Time

Out of the silence, time whispers change…
Experientially, there are three kinds of time, two of which concern us in our everyday lives.

Linear Time

Linear Time is our experience of sequence, of one event following another. In this dimension, when an event is done, it never repeats; there is an endless succession of the new and different. Using a road metaphor, Linear Time is an infinite straight highway. On this long highway we get on at birth, walk down the road experiencing all we come to, and get off at death. We can feel excited about the journey, or we can feel lost. With each step we leave the familiar and “move on down the road.” In the modern urbanized culture we are most aware of and concerned with Linear Time.

Cyclic Time

Cyclic Time is our experience of regularly repeating events, for example dawn or springtime. When one talks about dawn, one doesn’t mean a single sunrise 3 days ago. Rather “dawn” is that special time every day just before the sun greets us. Not only do these events repeat, but there is “cyclic equivalence” between events in cycles of different periods. Dawn and springtime are equivalent; they are both the period in their respective cycles, daily and yearly, when “things start happening.” Cyclic Time has been of most concern to the traditional, indigenous cultures; those cultures in close contact with the earth.

As a road, Cyclic time would be a “roundabout,” a traffic circle with entrances and exits in all directions. We enter the circle at birth, travel all the way around it (no matter how long life is) and get off at the same place we got on. What’s true for a whole life is also true for parts of it. The year “gets on” the circle, travels all the way around and gets off where it got on. The same is true for a month and a day. This is even true for other kinds of periods – a marriage, a job, or a college career. Each of these is a full circle of the roundabout, no matter how large or small. And each time we circle the roundabout we experience similar things at similar points on the circumference. This is what “cyclic equivalence” means, very alien to our modern awareness. When we see time from a cyclic perspective, we’re never lost; even if we’re not sure exactly where on the circle we are, we know we’re on the circle.

Our brains are wonderfully adapted for pattern recognition. We see patterns everywhere, in our physical surroundings and in time. Similar events repeating in a similar sequence is one definition of a cyclic pattern. Recognizing patterns is critical to our survival; we generalize from specific examples so we can recognize danger and food. And we love patterns; beauty is often described as harmonious, as balanced, as pleasing patterns. The famous saying “history repeats” must be derived from our ability to recognize historical cycles; we “ignore them at our peril.” Since patterns in time are cycles, it seems we must have an awareness of, and a sensitivity to, Cyclic Time built into our genes.

Linear and Cyclic: A Spiral of Time

Our well-being demands that we stay in touch with both Linear and Cyclic Time. For much of our history Cyclic Time has been the predominate awareness of time; progress as we now see it was slow to non-existent. New ideas and events were unusual. In many cases whole societies were stuck in one pattern for long periods. If we’re always on the circle somewhere, then “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” round and round and round. Progress is a product of time seen as linear. When we become urbanized and lose touch with natural rhythms, we are no longer “entrained” to the constant ebb and flow of life and progress takes off. As we are experiencing more and more, however, “progress” without stability leads to chaos, not growth.
“Meaning,” of events and lives as well as ideas, derives from connection, from context. Cyclic Time is “time as context,” since each moment on the circle is in relation to all other moments and shares characteristics with corresponding moments in other periods. From a linear perspective this context might seem imaginary, like seeing a face in random shadows, but from a cyclic perspective the existential meaninglessness of the endless highway is equally imaginary. Clearly, we need them both to be complete. To return meaning to an increasingly meaningless age, an age of alienated progress, we need to reawaken our ancient awareness of time-as-circle without shutting down our relatively new concept of time-as-line. This will allow us to transform an endless succession of events into a process of growth — periods of expansion followed by periods of rest. This is what the Spirals of Light Calendar offers: a way of experiencing our lives filled at once with newness and meaning. The two dimensions of time become a spiral.

Eternity

The third experience of time is Eternity. Eternity is our experience of wholeness in time. In certain states of consciousness it is possible to become aware of all time. One can see a panorama of past–present–future as one moment, the “Eternal Now.” Those who speak of eternity as an infinite succession are missing the point. Ending, beginning and even succession are irrelevant to eternal awareness which simply sits in an infinitely expanded present. Eternity is the experience from which premonitions of future events come, or memories of past lives. Within the eternal, the past, present and future are simultaneous. So a premonition, within that experience, is not seeing the future, but seeing a different perspective of the Now.

There are even hints from experiences of Eternity that Linear Time is much more complex than we assume. Some experiences suggest that instead of one linear time, there are many interconnected lines, branching from moments of choice, and maybe even coming back together “later” so that the linear dimension of time is more like a “braided stream” than a straight line.

Experiencing the eternal is experiencing the God in time, the sacredness of time. Since this eternal experience is incompatible with either linear or cyclic awareness, it is valuable to symbolically set aside periods for stillness. These are the Holy Days of all sacred calendars.

"Time" quoted here from the Spirals of Light Calendar for comments.