A SENSE OF TIME

©  2004 by Orchid Land Publications

[20040424]

     One wealthy person leaves a fortune to found libraries in small towns; another spends a million dollars on his wife's anniversary party.  One endows orphanages and charitable projects; another buys a wrist watch that would feed many poor people and uses his superfluous wealth for house ornaments of inordinate cost (if not value).  One thinks his future reputation; the other, of his present but passing glory, lacking a sense of the future and craving only instant gratification of one sort or another.
     A religious person reads Scripture and tries to put oneself in the mind of the ancients whose words one reads; another imposes one's own present-day outlook on the writings and mind of ancient writers.  One looks to a long tradition of insights for understanding a volume; another disregards all other opinions except ego's, however necessarily limited it is.  
     Such observations give rise to the questions, "Why is time so important for those who seek truth?" and "Why is time so absent from the minds of so many?"  Or are the questions really something else?  Should we be asking, "Why do some limit understanding to their own egos" and "Why do some seek to rise above themselves to a broader landscape?"  It would seem that timelessness is as ego-centered as is being antisocial, though one can be temporally antisocial while contemporaneously social.  Instant knowledge or instant gratification contrasts with respect for tradition and a coöperative bent.
     Here, we come to a dilemma:  What about those of an ego mentality but a social and outgoing spirit?  What about those whose minds go out beyond their own purview but are antisocial?  Not everyone is both mentally and volitionally social or antisocial.  In fact, many seem to balance mind against will, being egotistic in one or the other.  So we must distinguish different combinations of egotistic and social temperaments.  What is clear is that when the mind or will is egocentric, time and either a divinely inspired tradition or human traditions of knowledge get rejected.  Again, some seek to balance the one against the other--rejecting an inspired tradition and accepting a human tradition or rejecting the latter and accepting the former.  We all know of such examples. 
     However all of that may be, it must be considered that traditions can be limiting or broadening.  It depends on whether a tradition has stagnated (yes, that's an oxymoron) and resists anything new . . . or is a properly timeful (developing) tradition.  The former stifles; the latter enlarges.  There is one thing about a tradition:  It builds on itself if it is to be consistent and have a chance of being true (even allowing that truth is ontologically relative to context).  At all events, we need to distinguish here divine from human traditions.  The latter undergo paradigm-shifts from time to time as new premises replace older ones--without abolishing the basic premise of seeking truth.  Divine revelation can be frozen and exochronous; or it can be traditional and still internally consistent.  But if the evidence shows that it has changed  with every new intellectual or volitional fashion, it cannot represent divine truth unless we assume, as some do, that God is changeful.  The middle ground between frozenness and changefulness is consistent development--the position of Orthodox Christians.  Those who cannot distinguish a divine tradition that has been able to stand for a couple of millenniums from human traditions that come and go inevitably reject tradition as such.  Depending on one's temperament, those who reject tradition can either retreat into ego, be ever jumping toward the newest fad, or in dialogue with others seek to work out a new understanding on the human level of whatever discipline one happens to be devoted to or working within.  This non-temporal social activity replaces social thinking across time.  It proves best for science but arguably requires the temporal dimension in matters of divine revelation.  This balance has much to recommend it.  When thinks of the theological faddism of the twentieth century, one recognizes that things got out of whack.  Each proponent wanted "his" or "her" name on a given view of God and His creation.
     It is in the nature of a divine tradition that it must be consistent, assuming that God is perfect and changeless.  If one belongs to a faith that has changed its form or its essential details in an inconsistent manner, one should wonder about that.  One can belong to a changeless faith that is false, but a faith that changes in the wrong way--i.e. by being inconsistent with itself--can hardly reflect a divinely inspired tradition.   On the two levels of inspired tradition and human tradition, there is the question of whether ego dominates or a broader compass of human thinking is admitted.  When humans  judge which of various would-be divine traditions is the genuine one, it is necessary to avoid the vapidity of relativism and the straitjacket of ego.  Relativism can hardly be true, and any ego is too narrow to encompass the profundity and fecundity of the implications of divine truth.  The documents have too many things that are too hard for a single ego to reconcile--millenniums later.  
     The premises of a faith may reject materiality and/or time; or they may accept a religious rôle for them (usually not one alone and  not the other) while accepting an on-going tradition that builds on itself, developing new doctrines that energize and give meaning to changeless dogmas with new insights and indeed new aspects of the whole truth.  A single finite human mind cannot take in everything at once, but needs to work out the implications of such dogmas as it accepts over time.  Of course, if one cannot distinguish doctrines (teachings) from dogmas, none of this will make sense.
     If change can occur in two ways--i.e. consistently and inconsistently--on the level of belief, it can also occur in the same  twofold manner on the volitional level.  For a person or a group can be constant in love of friends while hating enemies--burning them at the stake or feeding them to lions--though there is a palpable inconsistency here with regard to love.  Collective egoism of the sort just characterized occurs in variants that parallel those of egocentric individuals, except that collective egotism can be of time or place--of an ethnic tradition or of a local tradition--whereas individual egotism is rejective of time.
    This brings us back to our starting point:  It is clear that egotism and a rejection of time go hand-in-hand, while being deeply cognizant of past or future time inevitably diminishes attempts for individuals to set themselves us as authoritative interpreters.  Alas, however, the latter kind of gratification sells easily; in certain situations, it appeals to many types of personalities, including the schizoid personalities who devote all the reason they have to gaining their income while spurning reason in the pursuit of religious truth.

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