Time and Beyond

                I’m pretty sure eternal life doesn’t mean this width-less line of moments endlessly prolonged…but getting off that line onto its plane or even the solid.

                                                                               Lewis

                We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it.  “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty.  It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water.  And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

                                                                               Lewis

I do like the Simultaneity/Sequency duality. But do you think that one is more foundational than the other? I think of the notion (as I understand it) that there was no "before" the Big Bang, and I hypothesize that death an immersion into that Simultaneity.   -  Nate Haken

I am quite aware that there are oodles of people out there much, much more qualified to speak to time and our speculation of its origins, but here’s my attempt at relating it to The Dispossessed and what might come after death. 

Imagine being knocked out only to wake up in a cell with only artificial light.  Suppose there is a clock in your cell, the old kind that is a circle with an hour, a minute, and a second hand.  Though you could see what time it was at any moment, it would be meaningless since you would have nothing to refer it to.  You would not know if it was am or pm, and you would only know how many days you spent in the cell if you imposed your own linearity by keeping track somehow how of revolutions.  Same would be true if you saw a time lapse of some nature scene, quickly zipping through the seasons.  The cyclical nature of time, says Le Guin, is its static quality that enables time to endure.  The linear aspect of time would be its dynamic quality.  Without being coupled with the static, dynamic linear quality would only be chaos.  Without some steady repetition, there is nothing to relate to.  Without an arrow to time, there can be no distinguishing between times. 

For physics, the most basic repetition is at the quantum level, with entangled subatomic particles.  Paired electrons rotating in opposite directions is an example of this.  Because you can separate those electrons to vast distances and have them affect each other instantaneously, without any passage of time, it is thought that this is the edge of existence where time can emerge.  At least I think that’s why in string theory, the strings are vibrating.  In other words, to measure an increase in time, there needs to be intervals, however minute they may be.  There also needs to be an original reference point to relate to.  Couple the original reference point with the second law of thermodynamics and you have the Big Bang.  Some have speculated that the Big Bang itself marks the beginning of a cycle among many where the universe expands and contracts.  This may have been the prevalent view in the 70’s when Le Guin was writing. 

Nate, I don’t speculate that Simultaneity is more fundamental; rather the opposite.  Simultaneity coincides with the static, with Truth; what holds the pattern and what structures the dynamic so it can last.  I don’t believe I would be alone in thinking that the Void that precedes time is chaotic; a crazy, wild, dynamic, creative force without form.  I’m obviously influenced by Frank Herbert, but he’s not the only one.  Now as to what we enter into after death is a whole other issue.  To reiterate what I said in some comments, time is usually considered the fourth dimension, and we have an inkling of its elasticity, its relativity.  So there definitely seems that there is a dimension or leap ‘above’ time.  We don’t discard the second dimension when leaping to the third, but rather build on it and it remains essential to maintaining the upper dimensions, even if it’s lost in the minute details of the gestalt.  Kind of like those 1’s and 0’s in the computer.  So to leap above time, we would maintain that connection to it and yet not be bound to it.  I’m hopeful that within such a state, we would be all the more capable of living on the edge of the dynamic reality, but I see this as something very different than existing in that something that was ‘before’ the beginning, precisely because we now participate in Simultaneity.  The problem lies with the word sequence, which places it within the realm of time, and so doesn’t directly seem to be more fundamental.  But in capitalizing it, I think it allows one to think of it as that force that drives the system, that pushes through the cycles of simultaneity; that force that is behind the movement of the arrow of time.  In other words, sequence only makes sense because it references itself to the cycles, the static.  This cyclical reference will remain within the fourth dimension, but the force that pushes through will also push out and above.  It may very well be true that as we leap into higher and higher gestalts, we both get farther from the Source and at the same time more capable of accessing the Source without losing ourselves.  It’s a nice thought, anyway.

One other morsel to chew on…The combining of a circle and an arrow seems, at least geometrically, to be a spiral.  You get a feel of the spiral in some of the philosophers, particularly Hegel and his view on history.  Perhaps, time itself, also works out in some sort of spiral.  My hunch is that it could even be the logarithmic spiral that we find all through nature.  That ubiquitous, fractal, ever expanding spiral that we find in shells, ferns, bathtub water, brassicas, cornea nerves, storms, galaxies, and Mandelbrot equations.  Smells right, at least.