She was dead. Her time was past. Or was it? On that we can speculate while her friends are totally stumped.
Time is somehow bound up with our lives, is essential to our lives; our devices for measuring time may help to maintain and perpetuate life; at the same time, we fell that clocks measure the loss of the individual life as it approaches the great unknown. Some say there is nothing to the unknown as far as the individual is concerned; dust returns to dust and clocks tick for the living; and if none are left living, the great clock wound up still runs on and on until the universe winds down, if it does. Others want more time, in a future life.
Ouspensky said, "The mystery of existence before birth and after death, if there is such existence, is the mystery of time.” He pointed out that we normally associate the three phases of time, Before, Now, and After, with Before Birth, Life, and After Death.
"It is precisely here that the fundamental mistake lies.... Outside this life, outside the usual perception, the interrelation of the three phases of time can change; in any case, we have no guarantee that it will remain the same. And yet, in ordinary thought, including religious, theosophical, and 'occult' thought, this question is never raised. 'Time' is regarded as something which is not subject to discussion, as something which belongs to us once and for all and cannot be taken away from us, and which is always the same. Whatever may happen to us, 'time' will always belong to us, and not only 'time', but even 'eternity.' We use this word without understanding its true meaning. We take 'eternity' to be an infinite extension of time, while really 'eternity' means another dimension of time."
Faithfully Your Mr. Groundhog
Labels: David Arthur Walters, Groundhog Days, Melina Costello, Ouspensky
Thursday, September 18, 2003
What's Going On?
What's Going On?
by David Arthur Walters
"... it is possible to say that our usual conception of 'dimensions of time' are wrong. For instance, for us time can have different duration - five years, ten years, a hundred years - but it always has the same speed. But where are proofs of this? Why not suppose that time in certain limits (for instance in relation to human life) always has the same duration but DIFFERENT SPEED? One is not more arbitrary than the other, but with the admission of this possibility the question disappears....." Ouspensky
It is possible to say that Ouspensky is a muddle-headed man and that the doctrine of eternal recurrence is absurd. Or he may be intentionally attempting to deceive us by making an impression that he knows more than he does, that he has insight into truths that remain a mystery to us, wherefore we should regard him as an authority, buy his book, sign up for the Work, or whatever. Or we, and especially yours truly, may be muddle-headed and in want of a better elucidation by the great master of enlightenment. Yet another possibility is that Ouspensky is trying to get us to think for ourselves by positing impossibilities or by posing ridiculous insoluble riddles for us to solve.
Alright, then, he suggests that we suppose that time flows or endures at different speeds, as if time were a thing such as a stream of water flowing along something stationary - over the land. We ask, if time is flowing at different speeds, different speeds in relation to what? Not the land, or are we all deluded? A thing moving in space moves in respect to time. A car speeds along at so many miles per hour. A man ages or changes over the years and we do not expect him to endure much longer than 100 years. We have an objective standard for duration upon which we all agree; for instance, we measure change by a certain quantity of units for which we have an atomic or astronomical reference. A moving object does not move at different objective speeds for each observer of the motion, nor are the observers living at different speeds. Or are we monads without windows and without relations to one another, monads whose only internal movement is changing delusions? I think not.
Now, then, since a motion or change in space occurs in relation to time, is it safe to say that time also moves in respect to time, or hypertime? and does hypertime move in respect to hyper-hypertime? And so on ad infinitum? Or does change change relative to change? Et cetera? We think not. We do not think that time is a thing that is moving in space, some thing that is rushing by each and every one of us like the wind. We think that the "flow of time" or the "stream of time" into which we cannot step into the same place twice, is a metaphor, or, better yet, a myth.
What, then, is time? Whatever it is, it seems that the notion of time moving at different speeds, and the attempt to make a difference between duration and speed, is sheer nonsense; or that yours truly, for instance, is in need of further enlightenment.
However that may be, and given human ingenuity, surely there is some way to solve the riddle Ouspensky poses - if there is a solution. I was thinking that each person at death might not be reborn instantly, but another universe would start up with a big bang, and the soul of the deceased would be suspended from animation or in a timeless state until the history of the new universe caught up and he was born again into the usual world, say, on Ground Hog Day. I am no mathematician like Ouspensky was, but if my scenario were true, I think there might be a number of universes approaching infinity in some sort of hyperspace. I don't know if that would pose a spatial problem. As for the waiting souls, since they are non-dimensional, I imagine they could all fit onto the head of a pin.
by David Arthur Walters
"... it is possible to say that our usual conception of 'dimensions of time' are wrong. For instance, for us time can have different duration - five years, ten years, a hundred years - but it always has the same speed. But where are proofs of this? Why not suppose that time in certain limits (for instance in relation to human life) always has the same duration but DIFFERENT SPEED? One is not more arbitrary than the other, but with the admission of this possibility the question disappears....." Ouspensky
It is possible to say that Ouspensky is a muddle-headed man and that the doctrine of eternal recurrence is absurd. Or he may be intentionally attempting to deceive us by making an impression that he knows more than he does, that he has insight into truths that remain a mystery to us, wherefore we should regard him as an authority, buy his book, sign up for the Work, or whatever. Or we, and especially yours truly, may be muddle-headed and in want of a better elucidation by the great master of enlightenment. Yet another possibility is that Ouspensky is trying to get us to think for ourselves by positing impossibilities or by posing ridiculous insoluble riddles for us to solve.
