 |
times
timed
the past
" Time is concomitant with
the physical world
but can not be pointed to
as existing in a material way." - Dalai
Lama
"Bedouins can sit for hours in the
desert,
feeling the ripples of time,
without being bored."
- Ziauddin
Sardar
Live in
the present moment,
contemplating the
future
while mindful of the past.
"He who controls the past,
controls the
future;
and he who controls the present,
controls the past."
–
motto of the Ministry of Information
George Orwell's
1984
"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key
machine of the industrial age." - Lewis Mumford
"In
Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Central America, people began to number
the years, e.g. from the start of a dynasty, thereby introducing linearity to
time and divorcing it from the cycles of Nature. The
artificial division of the day into hours (curiously, both the Babylonians and
ancient Chinese used twelve) and the Hebrew invention of seven-day weeks only
deepened this divorce, which has culminated in
the replacement of circular clocks with digital clocks, obliterating the last
remaining link between measured time and the cyclical processes of
Nature.
The fundamental purpose of clocks is
not to measure time, it is to coordinate human activity.
Aside from
that the need to measure time is a fiction, a pretense.
Henry David Thoreau said, "Time measures
nothing but itself."
Can you think of a machine that does not do
anything?
A machine whose only function is to function, and to do so
precisely and unvaryingly?
All machines are meant to do that, but this
machine does only that.
It is the epitome of eternal, regular, yet
pointless movement, of repetitive routine.
The machine I speak of is,
of course, a clock.
Think then of what a clockwork universe connotes.
Think of what is implied by the watchmaker
conception of God.
The universe, and
our own lives within it, ticks on and on, pointlessly.
(No wonder we,
living in a society ruled by the clock, so often feel like we are just marking
time.)
The ritual of smashing a clock represents a conceptual way of
freeing the pysche from the enslavement of time measurement by symbolicly
refusing to sell one's time, a refusal to schedule one's life or to bring it into conformity with the needs of
specialized mass society. Further, it represents a declaration that "I will
live my own life," establishing the ascendancy of now
(living life in the moment)." - adapted from Charles
Eisenstein
Time is the best teacher; unfortunately, time
kills all its students.
Time
is defined as:
a time-out
one's lifetime
a prison sentence
an hourly pay
rate
one of several instances
a customary period of
work
the hour at which a
pub closes
of,
relating to, or measuring time
the rate of
speed of a measured activity
a suitable or opportune moment or season
one's
interval of greatest activity or engagement
constructed so as to
operate at a particular
moment
the present in regard
to prevailing conditions and trends
an interval
separating two points on this continuum; a
duration
a period spent working, of apprenticeship or of
military
service
an appointed or
fated moment, especially of
death or giving birth
an
individual's
experience during a specific period or on a
certain occasion
a system by which
such intervals are measured or such numbers are reckoned
the period
during which a radio or television program or
advertisement is
broadcast
the meter of a
musical pattern; the rate of speed at which a piece
of music is played
used to indicate the
number of instances by which something is multiplied or divided
the span
of moments or interval necessary, available or designated
for a given activity
payable on a future date or dates as
related to an installment payment purchase
contract
to measure the duration of an event or the duration of an
action performed by an individual
a number, as of years, months, weeks,
days, minutes, seconds representing such
an interval
a number representing a specific point on a shared
continuum, reckoned in hours and minutes
the continuum of
experience in which
events pass from the future through the
present to the past
an interval, especially a span of years, marked by
similar events, conditions, or
phenomena; an era
a
period of time considered as a resource
under your control and sufficient to accomplish some
thing
a particular period or part of
duration, whether past, present, or
future; a point or portion of duration
the present
life; existence in
organic reality as
contrasted with an eternal
dreamtime life;
of a definite duration, as contrasted with
infinite duration.
duration, considered independently of any
system of measurement or
any
employment of terms which designate limited portions
thereof
a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible
succession
a linear way to envision
events which occurred in the past -
events that have happened before now;
events which are occurring as of the present
moment - events that
are happening now,
events which will or
may occur in the future - events that will
or may happen sometime beyond now.
