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TIME
The more of the past you can understand;
The more of the future you can comprehend.
“Time is money” is an aphorism that has developed a mindset in occidental cultures. Time is a concept created by mankind to organize his life, and probably the main cause of stress and mental illness in western society.
“Time is on my side yes it is” sings Mick Jagger. I say no it isn’t Mick; time catches up to all of us. Time is a concept that we created, to which we end up being slaves. Have you ever wondered how we created time? How and when did man decide that he needed time?
All primitive man had to do was to hunt and eat when it was (light)sunny, and sleep when it was dark. He observed the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon and the changing of the seasons. Those were his first realizations of interruptions in continuity.
The constancy and consistency of changes(in the sun, the moon and the seasons) evolved his thinking into recognizing a definite pattern in the repeated course of events. We look for pattern to give consistency in our lives. It is the natural human condition to do so because pattern is one of the basic laws of the law of the universe; everything has pattern.
The first separation of time for primitive man was therefore what we know as day and night, (darkness and light). The day was later divided by the passage of the sun with the overhead sun marking midday or high noon(as we have come to romanticize it.).
Man’s next unit of time came with his discovery that 29 to 30 periods or days of darkness and light was punctuated by a full moon and a new moon. The constancy and consistency in the changing of the moon evolved his thinking into recognizing a definite pattern in the repeated course of events.
North American aboriginals recognized this pattern as their primary unit of time. The Amerinds inculcated the moon in their customs with birth days, funerals and harvest celebrations by using the moon and its symbols as a representative part of either their good or bad fortune. They manifest deity out of their awe of the moon and created their Gods and their god philosophies. The awesome splendor of this magical moon in that dark beautiful sky in that beautiful natural state must have bewildered and dumbfounded these unenlightened minds.
The concept of time evolves in a parallel with human evolution and all other evolutionary states. When two ideas mutated or come together this new birth presents a new child of nature whether physical, mental, or spiritual. The concept of thirteen full moons always occurring between a winter, a spring, or a summer led to that other expanded time unit we have come to know as a year.
For many centuries the Phoenician and Babylonians recognized this unit and approximated its reoccurrence every 300 days. It wasn’t until the Egyptians noticed the star Sirius (brightest star in the sky) would assume the exact same position every 360 days approximately. Time was then divided into 10 equal units to cover this early Egyptian calendar.
The Romans and Greeks fine- tuned the year to 365 days and added 2 months to the calendar – January and February named after their gods. September, October November and December being the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months in the Roman Latin lexicon February being the last month of the year to which in the future a day will be added every four years, a leap year to make up for miscalculations.
The evolution of time would continue with the reigns of monarchs and kings being used to define or mark periods of time. The Hebrews used their prophets and teachers to calculate the passage of time. (e.g. in the fifth year of the reign of Nebucadnezzar), the Egyptians, their pharaohs, and in the case of the Chinese their dynasties became their watch, the measure of their time calculation. History has given modern man the best insights in hindsight of time.
The more truth you know the more truth you are, the more of the past you can understand and of the future you can comprehend.
The periods of day and night were first partitioned into morning noon and night and then progressing into dawn, morning , forenoon, noon, afternoon, evening and dusk. All these periods have now evolved into the hours, minutes and seconds as we now experience time.
If man was not mortal and did not die there would be no use for time. If man did not have to traverse distances time as a concept would have been unnecessary…without space there is no time.
It was only with the invention of the telegraph and the advent of transcontinental communication that universal time could be correlated. But as it is man has segregated units of time for his lifestyle and his convenience and so much so he is know a prisoner of time.
So how much time does one really have? In the Twenty first century mankind as a whole can reasonably expect to live for 80 years and kind woman for a little longer. Or what might seem to be a very long 2,522,880,000 seconds. But how much can we enjoy in this lifetime of seconds?
In a lifetime we can experience some 29,000 sunrises and sunsets if we are actually aware: How many sunsets have you noticed lately? We take about 15,000 breaths a day. So 29,000 sunrises aren’t very many especially when you sleep thru most of them. I have witnessed some sunsets that make my eyes clamor to open more wide, colors on the horizon that makes my breath pour out and float back in to my body, a sky so enticing that it makes my soul yearn to enfold it. There are less than twenty-nine thousand of those not that much in a lifetime and none are ever the same, each one seen, beholds the eyes of a lucky soul.
