Clock Time vs. Cosmic Time
What good is telling time, if it is an illusion?
by Jessica Murray
December 2002
As astrologers, we are the appointed timekeepers of metaphysics. Throughout
history we have been the jealous guardians of the astrolabe, the hourglass,
the ephemeris and the computer tables, clocks and calendars which use
the sky to tell what time it is. Sky calendars are our lingua franca.
Yet we must grapple with a basic conundrum: clock time and calendar time
do not exist in cosmic reality. This is one of those things that is obvious
once you think about it. But we don't usually think about it.
Ever
since humans have been on earth, they have been looking up, gazing at
the sky, tracking time. The Julian Calendar used so widely today is a
very recent invention. So are all linear calendars. These strange, flat
chronologies that we now take for granted, which purport to replicate
Time as regular, sequenced points plotted out in advance and printed up
in a series of bound pages, are a relatively recent concept. Such calendars
came along, as all cultural appurtenances do, to parallel a view of reality.
Human
thinking did not always process information via the linear logic we now
consider to be standard operating procedure. For the ancients, reality
was circular rather than linear, holistic rather than mechanistic. As
a species, we did not think in straight lines (which do not exist in nature)
so much as in loops, spirals and parabolas. Though the fastidious modern
mind tends to view every process as having a beginning, a middle and an
ending, our ancestors saw themselves immersed in a natural world that
was gloriously messy, with no pattern of finality imposed upon it. They
assumed that everything in the universe, including human lifetimes, followed
the same basic modus operandus they witnessed in plant and animal life:
that of endlessly repeating cycles.
So
how did they tell Time? The sundials, stone henges and round calendars
of ancient peoples tell us something about the circularity that seems
to have informed the prehistoric perspective. But those devices were,
of course, man-made too. Every effort to trap and name Time is a concoction
of the human mind.
As
astrologers, we need to remember that though timing is our stock in trade,
all attempts are stabs in the dark. Let us put our instruments down and
ponder our roles for a moment. Who are we but translators of the unknowable,
trying to aid and abet this tangible business of earth living? As we sit
with our clients and try to describe how their lives correlate with celestial
cycles, we are acting as intermediaries between the cosmic and the mundane;
making a bridge, as best we can, between abstract principles of impossible
subtlety and their probable three-dimensional expression. We cannot do
this with any integrity unless we are aware that our charts are not the
same thing as the ineffable universal patterns behind them.
We
must not take our numbers too seriously.
To
suggest that we astrologers not take our numbers too seriously has the
ring of blasphemy. But let us take a second look at what is going on when
we look in the ephemeris and confidently proclaim, for example, that
the Full Moon will occur at 2:51pm the next day.
We
astrologers tend to scoff dismissively when the layman says, "Oh,
I thought the full moon was LAST night". Trusty tables in hand, we
gauge proper fullness not by sight, but by degree of exactitude. Our records
tell us that at exactly 2:51pm, the 180-degree angle will be reached which
defines a full moon; a geometrical occurrence which can, of course, occur
at any point during the day or night. We presume to know the real story,
because we've got the astronomical event zodiacally measured to the nearest
clock minute; and we consider there to be a world of difference between
our official timing (the accurate one) and the anecdotal timing afforded
by the casual observer (the inaccurate one).
But
let's say an astrologer with an unusually precise approach comes along,
and derides that 2:51pm figure as a gross approximation. One must determine
not just the minutes, he says, but the seconds, in order to know the "right"
time. Fair enough. But then along comes an astronomer with an even deeper
investment in the accuracy model, who insists that any timing that didn't
use milliseconds was so inexact as to be useless. And so on.
This
is the first problem with timing devices: accuracy itself is a relative
concept. Like mathematicians seeking the last digit of pi, we may
hunt down the chimera of accuracy until the computer blows a fuse, but
we will get nowhere nearer trying to crack the mystery of Time.
So
if it is not about finding the "right" time, what are clocks
and calendars for?
Clocks
and calendars point to things. Their job is to identify a focus-- not
in third dimensional space, but in that other dimension, the one which
has been, equally arbitrarily, designated as the fourth. Our use of the
days-of-the-week and hours-and-minutes reflects our effort to control
or at least monitor Time, so that we can talk about it. We can refer to
things happening before and after other things. We can get to dentist
appointments, anticipate the ingress of comets into the solar system,
and make fashionably late entrances at parties.
