MacroGenesis, Volume #1 Digital Edition

Dear Friends,

I haven't been here for quite a while, as my Time studies have evolved into a single project that the bulk of my spare time has been devoted to for the last three years: Jeve & Steve, a fictional narrative about the first Day of Spring and the first Night of fall. These personified "Homunculi" are children of the Year, whose father, in turn, is Kala, or Time.

MacroGenesis Part #1 details the cosmic marriage rite of Kala and his beloved, Mother Nature, and the subsequent generations born from them, and sets the stage for Jeve & Steve. Feel free to check out the digital edition as you like.

https://globalcomix.com/c/macrogenesis

The Concept of Fate

Is wisdom forever foundational to philosophy? And if so, then what basic wisdom suffices to be called foundational to philosophy? Basic wisdom in turn depends on what we make of foundational facts. In what way might basic wisdom be called profound? Certainly it is profound if it merits singular attention as fundamental to philosophy.

Do the fates of all concepts lie with the Concept of Fate? Or else, does the fate of all concepts? But these are different questions, one aimed at the respective fates of concepts by themselves, the other at the Fate of Concepts as a whole. In one scenario, the Concepts as a whole survive sempiternally. In another, some concepts die off, others survive for the foreseeable future. In yet another, all concepts perish while life itself survives. But in this vein of thought, we are foremost concerned with two concepts in particular, both subject to this broader inquiry: God and Time.

The facticity or know-ability of the world, conventional wisdom holds, is founded upon basic truths. A truth, given or received as a basis, as a foundation, as a founding basis for knowledge—however such an abstraction of materiality might hold up to a critique of the concept of truth—facticity itself is abstractive as "a power for being known", this prominence of givenness from within a world-enclosure. This "givenness" and "power-for-such" are both semantically denoted datively, as "for-ness" or "being-for-such". It is as such that a confusion between the singular and the plural occurs, in the question of a God-given-world, versus the multiple sempeternities and/or mortalities of the individuals; the Sacred and the secular.

Yet as internality, the concepts of Time, Eternity, Fate all belong to a species of horologic-derived notions; the gods being the divinities, the heavenly beings, stars, astra and colonies of astra, heuristically conceived through narrative conventions, myths. Such abstractions of Time were necessary, in order to first think the heavenly order of being—the first incarnation of this being an early historical foundation of metaphysics and supernaturalism in Indo-European astrologies, as well as later astronomies, through which myths based upon constellations preserved their heuristic value. And thinking from afar, the astral or abstract body became narratively associated with the stars and the great ape, homo sapiens, did first conceive the horological.

This archeophilosophical inquiry into the founding concepts of mind sees in it a latent, nascent historical truth, one that turns on the earliest narrative interwovenness of temporality and eternity. Time and God both reside at the mental site of judging fates. Time appears like God, as a force that cannot be defeated from within life from within the world-disclosure which it avails, because as-such, as world-giving-Time, it is the power that drives birth and death, existence and fate, the universal event of life, though it is entirely possible that the fate of the afterlife and the eternal lie too, in its historical and hermeneutical operations.

If the universal event of life is a fact, if it is knowable-as-a-fact, then it is already a fact to be reckoned with. God-given-ness as an explanation for its facticity, for its knowability, does offer the appearance of an immediate buck-stops-here-styled premise, and for that, it recommends itself in a certain light as unquestionable, beyond criticism.

But if we think of the God who gives as one who gives in-and-through a medium, a prominent finitude or life who reveals as the prominence of the virtues in the thinking of the world as God-given-ness—then the question naturally arises as to how God gives the world to homo sapiens. 

Internality and Dimension

Time and Eternity have in common that they both are constituted mentally as a kind of conceptual internality; yet as internalities, they differ, not just from spatial externality, but one as a concept pertaining to the external and limited,  to science and cause and effect, over and against a concept pertaining to the internal and unlimited or infinite. Yet in this self-reflexivity, in this apperception which is itself a reflection on the self as time, as being-historical, as enduring—there is a kind of inference which takes the temporal and the eternal as erzats options to be opined upon and judged between, as if the facts did not intrude here, in this remote place, so as to prevent some external, objective determination; to wit, a deathless soul enfleshed in time.

Yet it is just in this history of Time and Eternity that we are to locate the emergence of this peculiar, absurdly paradoxical species of religious consciousness, a consciousness that determines deathlessness for itself in the face of death!

To preserve the concept of the Eternal in the face of the Temporal concept of Death is to insist upon the superiority, ontologically speaking, of an internality which cannot be violated or diminished in any ways by the external; a pure internality which affords a pure reasoning. Kant attempted to unfold this situation, and yet we could never say that he was successful in establishing an immortal soul as a fact, insofar as this would arrogate itself to behave like some external determination on this unreachable place, placing the cart before the horse, so to speak.

What is essential and deathless in the conceptualizing framework which is this mental dimension of internality, must be the way in which the self as Time intrudes upon the world for a while and in a particular place. This insistence of the superiority of self over matter, of the I Myself over the whole of the World, of the narrative of self over the facts of life and death, leads to a retreat into the self as a place of repose and continuity in the face of rampant scheduling and never ending worries about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The world draws us out from our repose and throws us into the fray of everlasting strife, the struggle for existence, the struggle for recognition, the struggle for freedom, the struggle for the good life.

Life gifts goodness in its own time, and we struggle to find safe haven in the ports between sea-going journeys between life-events, between anniversaries and holidays, between celebrations and parties, festivals; sacred moments, cherished and commemorated. Work that is akin to play makes this journey the more endurable; a life at sea, in pilgrimage, as journeymen and travellers, make and map our ways, seek sense in the larger picture, to join the small things in one harmonious and meaningful trip.

The sense of the Eternal endures, perhaps not least because it is endurance as such! Existence washes over us historically, until at last we relinquish our bodies to the grave. Will we then see ourselves in a new light? In any light at all? Yet endurance beyond life is already something external as historical. And as historical it is not immediately the eternal, but only the temporal.  

Diwali, Rāma, and Astronomical Lore

The general problem of historicity in Hindu religious narrative can be seen in the differences of opinion that arise between etic (outsider) scholarship on a given narrative versus emic (insider) scholarship. The insider perspective, for example, of the Rāmāyaṇa, is that Rāma is an historical figure, while the outsider perspective tends to treat Rāma as a mythical character. How one judges this matter impacts the reception of scholarship in general in the context of a Hindu audience, though Hindus are not a monolith, and themselves express diverse opinions on the matter, from literal to figurative readings. Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind that much of the emic studies on traditional Hindu narratives turn on a recounting of emic/etic divides, so that an emic study is all too often framed as a defense of culture in the face of foreign interloping by crackpot scholars who dismiss concrete evidences pointing to the historical existence of such figures. The common defense of Rāma’s historicity claims that outsiders fail to recognize the concrete historical evidences and literary nuances which bolster this position. 

While I find myself in more recent work on the side of the etic thinking on this and many other HIndu tropes, I initially took the emic position up and defended it as a hermeneutic exercise, a practice Hindu philosophers and rhetoricians call ‘pūrva-pakṣa’. The idea of pūrva-pakṣa is that one cannot be expected to defeat a position if one is incapable of first articulating that position faithfully. Of course, Western academies already utilize such a method on occasion; a method referred to as “generous reading”. 

