I was going through some of the unpublished drafts that I’ve saved over the years in my blogspace. Most of these are unfinished pieces, notes that I took on books or articles, thoughts I jotted down but never fleshed out.
I came across a couple I composed close together that were ruminating on the concept of time. Although I am not someone with a great brain capacity for the technical language of science and math, the element of science that I do connect with is the narrative form and abstract theory that can be pulled from the technical language. On this front I have long loved the subject of time (and the more fantastical language of time travel).
In any case, I came across two old drafts from years ago, one dialoguing with an article (and the study it was exploring), another with a book. Relating to the study I jotted down the following quote:
“The universe’s tendency to become more chaotic with the passage of time is part of what solidifies the forward-facing direction of the arrow of time – the more chaotic, the more challenging reversal becomes.” (Scientists Get One Step Closer to Unraveling the Mysteries of Time by Chris Melone)
My notes on the book (which unfortunately I didn’t record the name, so it could be from any number of possible contenders I was reading at the time), follow a similar thread. Time, the author states, “is not a built in feature of spacetime.” Rather, time is a matter of perception, a mental construction. To measure time is not in fact measuring a thing that exists in the way these constructions percieve it, but to measure the relationship between different things in space (whether space is also a mental construction in the same way is another subject according to my notes).
What’s interesting to note about this observation is that, looking back at this draft I can see some of my initial observations about participationist philosophy/theology taking shape alongside this idea of “all things in relationship.” This is how we come to knowledge of anything in this world in regards to that perception of reality.
There is another dynamic at play here though that I noted as being hugely important to how we navigate that truism, and that’s the shape of this percieved arrow of time from order to disorder. What this suggests is that, to come to knowledge of reality through participation (all things in relationship) is to be confronted with the reality that our perception of time is contingent on a “kind” of reality. A reality that is shaped by this conception of finiteness. In conceptual language we speak of this as a movement from life to death, or in the broader terms of entropy, from order to disorder. We percieve this pattern to be the shape of reality precisely because the predictions and patterns that we find in relationship to this world hand us this movement from order to disorder. But here’s the thing I note from this particular study and book: The simple fact that time is a construct, a mental perception that formulates out of a world defined through relationship, tells us that this “kind” of reality isn’t the whole picture. When we look at human function, it would appear that this notion is intuitive. Finiteness, or disorder, is something that life appears to act against. If one wants to give it it’s equally material and spiritual name- Death- we can observe that Death is in fact a state that enslaves our perception of reality to one kind of reality. This is not confined to our neat and tidy appeals to something as reductionist as non-existence. Death is the force of disorder and chaos that pushes back against a different state which we would call Life. This is how we distinguish between what Life acts against and what it desires to bring about, and what Death acts against and what it desires to bring about.
Materialism, by far the leading worldview of the modern world, to me has a real problem when it comes to making sense of Life in this broader use of the word, precisely because it’s held captive to a singular perception of the shape this world takes. As I cited from the book (again, apologies for not being able to name it properly), to even allow ourselves to speak of time in a coherent sense (meaning, using a constructed term to get to a concrete shape of reality), we have to acknowledge what is actually going on within this reality. “What we have is a surface of constant time that spreads throughout the universe, in which every point is the same relative to its vantage point.”
And this isn’t contained to the concept of “time.” For example, the book describes how free fall is the natural state of motion while our constructed conception of gravity is the experience of the push of the object (for us the earth) in an accelerated reference frame.
Most importantly is this simple statement: Entropy hinges on the irreversable. It hinges on the disorder, the chaos. If this is true, it is equally true to say that Life intuitively knows that this is not some natural state given superiority because it appeals to our want and desire for certainty and control (which is what materialist worldviews are expressions of). Life knows and desires order. Life understands that the language of finiteness is simply a construct we create to make sense of the qualities of this thing called Death.
Here I could bring in a book I happen to reading right now called Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp, a book that discusses the ways in which we “find our way” in this world, this reality. Here we find a tension that a key aspect this formulation of our preception, the function of memory, creates. The localization of this neuroscience within something we might call our experience of this world has to be reconciled with the idea that the same matter from which this emerges is found to be present in space as well. Meaning, and this is one of the key observations thus far from this book, the process of memory cannot be and is not, scientifically speaking, contained to some material object called the brain. Our navigation of this world, quite literally, comes from our relationship to it. That functional process, which we can observe, exists both within the brain and outside of it.
The real question then comes down to this. If it is true, as the study suggests, that our construction of this idea of time is a product of this percieved (and experienced) distance that entropy (increased disorder) creates between ordered Life, from where do we get the language to understand and name the other “kind” of reality that this reveals at the same time. And this isn’t just abstract, theoretical thought. Any time we respond to violence, to oppression, to suffering, we are in fact living this out. One potential answer to this question comes from Brian Zahnd’s recent book Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things. Here he argues that we have indeed been trained to see this world for something that it is not through materialism and the reductionism it craves. Thus, what is inituiive to Life has been relegated to the realm of the unseen, and in materialist terms unproveable, unscientific, un-real. Even as Life continues to act otherwise. Here Zahnd gives Life the name Heaven:
The modern soul is disenchanted because we have sealed off the soul from heaven. We have built a materialist ceiling over our heads and said, “There is nothing beyond the ceiling- all of reality exists beneath the ceiling.” (page 14)
As Zahnd goes on to suggest, noting the logical implications of materialism (whether we recognize it or not): “If we are to avoid ending up as hollow men and women whimpering about the emptiness of it all, we need to find the paths of unseen existences.” In truth, we do so intuitively. The question is, do we do so rationally. It seems telling to me, at the very least, that even where science is telling us otherwise, our predication towards materialist assumptions looms large. Which seems to suggest that even the scientific enterprise is something we feel we need to control in the face of a disordered world. Materialism remains the best way to do that.
In Zahnd’s book, he invites his readers, which his audience would arguably be those whom are open to the language of Heaven, defined as a different “kind” of reality than our perception/cconception of time, to consider the necessary reenchanting process in a materialist age as a pilgrimage. Analagous to (or with) a movement from one reality to another, but more accurately towards an unveilving of the true shape of this relaity which we occupy in relationship.
A pilgrimage, it could be said, towards a critical deconsruction of our constructs as authoratative voices, and the embracing of a process of giving up our need to control. To confront the irony of the fact that what modern materialism teaches and encourages is a control that desires to preserve and protect Death. No amount of appeals to “progress” can escape or explain the logical implications of materialism to this end. The disorder. That’s our modern obsession. And as Zahnd points out, even within the framework of theological confessions that do have a built in language for this idea of Heaven, materialism looms large. It is the same old Epicureanism played out again and again in context. Life is a far more dangerous and uncertain and precarious thing to embrace, precisely because it is not something we can control.
The Stories of my Life 