Saturday, June 25, 2011

Tinkering with thingamyjigs

Consider, if you will, the first assertion: that time and space do not exist. Of the two words we’ll look at the first.

The notion of time is absolutely pervasive and pivotal. It underpins every known worldview. Change occurs over time, for example growth. Without time there are no causality or karma. Free will disappears as an issue, because you don’t have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ an act of decision. Heck, it would even be meaningless to speak of birth and death.

What if time as we know it—as we think we know it—is just so much bollocks? If time was the fanciful artifact that quantum mechanics insists that it is then our civilization would surely crumble (which may explain our reluctance to examine it). 



All of our philosophical structures rest upon it. Our world revolves around it. I’m reminded of those thingamyjigs called celestial spheres or astrolabes that ancient cosmologists devised to try and ‘prove’ the sun, stars and planets revolved around the Earth.

Those people were deluded. They tinkered with wheels within wheels in a vain attempt to make their construct work. It did not, and they were wrong. And so, therefore, is everyone today. Time ought not to be so central to our ‘thinkering’.   



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