I myself exercised extreme generosity in my early readings of Hindu literature, to the point that I found myself attempting to defend the indefensible by mental gymnastics which would make even a seasoned yogin blush. I attempted, for example, to defend, in a graduate level essay, the extreme antiquity attributed to the narrative of Rāma’s life by emic scholars, a period of over a million years prior to the present.

My advisors were obviously perplexed at how to reign in my more ambitious and less wieldy enterprises, and on reflection, I think it did little to recommend my academic disposition to the weighty position afforded by a doctorate from a world-class university. Yet the sting of failure in my repeated attempts to enforce an emic vision of Hindu history nevertheless did far too little to correct the underlying problem, as I only later discovered. 

A methodological constant in my decades long studies of Hindu thought and history has centered on this concern over etic and emic divides. How does one explain the Hindu perspective of history to both practitioner and non-practitioner, while doing justice to both sides of the debate? Moreover, how does one unite the two communities in understanding, given the chasm of difference concerning their methodologies of reading history? Doubtless, emic scholarship frequently strives to dismiss any attempt which does not demonstrate a thorough familiarity with the traditional narratives. And the etic scholar will not countenance any rendering of history which falls far afield of the standard academic account, as the emic account often does, without a concomitant quantity and quality of concrete data to underscore its historicity. 

Another concern which has guided my studies may hold the key to this problem. One has to keep in mind the simple question of authorial intent. We would not fast accuse J. K. Rowling of intending the position that there is a literal historical school of Hogwarts where a young wizard named Harry Potter learned magic in such and such an historical period, and that she were doing the serious work of historical preservation. And nor would we accuse any other author of popular fiction of doing history when they were just trying to tell a compelling story. And of course, “doing history” can be reduced to a literary style, and it often is used in that way, even when its author chooses other ends as its aim, as exemplified in the classical novel, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Vasquez. 

I say, “other ends” here, because as scholars concerned with a critical reading of history, we have to read a work that purports to be historical (whether in fact or as a literary device), as not always giving such an end away on the face. The historical use of lemmata, uncited references to prior works is common enough to warn us against any rash judgments on ancient authorial intentions. One has to appreciate the varieties of concerns that form the impulse to writing and composition if one is to make a substantive literary critique of any single work, what to speak of a whole body of texts. 

Anyone sufficiently familiar with the ancient Vedic Saṁhitās has heard of the Vedāṅgas, the so-called Vedic limbs, which include Jyotīṣa, the study of the positions of stars and heavenly bodies in the heavens. This literary branch is a core feature of ancient civilizations, both East and West, and one that even the most “protestant” of Hindu thinkers would do well to familiarize themselves with, even if astrological thinking is itself justifiably held in scorn for its fantastical ways of reasoning. The imagery of astronomy and astrology figure centrally in the thinking of Hindu metaphysics, even for readers who are unable to recognize more than a couple constellations in the night sky. The vision of the heavens given in both the Vedic and Purāṇic literature can be quite elaborate, and this extreme detail offers us a bounty of historical references. As such, it is of central importance to the emic thinker who aims to provide concrete data on the question of historicity. But just as important, it provides an etic explanation for a secular student of Hinduism who wishes to render the often chimerical visions of gods and demons intelligible within a Postmodern world. Regarded in this light, astrology and astronomy should not be regarded as Hindu sideshows resulting from a lack of rational structure. They are the rational structure that illuminates the meaning of very many classical texts, and with that, an evidently important feature of the ancient authors’ hermeneutical intentions. 

We simply have to take a circumspect path of initiation into familiarity with the Vedic and post-Vedic works. We can do this by drawing attention to a simple historical fact, that the Vedic ritual mind had a deep and abiding concern with producing accurate calendars. Horology, the craft of time-telling, is frequently referenced in the Vedic and Purāṇic works, and is found in places even where one might not expect it. Sometimes this material appears abruptly, as a non sequitur within an ongoing discussion (cf., the 5th canto of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam). At other times, it forms an indispensible background condition, a kind of general lemmata, or narrative foundation. Recognizing how and why horology provides this foundation has the rather powerful impact of clearing up historical questions in ways that one might not have anticipated. 

Horology, as the art of time-telling, has to do with concrete, empirical references: the mathematical movements of heavenly bodies. But the heavenly bodies, whether those of satellites, planets, or stars, do not always present themselves in a straightforward fashion within narrative. For example, Rāma is referred to as an avatāra, which is often rendered as “incarnation of God”. Some scholars have further commented that the term simply means to “cross down” (tara being treated as a verb). But from a grammatical perspective, if we treat tara as a noun, the term could simply mean “descended-star”. Both interpretations fall within Sanskrit grammatical rules, so there is a kind of nascent polysemy. Nascent polysemy which affords horological readings is not uncommon to Hindu literature. Rūpa Goswāmin’s Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, for example, uses such horological polysemy in his opening remarks. This practice is apparent in many of the places where the emic scholar of history claims the historicity of Hindu deities. 

I accidentally discovered this practice some years ago. I was left with the impression that I had been little prepared by my prior studies to see it for what it was, and so it took me several years afterward to sufficiently familiarize myself with constellations and the movements of heavenly bodies. I practiced this art in simple observations I made of the phases of the moon, in contemplating the form of the year with its waxing and waning days and nights, in the passage of the Sun and the Moon through the 12 signs of the Zodiac. I also utilized newly discovered digital tools that enabled me to visualize constellations from different sites on the Earth, that enabled me to look back in Time to see the stars in the former positions as the ancients saw them. This enabled me to better visualize the precession of the Earth’s axis and equinoxes. Such tools further enabled me to quickly compare the constellations of different horological traditions, belonging to different ancient civilizations (specifically, Indo-European civilizations). 

This last feature proved to lead to my most important epiphany: That ancient navigators in traveling, far-reaching caravans of traders, explorers, and adventurers shared a common thread of understanding with the astrologers who predicted the fates of patron-kings, and who utilized the esoteric knowledge of the heavens to exercise enormous power over the various states in which they found themselves. The belief in the power of the heavenly bodies to influence the fate of mankind was bounded together with the power of the annual calendar to decide the cadence of the daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual events of the Indo-European civilizations, and these in turn, were interwoven by narrative processes that enriched the forms and structures of heuristic practices, teaching astrologers, astronomers, and ritual priests how to recognize the stars in the sky, how to render the cacophony of lights and shadows into a well-ordered orchestra of cause and effect. 

But in all this, a new player emerged, a monolithic deity which absorbed and coordinated the lesser, panentheistic, henotheistic deities: The all-encompassing Year, and its principle abstract background, Time. By developing the abstraction of Time through the complex interplay of horological deities, mythic placeholders, and moving heavenly bodies, history was founded on divine, or heavenly terms. Theism has many of its roots in this early play of Time and Fate, of human destiny and the destiny of the state, of the individual and the collective, all arranged and coordinated by the structure of Time, the calendar, the perennial flow of progress and decline. 

The Concept of Time is thus, in its earliest stages, closely akin to (and at places, perhaps indistinguishable from) the concept of God. And this can be, if not proven beyond all doubt, still indicated in a way that compels investigation: That the unreality of Time and the unreality of God are, as metaphysical questions, almost indistinguishable. The one behaves much like the other, though they have their peculiarities. Neither God nor Time are strictly empirical phenomena. Both of them assert primacy as a background condition for the possibility of existence. 