"Here is in
life only one
moment and in
eternity only one. It is so
brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of
sunlight - and it is visible
but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have
been lived, are forgotten and are
without value; the
moments that have not been
lived have no
existence and will have no value except in the
moment that each shall be
lived." -
Mark Twain
time off
"The United States is the only advanced
economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid
vacation." Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt, Center for Economic and Policy
ResearchBritian guarantees its workers 20
days compensated leave.
Germany
guarantees its workers 24 days
compensated leave.
France guarantees its workers 30
days compensated leave.
1 out of
10 full time American workers get no paid vacation
and 6 in 10 part time American workers get no paid
vacation.
The American worker with paid
vacation averaged just 12 days.
The average
American male worker worked 100 more hours in 2007
than he did in 1970.
The average American
female worker worked 200 more hours in 2007 than she did in 1970.
The
typical American worker sleeps one to two hours
less per nignt than his or her parents did.
"Very few individual workers in
America can ask for four weeks vacation. It is not
only outside the benefits of their job but far outside the culture on the
workplace." - Ezra Klein
What is time?
"What is time? It is a
secret - lacking in
substance and yet almighty."
Thomas Mann, from
The Magic Mountain.
The flow of time is a
mystery as in the impossibility of stepping
into the same river twice.
In ancient
Greece time was generally
conceived of as cyclical. The seasons cycle, life
cycles, the moon cycles - an ebb and flow -
forever repeating a pattern in a cyclic nature.
Hesiod , an 8th
century B.C. Greek historian,
described five ages of mankind,
beginning with the
golden age in a remote past, where
human beings lived
in peace with each
other and in
harmony with
nature, down to the miserable contemporary age of
iron, characterized by dispute and
warfare.
The concept of cyclical time
reaches far beyond ancient Greece. The Aztecs made use of a calendar carved in
a huge circular stone, the Sun Stone. Hindu tradition conceptualizes time as circular.
The concept of time as linear is
derived from Jewish
tradition and consists of an
irreversible process with a unique beginning and a unique end.
Saint Augustine argues strongly
in favor of this linear
concept of time in City of God. The
Christian idea
of time as an irrevocable process condemned ancient
Greek cyclic time as a
superstition.
T.S.
Eliot in Four Quartets conceives of a
paradoxical
timeless present, "the
still point of the turning world, " which has a
Hindu flavor.
This
eternal
moment is more obviously
related to the great tradition of
Christian mysticism.
Saint Augustine, in
Confessions, asked "What, then, is time? I
know well enough what it is, provided that nobody
asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to
explain, I am baffled."
Nietzsche stated that "all
desire yearns for
eternity."
The
philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 18th century secularized
our concept of time in
which time is generally conceived of as an endless
process, without
beginning and
without end, a neutral course of
events, theoretically released from its old
connections with the planets and the seasons of the year, possible to
cut up into an infinite number
of temporal fractions.
Human beings
think about the future.
No other animal does.
Time is not an
object it is an
abstraction.
If we
can not create a mental image of an
abstract
concept such as time, then how do we
think and reason about
it?
When people reason about something
abstract, they tend to
imagine something concrete that the
abstract
thing is like and then reason about that instead.
For most of us, space
is the concrete thing that time is like.
People imagine time as though it were a
spatial dimension, which is why we say that the past is behind us and the
future is in front of us and that days
pass us.
People think and speak as though
we were actually moving away from a yesterday that is located over there and
toward a tomorrow that is located 180 degrees about.
When we draw a
time line, those of us who speak English put the past on the left, those of us
who speak Arabic put the past on the right, and those of us who speak Mandarin
put the past on the bottom.
