Saturday, April 16, 2011

Ride the king's highway


Let me modify what I just said. That’s not how I meant it exactly. It’s not that there’s no time. I’m just saying that it may not be as how we imagine it. No, time is not what we’ve been brought up to believe. It is merely the measure of the distance between two points. You use it to drive from one city to another.
 


When you do, features that lie along the way do not ‘cause’ others to happen. This forest is not the ‘bad karma’ from having crossed such and such a bridge. This roundabout is the not the effect caused by that field of sheep six miles back, or by that hill up ahead. And this reasoning applies to our lives also.
 

A bulge in one part of our jabberwocky body does not cause a depression in another—for example a knee causing an elbow. The whole jabberwocky exists all at once. Examined from ‘above’, the creature is always fully formed. You only seem to make time move when you shift your gaze from one part of its body another. Your vehicle may seem to cause the road to move too, but we’re agreed, I hope, that it doesn’t?



I admit that this way of interpreting time turns our whole concept of life topsy-turvy. All of a sudden there is no cause and effect, no free-will, and no chance happenings. There are no choices to be made. There’s no karma going on that we’ve got to watch out for. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are now terms that hold little meaning.
Life, or lifespan, is largely an illusion. It is merely a string of conscious moments that does not exist as a unit in reality. But let’s put one under the microscope.
 

A life has a certain span, yet it’s only at the moment of death that we know how many years long.  At any given moment we have a height, width and length that may be measured (just as any particular size corresponds to a time—or times—in life).  Are you with me so far?
 

Emotionally we appear to have more invested in the fourth dimension than in any other. We don’t mourn the fact that our maximum reach is five or six feet from head to toe. So why do we work ourselves up over three score and ten? Death is merely the dead skin that lies at your periphery. It’s just the air that breezes across your scalp. It’s just how far your body reaches in that direction. 



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