But to return these comments to the question of Rāma’s historicity, I must make a further assertion, that there are even now constellations in an annually visible segment of the night sky which coordinate variously (whether strictly or in ways that suggest gradual decalibrations of the calendar) with the Hindu festivals that commemorate his various life events. 

The annual Hindu festival of Diwali passed just recently, and as such, it behooves us to examine the stellar sky for signs of heavenly causation in association with the narrative. Diwali or Dipāvali, is the festival of lights, associated narratively with the return of Rāma to his kingdom of Ayodhya, after living as a hermit for 14 years in exile. Just a cursory examination of the constellations and heavenly bodies associated with illumination demonstrates a easy connection. The heavenly constellation Hercules comes into full view just as the sun is rising in the east. This association of the visibility of the Hercules constellation and the return of light offers us a fair and simple argument for the meaning of the Diwali festival. Of course, I had not made any previous mention of Hercules in this essay, though I have already written of numerous associations between Rāma and Hercules in other essays recorded elsewhere (see links below). Of course, rigorous scholars, whether etic or emic, are unlikely to find it necessary to accept this association on the mere instance I provide here, but I beg their patience and attention to those other references I have made elsewhere.

Concluding Remarks

While this brief essay does not close the question of Rāma’s historicity, it does provide us an opening to reflect on a potential authorial intention which we might not have guessed, had we not taken this unusual approach. Did the authors of Rāma’s return intend to express an esoteric relationship between the return of the Hercules constellation and the return of the sun? Did the authors see themselves as horologists, ritualizing Time when they composed this narrative? Does not this ritual itself express a longing for the return of the day, embodied in countless oil lamps, in the face of an encroaching winter solstice and the expanding domain of the night? Or is it designed to remind us of the cool season that arises in coordination with this cosmic conjunction of our star with those stars? Perhaps all of the above? 

And if so, if the author intended to act as a horologist in composing this cosmic poetry, does the historicity of Rāma recede? Or does it return its rightful, ancient place in the heavens? In the body of a constellation whose figure can only be drawn by a contemplative mind?  

For further readings on the various associations between Rāma-līla and Astronomical horology, I refer the reader to my online blog: visnuswheeloftime.blogspot.com

The below links can be read in no particular order, though the piece on Jagannatha perhaps the most immediately useful. 

Stellarium, A Visualization App for Archeo-astronomers

The Jagannath Deity and The Hercules Constellation

Buddhist Depictions of Time

Contextualizing Visnu - A Lecture on the Nature of My Studies

A Discussion on the Concepts of God and Time

On Crucial Differences

Timeliness and Godliness

More on the Nature of my Projects

Concerning Magic, Astrology, and Other Dark Arts

Hindu Theology as the Identification of God with Time

Rāvana's Ass Head in Astronomical Relief

About the Timing of the Durga Festival in Kolkata

Jeve & Steve: A Graphic Novel on Horological Myth

For some Time now, I've been focusing a large part of my creative energies on producing a Postmodern myth. It has been a huge undertaking, investing thousands of hours in developing a large cast of characters, a meaningful outline moving over 36 individual issues and through six chapters, a novel font called "Leaf", a new artistic style, and of course a syncretic narrative that borrows quite broadly from many of the world's ancient civilizations.

This novel serves many of my aims as an artist-creator, but above all, it sets forth some of my most basic theories on how the concept of Time came into being. Despite being a light-hearted fiction, it plies quite close to a rigorous examination of the hermeneutical operations that make for engaging and lasting myth, as well as a clarification of some of the strongest undercurrents of religious speculation. My hope is that reading this narrative will offer a fresh and illuminating perspective on the ancient role that horology played in laying the foundations of history, and will give us a broader sense of the drives that continue to bring religious thinking back into the fold of human societies. 

Just to give you a taste of what I'm up to, here's a detail from the first page of the Macrogenesis, the Cosmogonic Myth which describes the generations of horological deities leading up to Jeve & Steve's own birth: 

Father Time & Mother Nature combine to produce the form of Death. 

The mythical elements of this story have exploded into a form that I could never have anticipated. The system I'm using for writing this story is surpassing my every expectation, which in itself is suggestive of why so many authors in times past have utilized it. There is much still to come, and yet so much has already been accomplished here, that I'm quite hopeful for what still lay ahead. 

Facebook's Contribution to Horology: the "Flick"

I haven't posted in a while, though that does not say anything about the time I spend contemplating Time's various human and natural dimensions. But every once in a while, I find something that looks to me like it should belong in my blog, and this article by ScienceAlert.com seems apt.

Essentially, Facebook solved a mathematical problem involving the use of cinematic frame-rates to produce a more elegant numerical value than the ones based on existing digital time-frames. In addition to this, Facebook released the documentation as open-source for gamers and film-makers, suggesting the possibility that the Flick may someday soon become almost as common used as the bit.

There you have it. All you have to do is own a multi-billion dollar media company, and you too might be able to introduce your own horological unit for public use. Good luck. 

Is Time Reversal Possible?

In a recent PBS Article on Time Reversal, Allison Eck describes a new scientific experiment performed at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany, in which the arrow of time had been reversed. This reversal occurred at the quantum scale, essentially, as the reversal of the law of thermodynamics which describes how heat loss occurs. Her article links another article from Science News by Emily Conover.

Whether or not Time reversal is possible in material systems larger than quantum scale objects remains to be seen. But the beginnings of such grand designs appears to necessitate starting small. Very small. In principle, the effects being studied were highly localized, as apparently between a very small number of atoms.

In effect, the team who performed the study coaxed warm atoms into getting hotter by robbing the thermal energy from cooler atoms. Performed on a large scale, this would tantamount to starting a fire by throwing ice-cubes on wood. If that sounds strange, well, so does Time reversal.

But Time reversal is so much more than simply the reverse of thermodynamic entropy. To get comprehensive Time reversal, one would have to reverse the trajectories of particles, and would only be able to go back as far as the particle's prior path interactions, all of which would have to be reversed. When examined in this light, Time reversal sounds possible only in the loosest sense of the term. To achieve human scale effects would seem to require near omniscient powers of observation and omnipotent powers of control, not just of the object one wished to send back, but of the very environment in which is was sent.

According to the study's coauthor, Eric Lutz, the result shows that "the arrow of time is not an absolute concept, but a relative concept." As a philosopher of concepts of time, I agree. But the pragmatic reality isn't really all that different for it. I remain unpersuaded that Time reversal will ever become a practical human reality, at least with the technology utilized here, as best as I understand it.  

25 top time travel films

http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g3086/best-time-travel-movies/?src=socialflowFB

Time, Etc.: We are One Step Closer to Time-Travel (Reversal, that is)

This article suggests that Time travel has been cleared up mathematically. It is difficult to imagine what the device suggested will even look like, but they couldn't help titling the thing after Dr. Who's famous TARDIS.

Anyhow, take a look. 

Horology in the News: Harrison Clock Accurate to Within a Second per 100 Days

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-john-harrison-vindicated-250-years-absurd-claims?platform=hootsuite

So, the "Worshipful Company of Clockmakers" (whose website makes for a fascinating case study in modesty) recently made a clock, based upon a 250 year old design, accurate to within one second per 100 days. The project vindicated the claims of the horologist, John Harrison, who made this claim at a time when clocks were simply not that accurate. In addition to having a fantastic wig, Harrison made nice clocks.

Not entirely sure why, but it almost always brings me a slight feeling of relief to contemplate that some of our predecessors were sometimes smarter than people gave them credit for. 