Regardless of our native tongue, we all put
the past someplace - and the future someplace else.
our personal futures
Human minds are continuously making predictions about
the immediate local personal future of their owners without their owners'
awareness. Whatever
you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the
word with which this sentence will end. But even as you
hear these words echoing in your
mind, and think
whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using
the word it is reading right now and the
words it read just before to make a reasonable guess
about the identity of the word it will read next, which
is what allows you to read so fluently. Any mind
that has been raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective novels
fully expects the word
night to follow the phrase It was a
dark and stormy, and thus when it does encounter the word night, it is
especially well prepared to digest it.
As long as your
mind's guess about the next word turns out to be right, you cruise along happily, left
to right, left to right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your
mind is predicting the future of the sentence at a
fantastic rate. It is only when your word predicts
badly that you suddenly feel avocado.
Consider
the meaning of that brief moment of
surprise. Surprise is an emotion we
feel when we encounter the unexpected. The
surprise you felt at the end of the last paragraph reveals that as you were
reading the phrase it is only when your mind
predicts badly that you suddenly feel . . . ,
your mind was simultaneously making a
reasonable prediction about what would happen next. It predicted that sometime
in the next few milliseconds your eyes would come across a set of black
squiggles that encoded an English word that described a
feeling, such as sad or nauseous or even
surprised. Instead, it encountered a fruit, which woke you from your
dogmatic slumbers and revealed
the nature of your expectations.
Surprise tells us that we were
expecting something other than what we got, even when
we didn't know we were expecting anything at all.
People
experience illusions of
perception,
illusions of retrospection and illusions of prospection (predicting the
future).
One of the human mind's most glorious and unique
talents is its ability to look backward and forward
across great swathes of time - to examine its own
history and to imagine its own future, to engage in mental
time travel.
But a problem
lies in the path of how we imagine our future
happiness. Our ability to simulate the future and
to forecast our happiness is seriously flawed, and
people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they
expect to be.
Cognitive errors may be more like optical
illusions than they are like illiteracy.
People engage in economic transactions
in order to get things that they
believe will provide them with positive
emotional experiences.
So rational economic behavior requires that we look into the
future and figure out what will provide those positive emotional experiences. As
it turns out, people make systematic cognitive errors
when they do this, which is why their economic
decisions are so often sub-optimal.
Errors
that people make when they try to predict their emotional
futures are quite systematic.
Specifically,
people tend to overestimate the impact of
future events. That is, they predict that
future events will have a more intense and more enduring emotional impact than
they actually do.
This is called the impact bias.
Whatever
impact these emotional
events have, it is demonstrably smaller and
less enduring than the impact the people who
experienced them expected to have. People have a tremendous
talent for changing their opinions of emotional
events so that they can
feel better about the
event and their reaction to the
event.
Thinking is a remarkable tool that allows us to change
our opinions of the reality we experience in
order to change our emotional reactions to
events that have occurred.
We don't
consciously experience the cognitive processes that are
creating new ways of thinking about an emotional
event and we don't realize that they will
occur in the future.
One of the reasons we
think things
contrary to our wishes, a tragedy that has
befallen us for example, will make us feel unhappy for a long
time is that we don't realize that we have a defensive
system - a emotional immune system.
When people predict how they're going to feel in the face of adversity, they typically
discount the ability of their emotional
immune system which leads them to expect more
intense and enduring unhappiness than they will
actually experience.
So why do people so
often mis-predict their reactions to adversity or tragedy?
A mental image captures one
moment of a single emotional event. One's happiness a year after the event is influenced by
much more than the emotional
event itself. A lot happens in a year and
although these things aren't nearly as
important to us as the tragic
event, they occur in reality, there are a lot of them, and together they
have an impact that people tend not to consider.
When we're trying to
predict how happy we will be in a future that
contains a tragedy, we tend to focus on the
tragedy and forget about all the other
events that also populate that future -
events that tend to dilute the
emotional impact of the
tragedy.