In
order to re-pledge our allegiance to metaphysical truth every once in
a while, astrologers need to step back and consider what exactly we are
telling when we set out to tell Time. But in order to re-pledge our allegiance
to metaphysical truth every once in a while, we need to step back and
consider what exactly we are telling when we set out to tell Time. While
we know that the deepest fact of the universe is that it is a massive
swirling chaos out of which we and our world of matter unaccountably congealed,
we humans nonetheless doggedly attempt to tame the roiling flux. We name
the planets and identify their apparent orbits with calculated schedules.
The
resulting cosmologies match the needs of the culture in question. The
earliest astrologies, which focused upon the moon alone, were simple systems,
sufficient for the settled tribes whose life cycles matched the lunar
clock. Later astrologies, which incorporated the five visible planets,
got quite a bit more complex; they were developed by pastoral peoples
who needed a more involved timing system with which to clock their own
wanderings.
The
nature of Time does not vary; timing devices do. The question is not,
Is the clock accurate? but rather, What function must the clock serve?
If we're timing the lighting of a ritual candle, a wristwatch works just
fine. To call the winner of a close race, an Olympic judge requires a
more precise instrument. And a physicist timing subatomic particles in
a lab experiment needs a calibrating device that could barely be called
a timer anymore, given that once we get down to the submicroscopic levels
of material reality, time has shown itself to break the laws it follows
on the human scale.
Much
has been written about the affront the New Physics presented to our notions
about time, notions that western science had always presumed to be inviolable.
Einstein proposed a New time, alarmingly more elastic than good old-fashioned
Time; and to the mechanistic materialists who would prefer Time to be
as neat and measurable as woodwork, this is a hard one to digest. But
to devotees of the mystery schools, who have long been hearing from the
great sages that Time is an illusion, the news falls right into place.
Let
us consider the transit in referenced above, for example, the exact Full
Moon. At 2:50pm, it has not yet happened; at 2:51pm it is already over.
The Full Moon is a moment, not a minute. Essentially, the Full Moon is
not an event at all, but an idea. Its meaning is archetypal, not measurable.
It is knowable only through an understanding of the greater cycle of which
it is a part: that cycle which begins at the New Moon, reaches a crisis
point at the quarter, culminates at fullness, and then immediately begins
to wane, headed back towards its origin point.
Theories
of circularity and interconnectedness seem to be coming back into favor
as the scientific establishment, in spite of itself, lurches into a post-Newtonian
worldview. As conventional ways of understanding Time become outmoded,
astrologers will be ahead of the game: we have always been cousins to
the mystics and shamans who travel between the worlds, where Time does
not exist.
In
contemporary western culture, where astrology is generally trivialized
at best and demonized at worst, we practitioners may find ourselves tempted
to cater to the lowest common denominator of understanding, framing what
we know in soothingly banal, event-oriented terms. I wonder whether, as
a group, we have been trying to keep our concepts as measurable as possible,
and our counsel as literal as possible, so as to be judged less harshly
by a skeptical public and by the new secular priests, the scientists.
It is a trend which might buy astrology greater social currency, but if
it is credibility we want, we must cleave to our roots in higher meaning.
Otherwise we will surely find that, in the end, we will have failed to
justify our ancient art to those with whom we seek acceptance, meanwhile
betraying our work by downplaying our identities as chroniclers of divine
knowledge.
Timetables
and ephemeredes are not the truth behind Time. As systems of categorizing
human experience, they can service certain predetermined needs. But to
the extent that we astrologers are also devotees of universal truth, we
need to keep in mind that we do not have the mystery solved, we have merely
given it a name and a number; and to presume that our numbers do anything
more than make respectful reference to the ineffable cosmic dance performed
by the wheeling, intersecting, inter-connected planets is something on
the order of hubris.
Humility
is a gift of experience. It is true in every esoteric field that the veteran
practitioner is more conscious of what he or she does not know than is
the acolyte. When we begin a chart interpretation knowing full well how
much is lost in the translation from geometry to truth, we will find ourselves
opening up psychically, privy to mental pictures and flooded by the right
words to say. Commencing our interpretation with the data in front of
us, we will find our understanding taking off from there, until our minds
are smitten with meaning from within and from behind the data in front
of us. At that point we will have the illusion of Time on our side.
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