“ I don’t like the sun, it causes cancer, its bad for my skin”, these are some retorts that I have heard from people of lily-white European heritage. Well let me tell you a secret, brother, get out and get some sunshine and maybe you wouldn’t get so sick and look so sick, dammit man there are only about seven thousand lazy crazy hazy days of summer, get a little brown it does go away in the autumn and you’ll always get a job.
Autumn also brings to mind thanksgiving, holidays and anniversaries which means the turn m opportunity not only to make it a point to celebrate and enjoy good food which might provide excellent nourishment to enhance a salubrious life. There are only eighty possible birthdays and potential anniversaries and Christmases or Hanukahs.
The weeks of Spring in ones lifetime number near one thousand and the fast blooming flowers will eventually fade and if no one stops to smell the flowers maybe someday evolution will find no need to create beautiful smelling flora.
\ What the world needs now is love sweet love that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of; except for the fact that in anyone’s lifetime there is only room for one thousand full moons. The most romantic and awesome sight that we can imagine is to feel the force of the light of a full moon that seems like it is just a touch away. If love could be translated to light this energy would be as close as any one could come as you bathe in its powerful light waves. Don’t let many full moons pass without appreciating nature’s gift to your senses and your soul. If we keep ignoring our good fortune and withhold our gratitude then evolution again will make it unnecessary for you to receive these gifts since you didn’t use them you will lose them. A full moon is probably the only universal phenomenon that can be observed by the entire planet in the same day. Imagine the power in feeling that. Imagine the whole world with the same focus feeling that unity.
Sharing this energy experience might be a start to create a unity of consciousness or just enjoy the full moon because it is damn beautiful and we really can’t afford not to; I don’t care how busy you think you are.
When man started fighting wars the first necessary strategy of war was to figure out what time the enemy was going to show up. Man’ s evolving mind needing to segregate moments and observing the sun’s passage over the upright fauna naturally invents the shadow clock which became the sun dial. The only problem was this sometimes artful creation as progressive and beautiful as it was couldn’t tell time at night or on cloudy days. And you really wanted to be awake before the enemy came. That’s a given.
So some wise mind invented the water clock. Water would drip through a hole pierced through a gourd with calibrations on it indicating how many units of time had passed. The trouble with the gourd is that water, the strongest substance that we know, will erode anything. Thus the size of the hole in the gourd was never constant. The next step in clock Dom was the introduction of the sand clock or hourglass as it has been so romanticized. The trouble with the hourglass is that it was never big enough to give more than 2 hours at a time and the sand could get moist and frequency of moist sand would impair any accuracy.
Galileo introduced the pendulum and a new era in clock building began. The pendulum too was inconsistent because it does slow down. The mechanics of the pendulum requires moving parts. The necessity of wheels, bolts and cogs to accommodate the clocks movement led to the start of an Industrial Evolution. During this evolution the mechanics of the spring, technically the winding of a steel coil and the utilization of its releasing force to move an object, was discovered. This spring force was used to turn the wheels whose sizes and movements would standardize the units calibrating the new portable clock, later miniaturized to become the pocket watch and then the wristwatch of the twentieth century.
This Industrial Evolution introduced the mechanics of wheels and lathes and with the discovery of the use of steam these two separate thoughts and ideas would mutate into what we call the Industrial Revolution – steam powered machines and engines.
Modern man has since decided since this Industrial revolution that a day has 24 hours and an hour has 60 minutes and a minute 60 seconds. Man now starts to make time a commodity. Man will hence put a material value on his time and time will be worth money from now on. This civilization will become a part of a universal mind set that “Time Is Money”. People will charge now for their time.
So how much time do we have? We have, 2,522,880,000 seconds in our lifetime only two and a half billion seconds to live there are people with more money than that, its not as long as it seems; only eighty years, only 960 months and only 29 thousand days.
Nature makes it necessary for us to sleep at least eight hours a day to be healthy. That is one third of our twenty-four hour day, which turns out to be one third of our life totaling nearly twenty seven years.