Questions? Just Ask!

For those of you interested in settling matters related to the nature and role of the concept of Time to religious and historical themes, feel free to send me your questions! My fees are beyond reasonable! Check my profile here:

21.co/benmcclintic 

Transcendence and the Solipsistic Retreat

The concept of Time may be regarded as drawing itself originally from two general domains: (1) the internal mental domain of analytic and synthetic cognitions and hence time-perceptions, and (2) the external, empirical domain of the calendar with its roots in the ritualized, commemorated, and studied motions of stars, planets, and other heavenly bodies, and which thus constitutes the earliest formal grounding for human horological practices. The difference between the concept and its phenomenal ground, consists entirely in this. This division might then be regarded as Pure (or Conceptual) Horology and Practical Horology.

Both the pure and the practical facets of horology indicate an existentialle within dasein: his contention with Time. And this shows up in a certain way, as will be shown through a consideration for dasein's social practices, given here as particular moments seen in a conversation. In general when, for the sake of conversation, dasein comes face-to-face with another person (or more simply put, an other) we may note specific distinctive incidences of transcendence. As Levinas works out at length, this face-to-face encounter is the locus of an event of transcendence, the disclosure of a trace pointing toward alterity, or the difference an other makes.

Conversation arises in a normal, everyday context of the various incidences and events provided by schedules, whether these are work calendars, or of planned vacations. They are also part of this calendrical practice, even if their content is merely a "time-filling" or "event-ordering" device, such as an "ice-breaker" or a gentleman's excuse. The contention with time remains alive throughout the conversation, so that in both speaking to and listening to the other, there may arise moments of retreat from external awareness. The other speaks, but no one is listening, because thought interjects and derails the attention, redirecting the mind inward, toward a solipsistic contemplation.

These transcendental movements are herein regarded with respect to the concept of attention and in that light of that general condition called attention span. When speaking of the face as the locus, the where, of the event of transcendence, we speak of the way that the face discloses traces of a solipsistic retreat through the withdrawal of attention from empirical consciousness, a withdrawal that takes its point of departure from the questioning of the meaning of being and draws the mind toward an historical, phenomenological understanding of the concept of time, an understanding that in a sense lay at the end of an understanding of self, and hence as a telos for apperception. The annual calendar is for the most part an indispensable part of our identity. The man is a Catholic by virtue of his participation in the calendrical ritualized event that defines and structures annual Catholic life: Christmas, Easter, Sunday Mass, the Celebrations of the Lives of the Saints. Interspersed may be any number of public, community events, intended to fill the time of the year in festival, or engaged in practical outreach, community service, and so forth.

It is in this situation that our skills as teachers, builders, cooks, drivers, organizers, leaders, employees, parents, and so forth structure our dialectical lives. Conversations fall to these themes and others like them, or with respect to aesthetic concerns, ethical concerns, and questions of ultimate meaning. The practical activity of organizing our lives according to the schedule of a calendar determines this meaningfulness of finite existence just as much as the conceptual life of the for-the-sake-of-which that provides an understanding of that meaning.

In the course of talking in the context of these varied circumstances, there arise non-parities, inequalities. Conversations with certain individuals may expose us to frequent interruptions, or in conversation with others, we may find our minds filled with ideas, and may have to constantly revisit the other's act of speech with renewed attention. The attention which does this undergoes a solipsistic retreat from empirical awareness, the attention span becomes thin and attenuated, or split.

In another case, the form of a talking over, an interruption: the other is disjoined from their own event of disclosure. The other who discloses thought may fall silent in order to listen, the thought may pass incomplete. In interruption, one opens up a disclosure toward the other while closing off disclosure. In the interruption of a condescension, a desire interrupts which valuates one's own time over that of the other. In the interruption, there lay a solipsistic withdraw of the attention from listening to what has been said and what is being said. This is a retreat, or a withdrawal into the first-person perspective. An empirically-minded scientist may be tempted to turn a blind eye to even the possibility of a transcendental content in the mind of the other. The other is reduced in concept from something enigmatic or fathomless to something knowable and known, the thought of the other is designified.

Other than this solipsistic retreat, there is another transcendental movement and which is the flipside of this coin of attention, and this is the return of consciousness to empirical awareness. This movement may become alerted to the fact that the train of attention has become derailed, and may seek to resume through a circumspection of recent moments. The words already passed as the other's speech, are pulled back from the thought of having just heard them. The mind attempts to get itself back up to speed; where did I leave the conversation, and where are we at now? Time travels internally and externally in our thought and in our dialogue, and to follow its every trace is to have our attention divided. Time seems selfish for shares of our attention and in different ways.

These are matters for which we cannot reverse the event, but can only exercise our attention to be more attentive, to derail less, to listen more, and as much for understanding as for response. This concern for understanding the other is thus what overcomes the solipsistic mentality leading the attention to review and resume its empirical awareness. The transcendental motion here derives from the other, from their alterity, from the space of their own speech, their own thought, their own understanding of a matter. 

A Nice Dr. Who Blog

https://doctorwhomindrobber.com/

Is Time [a] God?

What Is Time?

The question has been thrown about as if it were already obvious that Time were either some thing or else nothing at all. Of course, a concept can be a thing, though an empty thing at that, insofar as it does not provide us with some corresponding res extensa. 

J. M. McTaggart's account of Time reduces it to an "unreality", a conclusion he arrives at by way of describing a logical absurdity or conflict in the way that we usually talk about it. McTaggart's essay The Unreality of Time did have the novel effect of reorienting my thinking towards Time as a possible theme for exploration and discovery, but it also had the impact of leading me to question the utility and limits of reason with respect to the source of nature. 

Not that I'm an anti-rationalist, no. But my intuitions allow for there to be absurdity in the world without decrying it as falsehood or illusion. And neither do I mean to imply that the world just cannot make sense. But lived experience shows that we very often are able to live and act in the world without having a full understanding of it, without a universal comprehension. 

And so, it is important to recognize that while a person like McTaggart can convey with logical rigor the absurdity of speaking of Time in ways that appear even at cross purposes, this does not in itself demonstrate that Time is any less real than it was when we accepted it as real! 

McTaggart might have himself continued to keep a pocket watch, or to keep schedules, to wake early, to lecture at a certain Time, to celebrate his birthday, and to honor annual holidays. All of these would depend upon his accepting, on some level or another, the realities of Time. 

With this sort of intuition in mind, I set out to explore a richer description of Time, one that spanned not simply a corner somewhere in the ideological mind of a certain analytic philosopher, not the A-type or B-type description, tucked away in some department of a certain university, but the concept of Time as best approached by the historian of concepts. 

You see, at that very time when I first came to know of McTaggart, this problem seemed to me serendipitous. God too was being accused of very similar charges, that He was unreal, that the vision of God is an absurd one, in which we are expected to hold in union concepts which do not tally well with experience as such, that God should be omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent. 

I was already following the history of the problem of evil in relation to ontotheology, so that when I saw how McTaggart treated Time, it struck me as not a mere coincidence, but as something structurally significant. But to appreciate that better, it helps to bring to light that I had already been studying the Bhagavad-Gītā for the better part of a decade. And of all the chapters in that terse and semiotically dense work, the 11th was most curious to me. It is in that chapter that Kṛṣṇa claims identity with Time, and thereby claims supremacy as the God of gods, and as pervading the whole of the world. 