Alright, then, he suggests that we suppose that time flows or endures at different speeds, as if time were a thing such as a stream of water flowing along something stationary - over the land. We ask, if time is flowing at different speeds, different speeds in relation to what? Not the land, or are we all deluded? A thing moving in space moves in respect to time. A car speeds along at so many miles per hour. A man ages or changes over the years and we do not expect him to endure much longer than 100 years. We have an objective standard for duration upon which we all agree; for instance, we measure change by a certain quantity of units for which we have an atomic or astronomical reference. A moving object does not move at different objective speeds for each observer of the motion, nor are the observers living at different speeds. Or are we monads without windows and without relations to one another, monads whose only internal movement is changing delusions? I think not.
Now, then, since a motion or change in space occurs in relation to time, is it safe to say that time also moves in respect to time, or hypertime? and does hypertime move in respect to hyper-hypertime? And so on ad infinitum? Or does change change relative to change? Et cetera? We think not. We do not think that time is a thing that is moving in space, some thing that is rushing by each and every one of us like the wind. We think that the "flow of time" or the "stream of time" into which we cannot step into the same place twice, is a metaphor, or, better yet, a myth.
What, then, is time? Whatever it is, it seems that the notion of time moving at different speeds, and the attempt to make a difference between duration and speed, is sheer nonsense; or that yours truly, for instance, is in need of further enlightenment.
However that may be, and given human ingenuity, surely there is some way to solve the riddle Ouspensky poses - if there is a solution. I was thinking that each person at death might not be reborn instantly, but another universe would start up with a big bang, and the soul of the deceased would be suspended from animation or in a timeless state until the history of the new universe caught up and he was born again into the usual world, say, on Ground Hog Day. I am no mathematician like Ouspensky was, but if my scenario were true, I think there might be a number of universes approaching infinity in some sort of hyperspace. I don't know if that would pose a spatial problem. As for the waiting souls, since they are non-dimensional, I imagine they could all fit onto the head of a pin.
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Eternal Recurrence is Fraught With Problems
DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE IS FRAUGHT WITH PROBLEMS
CORRESPONDENCE FROM
GROUNDHOG DAYS
Sir Groundhog,
The Eternal Recurrence Theory is fraught with problems. If my memory serves me correctly, there is no mention of parallel realities, which would have to be a part of the equation if we are to satisfy logic.
For instance, Ouspensky postulates that when one dies, he is reborn into the life he just lived, ad nauseum, until he "gets it," which may then lessen, if not obliterate, his go-rounds on the wheel of karma: death and rebirth. It might also offer offer him "choices" he might not have made in previous go-rounds, which would alter the "predetermined" course of his fate.
Okay, let's say my father, who was born in 1925, dies in 1992. He is once again born in the Midwest to Italian immigrants in the same house, on the same street, with the same siblings, and so on. At some point along the time line, he meets my mom and I am conceived, which would then posit another Me in the world of form whilst the "me" who is writing this message yet lives.
Now there are two Me's living in flesh and blood bodies in a three dimensional quantum of space - NOT - unless, of course, we're talking about parallel realities. Again, there's no contingency in the argument for this apparent conundrum.
Additionally, let's consider the following: "It might also offer offer him 'choices' he might not have made in previous go-rounds, which would alter the 'predetermined' course of his fate."
Well that's an awfully powerful factor, however untenable, in the equation, wouldn't you say? Let's test it: Say my father is born in 1925 and in 1945, at age 20, he has an epiphany - he "gets it." This profound alteration of his habitual mode of consciousness causes him to consecrate himself to, say, the Catholic priesthood. Thereon he remains celibate and, in fact, does not proffer his seed to womankind; therefore I am not conceived, at least not through his ancestral line.
One need not be a rocket scientist to figure out that the *slightest* alteration of one's choices in the given scenario has far-reaching consequences to so many lives ala It's A Wonderful Life. My present mother would not be my mother (to say nothing of the fact that her entire life experiences from the age of 19 onward would not have occurred), nor would she have given birth to 12 children who are presently my siblings (sans one who drowned) - and what of their fates, let alone their conceptions?
Eternal Recurrence seems to be mounted on the concept that each person is a separate unit operating in some hermetically sealed universe upon which others' lives have no impact, no meaningful interface.
Unless, of course, there ARE parallel realities. Either Ouspensky closed the book before penning the last chapter, or I need to go back and read A New Model For The Universe - perish the thought.
Madame Melina
