Dispatches from the war on time,
from the Provision Fragrance Monestary
at the center of the antitime portal:

Time and consciousness are closely related. Is consciousness the enemy?
Some people have excess mental energy and like to go spelunking through dark conceptual chasms. Others have other things to do with a supposedly finite level of mental energy. For the latter, many ideas are dangerous, and the people learn accordingly to follow the straight and narrow, not venturing too far outside consensual reality. For the former group, the adventurous spelunkers, hardy minds that figure that they can handle a few "hits" from unreality, however, there can also be dangers. I suppose there are different level of danger, and I am considering myself one of the hardy souls, but across the decades I ran into a few things that were like riding a wild bull. I guess I know when to fall off, and how to eventually tame some of the wildest bulls. Maybe I let a couple of bulls roam free, untamed. Sometimes I even help along in the birthing of a real wild one. I think this is one of the wilder, more dangerous bulls:

I continue to have the intuition that time is out to get me. Maybe I'm using the common psychological feature of paranoia against something I conceptually think deserves it. You know how the CIA gets the accusation all the time, the aliens get the same accusations, I figured lets vent the entire psychotic force at time. Einstein said it is appropriate to think of time as a separate entity, apart from matter and energy. I see myself as one with all of matter and energy, and with all this energy I thought I ought to take on our formidable enemy, time.

And fighting against an enemy like time can sometimes seem like beating your head against a wall. Many sages and shamans have advocated appeasement, rather than conquering.

But at the Provision Fragrance Monastery, a comfortable retreat outside of time I use for planning the war against time, I decided to try to look at time from other perspectives, in order to better envelop the enemy. And one way to get novel perspectives on something as abstract as "time" is to use analogies.

So I thought of the analogy of a quasar jet, and the radio lobe, in astrophysics. The Aztec religion idealized a similar vision, the "cloud serpent", which was their personification of the smooth flow of the clouds. Inspired by the cloud-serpent, they went to war. As a modern-day Aztec Indian, I am treated to much more powerful "cloud serpents", far past the white clouds in the blue sky above me; these cloud serpents are the quasar jets in red-shift space, their origin is some of the brightest compact objects in the universe, and they ultimately "crash" and form "radio lobes", the turbulent endpoints of the jets, as they push forward on the "working surface", whatever it just crashed into.




So I thought about the quasar jet, of the cloud serpent moving slowly, carefully, gracefully, and also of the "disappearing mist of personality and action", as the "disappearing" jet nozzle of the present. Modulating the flow from the jet at the point of the nozzle, where the flow first hits the "ambient medium", is our action in "time". But we only really keep staring at that one point, where the flow comes out of the nozzle, and modulate that, as the rhythm and dance of the "present". But, drifting before it dissipates, (for 8 generations), the mist is affected more and more heavily by the darkness that the jet of life beams against.





Time, then, is at first this "present", or measuring the flow near the nozzle, and it makes sense that this was the first consciousness that would evolve, but a logical progression of excess mindfulness is a movement into the PAST, or a widening of the field outside the nozzle called "time".
As a shaman I decided to expand the consciousness a bit, upward into the PAST, to see how this expansion might benefit the object before traditional consciousness, consciousness of the present. As an Aztec shaman, the directive is to stand with a "wise face and a firm heart" for the short time we spend in the material world. The directive is a hint that this "firmness" of heart does not come naturally. The quasar jet of heart wavers in the oncoming dark turbulence, dampened by the shamanic directive, but always battling the oncoming pressure. Outside the layer of "present", the layer just outside the nozzle of the jet, which is better protected in consciousness, lie in wait the hungry consumers of the jet's numinosity, like a bunch of rhinos feeding at a trough!

How to protect the mist as it drifts upward, into the 'PAST'? Mediating, master of law, red robed emissary with sword in hand, consciousness of the RISING mist in between the moments, DON'T LET MOVEMENT OR THOUGHT OCCUR, or the dark above will destroy the flow, and the disturbance will proceed UPSTREAM.