To be sure, such pagan thinking is abstract, but it does mark, whether precisely or through the lens of poesis, a certain foundational era in human history; the beginning of thinking about Time in abstraction.

And certainly Time had already been on the mind of the Indo-Europeans long prior to the Gītā. They founded horology in order to measure Time out. This measuring came in two forms; the calculating of annual events, whether ritual or seasonal, and in the questions of universal origination. Both forms of this horological project found a grounding in the regular passage of heavenly bodies, whether the planets, or that of the stars which appeared stationary with respect to each other. 

But here we see just how closely the problem of the existence of God coincides with the problem of the unreality of Time. For, the first gods were traced through those mythical heuristics of astrology. Astrology was not simply some long forgotten, arcane master science; it was theology before theology had a separate life in relation to reason. 

And I have come to recognize through a close study of the theme of Time in the Rig and later Vedic materials, that the abstractive process which led to Kṛṣṇa's declaration in the Gītā is not random or without historical significance; it reflects precisely this motion, from a henotheistic or polytheistic seasonal worship of multiple zodiacal and/or non-zodiacal astral deities, this accorded to an annual lunisolar calendar to the veneration of the year itself, and from this to the veneration of Time as the first of Gods. This period we see at the close of the Atharva in the 19th Book in the two hymns to Kala-deva. 

The abstraction follows an historiological arc, and provides us a certain source and result. It clears up much about what the Vedas are after, such as in the Rig, I.164 hymn to the Viśvadevas. It suggests that this peculiar but histocially concrete abstractive process is key in making sense of the 11th chapter and the ontotheological claims made therein. 

It also suggests some rather provocative matters for the future of ontotheological thinking, at the very least, among Hindu thinkers, if not for theology on a global scale; though even here, the outcome depends upon whether these same heuristic processes can be traced in other religious histories. And it may be that we will not have the full solution to this problem until we have gotten further along in our comparative studies. But already, one can see suggestive formations in Genesis for example, in the proximity of Ophiuchus, Serpens, Corona Borealis, and Hercules to the myth of Adam and Eve. 

But closer again to the leading question, does the coincidence of God's ontotheological absurdities with those of Time tell us anything about the global history of the concept of Time? And does Time then serve as a useful source for thinking about God? And what does this say for Heidegger's results in attempting to secularize ontology? Has he done so at all? Or has he rather returned ontology to its theological sources in such a light that history might now come to light for the first time since its inception? 

Doctor Who & Tom Tomorrow

On a less/more serious note (depending upon whether you are British), I'm an old fan of both Tom Tomorrow and Dr. Who.

Hence, I'm very happy to share this cartoon.

Astrology & "Dark Arts"

In a recent conversation with my father, he felt pressed to point out that the Holy Roman Church regarded astrology as a "dark art". Of course, I was already aware of this, but it brought to mind a valuable reflection: the very alienation of thought from astrology in Western culture might help us to better appreciate how far it has been underutilized in making sense of Asiatic religion.

One might expect the topic to fare better in the academic study of religion, at least, yet evidence suggests otherwise.  Thus a critical reconstruction of the history of astrology in Asiatic religions pertains to several matters:

1) the roles astrology plays in the history of religions;
2) the roles astrology plays in the construction of traditional myths;
3) the roles astrology plays in the interpretation of an annual ritual calendar;
4) the roles the criticism of astrology plays in the construction of theology;
5) the violence done to a history of religions by means of this criticism;
6) the methods needed to locate and discern astrology's various roles in the above;
7) the roles astrology has yet to play in providing hermeneutical cyphers in the interpretation of astrology-wielding religions and cultures;
8) the philosophical implications of such a reformed reading of history.

A chronological approach to this matter suits the nature of the study less than one which progresses thematically and inter-culturally. The themes themselves may require us to leap forward and backward in history, from cause to result, and across geographies, from ur-form and comparative counterparts to synthetic forms, as with the production of new myths from the elements of older myths. In this way, many chronologies contribute to the disclosing of a larger chronology (though perhaps even here, no universal chronology yet exists, or even should be supposed to be possible).

At the comparative level, we might expect the study to progress best from the examination of two traditions and no more. Yet again, the evidence suggests otherwise, so that astrology is better seen as a thick multiculturalism, enriched and even constituted by numerous diasporic tributaries, even when focused upon a single myth recalled from a single geographic tradition. For example, the evidence for the monkey god Hanuman's latent associations with the constellation Corona Borealis cannot be made entirely clear without drawing evidence from both the Chinese astronomical traditions and Greco-Roman and European art ranging from Antiquity to the Renaissance (in addition to South Asian sources). Indeed, even this requires that we compare astrological traditions internally, so that Corona Borealis must also be compared against Corona Australis. And all of this becomes increasingly concrete whence we have included Hanuman's associations and interactions with other mythical characters, tracing their astrological ur-forms alongside his.

But even before we can consider such puranic-epic characters, we should probably begin with something of a chronological approach, so that we should at least first examine the Rig Vedic materials, if only to demonstrate how remote and pervasive the origins of these horological practices are.

With that, we might first consider the associations of Indra with the Ruddy Bull, or Taurus (whose housing the Sun brings with it the Monsoon. This appears to be among the very oldest myths recorded in the Vedic materials, with the battle against Vṛtra forming an early historical episode of theological reasoning in connection with annual, seasonal events.

The short of it:

Such reasoning through astrological materials gives us the chance to clear up theology of its theo-temporal associations, and brings into question the existential matter of thinking about being within the horizon of Time. Is thinking about being qua Heideggerian phenomenology just a natural extension of that earlier Pagan thought which saw Time as the adi-deva, the first god? Would that make Time the Devil?

Physical Asymmetry & the Arrow of Time

Well, it seems that atomic nuclei are asymmetrical. Too bad for Time Reversal.

Letters of Love to the Lady Wisdom: Appreciating the Scope of the Horological Project

The thought of wisdom, which at first ignites our curiosities, our youthful desires, our imaginative ponderings, our first questions, our first order ontologies, our investigations into the meaning of being, our methodologies toward knowledge, toward a formal description of existence and non-existence, our historical understanding of being, our originations and their hermeneutical, historical contributions toward human understanding—all of these contribute toward our understanding toward the original contribution, that which comes from the Love of Wisdom itself.

What does the love of Wisdom teach us, who are her ardent students? How does one qualify to be a proper and adequate lover of wisdom? What does she want to teach us? A very controversial question indeed. For why should we regard Wisdom as a lady if not because we ourselves wished to seduce her? But the image of Wisdom as a lady is an idol, a symbolic image of divinity—a way to direct the eye toward-the-heavens.

We ask then about the origins of our calendars: the origins of the concept of Time. To investigate this globally, we need look to the hermeneutical principles which guide the adequate and scholarly interpretation of the history of this concept; for it tells us much about a decisive era in the earlier history of mankind. The great Indo-European civilization, which was to forever impact the course of the history of the world, gave rise to a certain historical part of that question in South Asia. Her contributions to the overall history of the concept of Time do provide us with key cyphers in cultivating a deeper understanding of the history of this concept globally.

The Indian (or South Asian) experience of Time remained, for a time, geographically remote from European history. Yet we see all about us, in their own myths, evidence of the foreigners, which brought with them their stories, their narratives, their heuristic devices (all technologies which could even at that time be shared through the proper channels of understanding; i.e., horology).