A man must earn his due. To be a human one must accept the responsibility of caring for oneself. Labor is healthy and necessary for survival. Man must work. He thus labors for twenty years of his life. The two most basic things work and sleep, occupy forty-seven of his potential eighty years, leaving thirty-three. In this mobile society man must get around and getting around takes time.
Commuting or traveling occupies man’s daily life for at least two hours per day, taking another six years out of his real lifetime.
Now we have twenty-seven years left. I for the life of me can’t remember my first seven years, at least not vividly. I can’t look back at any experience at that time that could possibly help me right now. I lost seven years and I am sure so did you. Now we are down to twenty.
Personal daily hygiene, nutritional needs and other domestic vagaries utilize two more hours of our daily routine decreasing by another six years our real time lifetime. Fourteen years left. What to do?
Every day a majority of human beings spend thirty-five minutes to an hour waiting in lines, waiting at stoplights, waiting to eat, and just waiting because some one else is late. Approximately two years of your life is wasted waiting. Now the lucky ones have only twelve years to live.
Are you one of the not so lucky ones? If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, the time spent smoking for each pack over a lifetime will be at least two years smoking not to mention the ten years that the chemicals in the cigarette are going to shorten your life. If you watch TV four to six hours a day; that will be like watching twenty years of TV for your life and since you have only got twelve years to enjoy, I don’t like your chances. So probably the best we can do in our lives is if we are smart, is to make those the best twelve years in eternity because those are all that we can call our very own conscious free time.
For every hour of the day you spend in a fruitless, non-contributory way to your own personal life or to the evolving energies of the universe, you are wasting and frittering away more than three years of your life, how ungrateful is that when we have been freely allowed this limited time in life to fulfill our souls and our selves.
The two phenomena in life that seem to cause the people of the planet the most angst and the most interpersonal conflicts are sex and religion. If as an overall average two people were to have sexual relations twice a week for forty years (trust me I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt) and if this lifetime total of approximately 4000 times (40 years times 104) or 2000 hours of actual intercourse is converted to weeks, we would discover that we engage in sex less than twelve weeks in our entire lifetime. We have used sex and its behaviors to victimize and overpower even our supposed loved ones. We have created industries out of sex needs and destroyed any intimacy that was left with our addiction to pornography.
Religion which has led to most of the political and cultural conflicts throughout history occupies at most in some peoples lives an hour a week for maybe sixty years in your life and so surpasses sex with a total of eighteen weeks or four and a half months.
So how do you fulfill a life instead of just filling your life full? No matter how long we live we each only have twenty-four hours a day. Every hour represents less than five percent of our lifetime. It is observed that nature demands of us a minimum of eight hours sleep per day. So how do we fulfill our day? Let’s start with sleeping since we will need to sleep to have the energy to take on the day. The important thing is good sleep. How do we achieve good sleep? A good night’s sleep should consist of the first hour and last hour as transition stages. When one goes to bed at night one should use the first hour to flush ones mind of the stress of that day. One should aerate ones body consciously, breathing in to the maximum content of ones lung. One should endeavor to relax every muscle and joint in ones body starting with the toes and climbing limb by limb to the brain. One should drift on into the state of sleep with the desire to be open to the energies of the cosmos. At the end of the sleep state the last hour should be the hour of awakening both the mind and all those joints and muscles that went to sleep last night. Renewed breathing will foster new energy to give power to your body.
To be human it is necessary to labor at some duty, to create an earth career so that one can be responsible for oneself, unlike animals that need to be provided for or who in the wild will steal or kill. Creative talents and genius are gifts that are bestowed upon special people for reasons that only the cosmos knows; but each human soul has the exact same potential for making the best possible life he can. Every human being has a place on this planet in his time for how ever long that may be. Some people are lucky enough to be paid for the job they like to do and some people create inordinate amount of stress on their bodies by resenting the job situation they find themselves in. We all have to work to take care of ourselves. And if one truly believes that no matter how small his job, (because when my garbage is deteriorating and causing me discomfort the garbage man is of a lot more worth to me than a doctor on a golf course on a sunny Wednesday morning), he serves a purpose in the whole. They say there are no small actors, only small parts and since the world is a stage lets play our parts as best we can and love ourselves for it.