Although this is generally
true we always run the risk of becoming
slaves to the focus of our attention - the
occurrence of the tragedy. We may become
emotional slaves to the tragic event
and actually attempt to fulfill our expectations of
unhappiness as we intensely focus on the occurrence of the
tragedy. When an individual
emotionally focused on a
tragedy, or any event that occurs contrary to our wishes, we
become clinically depressed. - adapted from Daniel Gilbert
the legend of the Cedar
tree
(or
night and
day, day and night)A long
time ago when the Cherokee people were new upon the Earth, they thought that life
would be much better if there was never any
night.
They beseeched the Ouga
(the Creator) that it might be
day all the time and that there would be
no darkness.
The Creator heard their
voices and made the night cease and it
was day all the time. Soon, the forest
was thick with heavy growth. It became difficult to walk and to find the
path. The people toiled in the
gardens many long hours trying to keep the weeds
pulled from among the corn and other food plants. It got hot, very hot, and
continued that way day after long
day. The people began to find it
difficult to sleep and became short
tempered and argued among themselves.
Not many
days had passed before the people
realized they had made a mistake and, once
again, they beseeched the Creator.
"Please," they prayed, "we have made a mistake in asking that it be
day all the time. Now we
think that it should be
night all the time."
The
Creator paused at this new request and
thought that perhaps the people may be right even
though all things were created in twos... representing to us
day and
night, life
and death, good and
evil, times of plenty and times of famine.
The
Creator loved the
people and decided to make it night
all the time as they had asked.
The day ceased and
night fell upon the
Earth. Soon, the crops stopped growing and it became
very cold. The people spent much of their time gathering wood for the
fires. They could not see to hunt
meat and with no crops growing it was not
long before the people were cold, weak, and very hungry. Many of the people
died.
Those that remained still living gathered once again to beseech
the Creator. "Help us
Creator," they cried!
"We have made a
terrible mistake. You had made the
day and the
night perfect, and as it should be, from the
beginning. We ask that you forgive us and
make the day and
night as it was before."
Once
again the Creator listened to the request of
the people. The day and the
night became, as the people had asked,
as it had been in the beginning. Each
day was divided between
light and
darkness. The weather became more
pleasant, and the crops began to grow again. Game was plentiful and the hunting
was good. The people had plenty to eat and there was
not much sickness. The people treated each other with compassion and respect.
It was good to be
alive.
The people were grateful and thanked the
Creator for their life and for the food they had to eat.
The
Creator accepted the gratitude of the people
and was glad to see them smiling again.
However, during the time of the
long days of
night, many of the people had died,
and the Creator was sorry that they had
perished because of the night.
The Creator placed their
spirits in a newly created tree.
This
tree was named a-tsi-na tlu-gv {ah-see-na
loo-guh} cedar tree.
When you smell the
aroma of the cedar tree or gaze upon it standing
in the forest, remember that if you are Tsalagi {Cherokee}, you are looking upon
your ancestor. - as told by Jim Fox
Tradition holds that the wood of the cedar
tree holds powerful protective
spirits for the
Cherokee.
Many
Cherokee carry a small piece
of cedar wood in their medicine bag.
It is also placed above the
entrances to the dwelling to protect against the entry of evil spirits.
A
traditional drum would be made from cedar wood. |
|
back to stacks
contents
 |
This web site is not a commercial web site and
is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a new religious
ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification
of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt
version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any
group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due
to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion
aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason
which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no
church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to
develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of
reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the
human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in
detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to
their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate
crime.”
This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary
the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The
international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking
system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military entertainment complex of
America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of
self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization
is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a
gun.
American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more
power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed
into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The
results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social
structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a
perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the
bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the
corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which
further their purposes.
All views and opinions presented on this web
site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through
their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational,
insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web
site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally
presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the
facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected,
redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion
and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the
original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions
clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.
Fair Use Notice
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has
not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making
such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal
justice, human rights, political, economic, democratic, scientific, and social
justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such
copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the United States
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on
this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. For more information see: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If
you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own
that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
|
 Copyright
© Lawrence Turner
All Rights Reserved
|