The formation of calendars, or cultural chronicles of annual events perhaps even itself gave rise to the closer study of the stars. Calculating the year was a formidable task, at one point in proto-history. Today, it is as if second nature; reduced to the status of mere (or primitive) instinct. But at one time, this was a grand task; and it would behoove us to attend to the question of its historical formation in India, as this provides another, advanced cypher into the greater historical question of the meaning of Time. We could as it were unlock another ur-historical period to greater historical understanding.

To do this we require to understand this history of calendars, by means of relating them to historically early forms of polytheism and the myths that preserved their cultural forms. The knowledge of the stars is a knowledge of this grand civil exchange, a sort of intercultural horology. The travellers, Traders and Businessmen, made it a common practice to take the services of a horologist, or as they were known, astrologers, navigators, metehoroscopoi. Plato himself indicates in his great Republic the secret but central status of the naval navigator.  One who knows the stories of the stars and can thereby unlock the mysteries of Time and Space. This image of the astrologer is very often spurned by the pretenses of rigor in the academy, because it would appear to reject the historical accomplishments of the academy—it would seem to reject science in favor of superstition and wild inference. But we are not concerned with reviving into practice this failed prescience; we are only concerned with the resuscitation of an early historical epoch that centers upon the theme of Time by accounting for the role astrology played in early history.

An academic criticism of horology would simply be an adequate accounting for its arising within the greater history of mankind. To take astrology academically serious and methodologically rigorously, is simply to account for it in an academic light, an historical light. But all evidence suggests that astrology also happens to play a key role to the early development of the history of Time; it played no small part in making Time first intelligible to us, and so played a crucial role, a formative role, in human history. As such, we may appear at first to be at a great academic disadvantage, for the rigors of resuscitating to the light of historical scrutiny such an arcane beast would no doubt require greater work than could be accomplished in a single lifetime by a single scholar; much criticism and consideration for this topic is yet to be had.

No doubt, this fear might, had I the foresight of prior experience, have intimidated me into a smaller project (fools rush in where angels fear to tread). Yet my earliest intuitions on this matter remain to all appearances sound: Time remains the key question: what is its meaning, and how do we best approach that question? My intuition suggests we look at a history of horology, a history of the accounting for time and the production of calendars, grounded in annual and seasonal rituals (cf., the monthlong Bengali adoration of Devi while the Sun is in Virgo). The practicality of the matter simply asks us to attend to ancient stories in such a wise that we know what to look for; and this turns out to require very specific things: one needs to find evidence in the charts and stories about them, the evidences of borrowing, of which we have accumulated much. 

In the style of Jan Gonda, we have accumulated a sizeable compendium of notes on various constellations across horological cultures and which I should eventually like to publish; approximately half of these notes were taken in the year of my comprehensive exams on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Methodology; the other half were taken in the year of my field research in Northern India and Nepal.

While in Southern Kolkata, I stayed near Jadabpur University, where I spoke with both faculty and students on the topics of Hinduism, history, and astrology. I attended the month long Goddess (Devi) festival in honor of the conjunctions of the Sun with Virgo, visiting many of the city's temporary yet decorous deity installations. The goddess's persistent iconography disclosed the sectors of the sky, when Virgo overtakes the powers of Taurus, who descends beyond the horizon as Virgo reaches the zenith of the day. She stands upon a Lion much as Leo sits directly beneath Virgo. She stabs the bull with a trident, perhaps after the fashion of Cancer or Gemini. Her attendants are all about her. The vision is almost invariably astrological, even though the night sky has long since been lost to fog and smog in the region of Kolkata.

While in Delhi, I met with the chair of the Sanskrit department at the University; I spoke to him about my research interests, and within a week, he assembled the entire Sanskrit department, along with all of the grad students, to listen to an hour-and-a-half Powerpoint presentation I spent the week preparing regarding the question of the history of South Asian horology with respect to the origin of the yuga cycles. The entire department expressed deep appreciation for my work, and the very next year, the University of Delhi held its first open conference on the general topic.

I also spoke with the entire faculty at the University of Rajasthan at Jaipur. I related an early exegetic exercise, in which I suggested how the Kṛṣṇa-mūrti's formality as kāliya-dhāmana, the Chastiser of Kaliya might have taken its form from known constellations. The headmaster was elated when I made the patent suggestion that Kṛṣṇa took his form from the constellations Hercules and Draconus, and demonstrated through a slide show, why I thought so. I also spoke on the substantive probabilities of the earliest period of the 30-section muhūrta, which took many of its names from various and specifically identifiable constellations in the northern sky.

I had the curious fortune of being the only scholar to show up for a Mahābhārata Conference that had been cancelled at the last moment. I spoke to the original organizer, who assembled the two dozen members of the faculty of the school within an hour. I had only wished to attend, and so had to impromptu speak from a compiled slideshow. I took this from a file in which I kept various artifacts of symbology which helped me to build my narrative, while using modern applications such as Stellarium, to show these scholars how one might familiarize oneself quickly with multiple astrological narratives across the globe using a cutting-edge and informative night sky emulation application; one had immediate access to numerous horological narratives across the globe and could quickly compare them across Time and Space.

The impromptu presentation was a watershed for them. I showed just how the metallic form of Kṛṣṇa, the mūrti aligned itself with the cosmic variant, as if pramā and pratimā. I explained how similar patterns can be seen in Greek and Roman variants of horological myth. I've written extensively about this matter in this very blog (as for example, in the near identity of Hanuman and Hercules iconography, or the "esoteric" suggestions of the trapezoid in Vaiṣṇava iconography qua Jagannath et al and a multi-sect Vaiṣṇava tīlaka). The evidence is written in forms that do not speak; unless to the educated mind, the knower of time, the horologist.

I spent a month in the ancient capital of Nepal, Bhaktapūra, learning from locals how to paint the ancient kala-cakra-maṇḍala, and learned from their popular narratives that the image of the Bhava-cakra conformed well as a calendar to the months of the year through the symbolic content of the 12 links in the Buddha's teaching regarding the chain of pratityasamutpada.  The six realms too displayed such a tendency, reflecting large sectors of the visible night sky. Indeed, though I learned this art by spending six eight-hour work days per week in the company of local artists and discussing the matter with them as far as language allowed. A local Buddhist monk denied the story, considering it a popular corruption to the original wisdom of the Buddha. This might suggest an earlier synthesis of Hindu horological tropes with Buddhist ethical teachings via some regard for heuristic phronesis, practical wisdom, or upāya.

Overall, the culture of astrology remains a palpable and normative part of Hindu culture; it is metaphysically embedded in the theological abstractions which depart from it toward the transcendental; the temporal historically grounds the eternal in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation is itself a way of thinking eternity through sempiternity, never-ending Time.

I am simply trying to decypher the earlier history of this problem of accounting for calendars, which did in time complexify itself and produce greater and greater problems of the production of accuracy and reaccounting for its passing, itself driving the invention and revision of the clock and calendar, and leading to the arising of horology as among the first truly human sciences, until giving rise later and in many respects to technology itself. But what concerns me most is its relation to the concepts of divinity and transcendence.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami treats these two religious and ritual categories as ordered in the face of eternity, with transcendence being originary and divinity being derivative. But what if the opposite were true? What if the very vision of the transcendent were derivative of the divinities observed overhead from the down below? This should even go further to suggest much about the historical nature of some of the most popular forms of religious thinking in Indo-European civilization, both early and late.