Like the universe moving forward in time, our lives are affected by the darkness acting upon our ancestors. And so their problems are our problems - we must feed them, help them be still! As the "dark energy" grows directly along with the size of the PAST, and also the Periodic Table of elements grows in league with the PAST - more and more complex elements arising as now three generations of stars have taken in the previous generation's output and produced even more massive elements - the strong and central heart must begin to step forward and control it's own destiny. The harmonizing of the elements. The slowing down and stopping of the spinning circus. Stars are born, new elements form in denser crashes, new demons form in denser arrangements, therefore: dissipate crashes, mindfulness radiating outward into the PAST. The problem is the turbulent DARK, the answer is RADIATE, and nothing radiates like QUIET MYSTERY.


Buoyed by this ability to reach into my own past and control myself - more completely - from that perspective, I developed another analogy - this one of a lake. I didn't make this one up; apparently all the way back in the time of Plato, mankind was so ill-equipped to deal with the abstract concept of "time”, that Plato could get away with the analogy that rime was a river, moving forward, and we go along with it.

These days I have seen several different posts on the internet, where intuitively, people can’t see it as a river, because we can tell that the stuff along the bank isn’t really “going by” the way it does on a steamboat cruise down the Mississippi, it’s more like a lake of water, rising up along the banks. As the rain of time comes down, the lake continues to rise, progressively burying the lakeshore we know as “being”, or matter and energy.

And so I was using the analogy of time as a lake, and again trying to approach it as my enemy. I thought of Crater Lake in Oregon, the lake grows, but at the center of that volcanic ditch, so does a small island. Kind of like Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which is also volcanically rising out of the center of the “ring of fire”.

That central rise, which becomes a beautiful pristine island at the center of the lake, would represent the very beginning of what “time” began to cover, and so it would ordinarily be the deepest point. But the beauty is in the volcanic nature, which is like a quasar jet from the compact source object at the center of the earth, or the jet of numinous life into the field that is prey for the raging rhinos of “time”. The very center is the part to rise up, to overcome the initial flooding of the lake.

Returning this analogy to “time”, I figure if I learn to control my past, all 8 generations, and hold them still, as the lakeshore would control more and more of the submerged lakebed, I can use energy as will to force the center of the submerged lake to rise again, to become the island in Crater Lake, to raise up my own PAST out of the flooding lake of TIME, and communicate with earlier self from across the surface of the water!

Having taken this thought experiment this far, I began to control the rest of the lake, and once I could fight time from two fronts – the lake shore as well as the center – I proceeded to evaporate the lake, become “one” with myself again, and just proceed to calmly dry and crack as a single giant desert, immune to the rain of time.

Finally having vanquished my foe, at least within the gedanken/thought experiment, I felt free to contemplate what use going through “timeliness” might have for me, as all matter and energy. If I could come up with a good enough excuse for going through time, then I might be able to let it happen, without being so outraged by it.

I realized that time is a very effective encryption scheme. Encryption is the procedure where we take a piece of information, scramble it in some systematic way so no one along the transit route can read it, and then unencrypt it on the other end, at the target.

The desert of matter/energy, unmolested by an external “time”, is a simple entity, it is what it is, it is obviously just there. Maybe it is at risk of detection by intruders. If so, progressing through “time”, by letting the rain fill up the crater in the desert, and hiding under there, is a great encryption scheme. Everything seems like a separate piece, it seems like there are many different entities, rather than one big “ONE”. Anyone looking for the “ONE” at the surface won’t be able to see it.

Therefore, within time, the only way to see the “ONE”, the source, the matter/energy, is too look at EVERYTHING at once, an attitude the ancient Taoists called “utmost pervasion” – see everything, hear everything, know everything, the knowable and the unknowable, the seen and the unseen.

So I can’t afford to be superficial, because time has been encrypting my truth. I have to look beneath the surface, to make it all make sense.

-onderdonk