Yet this is merely one of the roots of the question concerning Technology. Indeed, we won't really know if we can reverse Time until we've gotten clear about what it is. Without getting clear about the meaning and nature of the history of the concept of Time, it will remain in crucial ways difficult to get entirely clear what technology is up to next—or what is more, what its long-game is when we imagine ourselves building time machines.

Time and Greatness

What we call "Time" (if indeed a "what" can at all be appropriately applied) is in fact a greater background. Consider how Time arises in relation to the face-to-face encounter: the person comes into-and-out-of our lifespace, our personal vantage point. In this arising of appearance, this coming-near or proximity, there lay the clue to our question concerning Time's greatness. When the other person disappears, it is as it were a disappearance into the great background of the world. And so, the other transcends proximity, being-there only in terms of varying degrees of closeness and remoteness, immediacy and mediacy. Abstractly construed, this degree admits of a thinking in which the other is removed from us—not by some mere spatiality, but—by a temporal distance. This temporal distance is itself a background (and as such, a condition) for the dimensions we call space.

Though one studied philosophy, one is not as yet a philosopher, not of the highest rank. But such talk is theological at base. The thinker must think about time. Thinking God as Time is a thinking of life as miraculous, wondrous. Time as Father-of-All. Nature as Mother-of-All. These are pagan thoughts, yet they are too the thoughts of science, so that a deep truth comes to light in consideration of them, one that might even go far to repair theology from the violence of historical conquests carried out in His Name.

Under current standards of scholarship, Time appears within the Hindu Pantheon as if the image of a tripartite deity, Past, Present, Future; so that there is a necessity of critique in light of the monotheological, the idea of a single God over all other gods (deva-deva jagat-pate). The transformation of the many gods into demons (into images of avarice toward the monotheological), flows in many ways from the exigencies of historical consideration concerning the chief human virtues demonstrated in the light of history itself: ye shall know the tree by its fruits. A knowledge of history requires training in rigor and care for the fragile condition under which any such history leads humanity to a greater flourishing by having a greater view of itself in the light given by historical understanding.

 South Asian religions of numerous varieties are still called to respond to the question of monotheism. The culture of the Bible, and the culture of the Veda are both great plants, born in the soil of the everyday world. Thinking theologically means caring for these plants, and finding practical, insightful ways of leading them to flourishing.

Considering Time gives us pause to regard the conditions under which South Asian religions respond to contemporary theology. Its own history demonstrates a deep concern for the historical through the envisioning of these tripartite deities, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva. They are later products of a thinking which perhaps began even from a mere consideration for the diverse annual festivals that populated humanity. Our habits, our practices, our daily ways-of-being; consideration for the gods, for those celestial deities who occupied the deep of the night and marked the passage of Time.

Astrology today is still regarded by Roman Catholics as a dark art, so that a robust possibility of comparative theologies looks dim at first face. And indeed, without a knowledge of the night sky, one would be bereft of the art of understanding time, as it were, in the light of mythology. The mytho-logy, or reasoning which arises from a consideration for myth, belongs to a heuristic device (much like the Antikaithera Mechanism) adopted from pre-history for the sake of importing an understanding of the will of the gods, the seven moving in the twelve houses, the zodiacal ring of the year, The great Giants resting at the whirling peak of the world and the deluge below. As Levinas puts it in Time, Death, and God, the upward image discloses a curiosity which precedes all taboo. Science sees the world, and subjects it to the criticism of a mathematical consideration for the conditions of its being, its physics.

A consideration for Hinduism means not less than a consideration for the marks made by a consideration for Time in Hindu thinking. The calendrical culture of South Asia is one of many histories, one of many ways of being. A consideration for astrology is no plunging oneself into a dark art (no rash judgement!), but rather a plunging oneself into a question for the role and domain of astrology in making intelligible the very meaning of the texts under consideration; it would be rash to judge Great Hindu works without a consideration for the astrological cultures which produced them. The myths open themselves more freely to a reader who has an ear for astrological thinking, and even more so when they are not limited to such astrological thinking! But how rash are we to skip the elementary in order to appear as more advanced! 

The elementary stands as the guardian to thinking; when elements of thought are lacking in consideration, one thinks rashly, one acts impulsively. Consideration for the time of the other is a consideration which belongs to an even broader ethical thinking. The neglect of India is the neglect of a growing economy, a new consumer. Capitalism itself then wants a healthy India, an India with a healthy appetite.

But India consumes diversely, it is a marketplace of diverse cultures. And with that, diverse understandings of Time. This diversity in many places and in many ways implicates itself in a process of exchange, a multi-cultural gifting. To seek a monotheology in Indian thought thus abstracts skyward, away from the ground of daily existence, and toward the cultural background, toward the idea of a culture of thinking horo-theo-logically (rather than pan-, panen-, poly- et al).

It is perhaps uncanny to Middle-Eastern monotheologies to find in India a habit for divinizing the diverse ontological groups in the world, and yet for the throngs therein, for thinking oneself monotheologically. Generally, this leads to a thinking of brahman, abstract unity or monism. Yet the mono- in monism is not yet a monotheology.

There does stand before us an important question for consideration, and an important critique, one that aims to reach near the heart of Hindu thought, in order to better bring out the historical course of its monotheological thought, which is even now already well under way. It is perhaps the fate of Vaiṣṇavism to always be preparing the way for the arising of monotheological thought. And this, because it is always thinking horo-theo-logically. In abstraction, kāla stands as the supreme deity of the whole of the Hindu Pantheon.

Kāla, or Time, is the vision of a supreme and absolute deity, a God-over-all-other-gods. Time, as a theological product, as a product of thinking—theologically, ritually, annually, calendrically, horologically—is a thinking which produces a cultural fruit, in many cases, a diverse market-place of cults and rituals. These cultures interact as through the medium of shared calendars, public annual festivals, habits of gifting and exchange, of sacrifice, mercy, and renewal. The sacrificial mind dresses up the pleas of humanity to the hearts of the gods; it seeks a way into their hearts as through their stomachs. Fate is taken to be in the many moving hands of the gods, and with that, a certain fatalism arises which motivates the sacrificer to seek clemency, mercy.

Kāla slays all. None can withstand his approach forever. The thought here merges darkness with finitude, and gives rise to the thinking of death. Immanuel Levinas would have us think of what lay beyond death, so that the finitude of Time's grasp on life would appear as a demonic grip, and one broken by the final, fatal act of death. So that the Grim Reaper seems the constant companion of Time: one of the four horsemen at the advance of the end of history. But what is perhaps an even more frightening thought than the end of history itself: what if instead of pre-occupying thought with consideration for the fate of humanity, given as unavoidable and inevitable, so as to usher it in all the quicker, we had to think of future generations and all those yet to come, all those who are yet to inhabit a lifespace, yet to confront the questions and quests this lifespace opens up to them. What if we stopped preparing the world merely for death, but instead prepared it too for life?

The image of Time as Supreme Deity needs to be understood if Vaiṣṇavism is to uphold the mantle of monotheology. But it appears as if under the weight of a mythical thinking, inspired by a naive consideration for a super-stitious and pre-critical horo-theology (i.e., astrology). The calendar, the culture, their history, and very many of their visions of deities patently belong to such a mode of interpretation, and as such, our question concerns the interpretive principles under which our understanding obtains its object. To teach Hinduism as an elementary subject, so as to produce an Introduction, not merely as useful, but insightful, helpful in clarifying Hinduism beyond misunderstanding. To do this, one needs to broach the question of astrology for the student, not so as to lead them to think superstitiously; rather, mythologically, to help them better understand the abstract and practical roles that myth plays in Hindu culture and thought, in setting its traditional, annual, seasonal patterns.

The facet of South Asian religion I am concerned with is just that one which adores Time as Supreme, roughly defined as the kāla-vādins. The term, kāla-vadin, does implicate a specific if loosely bound historical group (Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, Rāma-bhaktas, various Śaivas, and some groups of Śāktas can be said to belong to this group), or it can also simply refer to the group contributing the Atharva-Vedic hymns dedicated to kāla. Perhaps this latter might even include those earlier thinkers who first worked out the length of the year, and who considered its understanding to be a great riddle, as collated by J. Gonda in his work, Prajāpati and the Year. We might roughly view these then as two groups, since there is evident an earlier and a later in terms of the history of the concept of Time in South Asian literature. We do not mean to introduce a new religion where there was not one before; rather, we are using the term kāla-vādin in a formal sense, as an historical category of the understanding, one utilized in Hindu thinking and one we too might adopt for analytical ends (even if thereby doing so, we extend its meaning further).

 This facet would be best viewed without reduction to an incomplete reading, but its complexity and enormity evades a singular consideration on my part alone. Its role is increasingly clear to me, insofar as so much of what is thereby recognizable in South Asian religion reflects an intuition or notion of it, insofar as the people set their own life-patterns after it in one form or another. The timing of weddings by consideration for the proper muhūrta, the calculation of the Vedic or Vaiṣṇava calendar,  The timing of births and reading of fates in astrology—all of these belong to a broadly elementary "Hindu" intuition of kāla. Even the conflicting paces in the daily grind of both urban and rural life in South Asia still show deep regard for these intuitions.

Time, whether regarded by its "Western Sense" or by its "Asian Sense" is clearly a background condition for the thinking of human history in South Asia, as much as it is for that collective we call the West. Indeed, Time is no less a condition for the world of the mere animal! As such, it is an absolute background condition for being. The thought of Time's greatness refers to the remoteness of its idea as the background for lived spaces. Time is a basic condition. As a basis, it is also a baselessness or what is too remote to give itself in any basic way; i.e., a background. Time considered conceptually might give us such language as before and after, as past, present, and future, and as such, might be subject to J. M. McTaggart's logical critique. But if Time simply and truly shows itself as a basic baselessness, does not this suggest a patent contradiction too? Does not Time here become too absurd even to think?! Is Time no more than a great absurdity?

But such unserious thinking would have us ignore the basic truth of Time's conditional character: as a remote background, it perhaps does not stack up to the Eternal. Perhaps Time is not so Great as Eternity? Or have we simply lost sight of what is similar in them, the sempiternal? Is not the "forever and ever" of Time like that of Eternity? Or do we only regard as Time what is finite in one degree or another? 

Time and Light

Time, in abstraction, “appears” as if a visible event. Time as Light constitutes the rate of the propagation of an event. In this respect, even visualizing the past (as with time travel to a distant past) would be mere visualization, mere envisioning, and not per se ‘recovering the event in its originary passage of coming to be’. Time travel today, as fiction, envisions the technology, but does not understand the phenomenon well, and so devolves instead into hocus pocus, technological and narrative slight of hand. Serious consideration of the very meaning of temporality given in terms of its conceptual structure for this reason does not easily arise, and certainly not without the right sort of preparatory exercises. 

We can analyze time horologically, as with our attempts to keep track of it via natural and mechanical clocks and calendars. Such analysis affords us a view of Time, a way of seeing it. But there are other analytical approaches which prove to be meaningful approaches to an understanding of Time. Perhaps if we are to first have an understanding of Time which might finally be regarded as comprehensive in its formalities, if not yet finished in its historical overtures—so that every generation will have a view of Time for a while, and then pass on in the face of a yet newer generation—we should aim at an understanding of the Being for whom the question of the meaning and nature of Time is at issue.
Time, in this respect, refers to Dasein’s finitude, and the urgency which this produces alongside the angst felt in thinking of death. Time is as if saturated by a sort of meaningfulness in this urgency which it presses upon Dasein to seek after. Dasein seeking to restore its past, seeking to reverse the flow of events, to invert as it were the arrow of entropy and tragedy, and so to cast itself back. What direction is this backward leading event? Is it even realizable in terms of our current physical ontologies which preference that of what is, what exists and can thus be seen, in opposition to that which is not, is no more? Or would we need first to learn a new language, one with newer grammatical rules and newer terms, a language which allowed for discourse on this redisclosure of events past? And how else would we expect to disclose a thing so illusive as time reversal?

We might at least imagine such a machine as would naturally arise from such a serious conversation;  and imagination here is at least somewhat important, since it evokes the visual element of Time. What does the person outside the machine witness when witnessing this event of time-reversal? What does the person within this field opened up by the machine witness looking outward at her audience?

Interstellar makes a state-of-the-art styled attempt at visualizing the current best modeling of the sorts of dynamics at play in such an event. The leap across space leads to a leap across Time, one which suggests a general angular function to Time, if not one that reverses events (though in the event of passing through the portal there arises a moment of such, two time-travellers cross paths while passing in opposite directions). In this film, there is a tacit need for visualizing, and hence a seduction into avoiding the deeper difficulties of conceiving Time travel. 

The passenger plays a role in opening up such a direction, such a field, if only as its passive witness. Would such a removal from the forward flow of Time appear to the passenger as a visual movement? Or would such eyes as we possess not be able to process higher dimensional structures? Would we not go blind to the passage between worlds? Wouldn't this be a dark moment, a moment without vision? 

If we have truly been dispossessed of a visual, it is perhaps because we have this instinct for the identity of Time and Light. 

Time is first of all an opening in the World, a Space, wherein events inspire and expire; history rolls itself underfoot by the inspiration of the novel, and the expiration of the institution. This opening is held together in unity by the passage of light from one event to another; seeing. It is being held open by a form of Time known as Dasein, as life. It is such an abstraction which thus opens the way for the easy envisioning of consciousness as light. But then we can see the difficulty, caught as we are by the seductions of envisioning everything, not allowing for thought of the blind moments, the moments when the eyes and all of our other instruments fail us as when we cannot see beyond the event horizon of the reversal. Opening up this particular sort of field doubtlessly produces such an event horizon. But what does that even look like? 

Would one see a hole, whereupon the other side showed some time in the deep past, as with Star Trek’s famous episode, The City on the Edge of Forever. Or would space simply warp the image of the other side from view? Would the vehicle appear to shrink from our eyes? Would it simply fade, as the good Doctor’s Tardis? Would there simply be a hole torn in spacetime, which some eyes could see and some not? Would the sudden loss of local mass impact and destroy the local spatial environment, witnesses included? Would we not have to witness from afar, through instruments? Would the hole simply close back up, or would a crack, an unalterable opening protrude into our local spacetime? Would the vision of us as we moved through this portal appear as if a redshifting movement, of a thing no longer but not yet gone from sight? Would each passing vision blockade and disrupt the motion of the next traveller? or would the visions merge as each new passenger entered, slowly fading over time? Would one be able to “set up shop” in this new environment, carved out of space and time, this crack as a new world to explore? 

So many questions await our response. Perhaps it is enough for the Time being that we let fiction tell us more about this event through the collective imagining of it. But at least we ought to know the questions we want fiction to put to the test.