my favorite scene and line "I got's to know"
Part 5
Gentle Reader,
We are looking at "TIME" and the various aspects that make up our understanding. You might think that as a Doctor of History in Early Christianity and Linguistics that I am not qualified to discuss scientific matters. If you are one of those few that hold that science has no place in the matters of the religious "heart" than perhaps you are reading the wrong blog and need not apply for the rhetorical wedgie that is coming your way.
On the other hand if you’re a Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" fan who as was said in the first movie " I gots to know" than nothing is off limits to the increase in your "religious studies" For as I understand if God created everything then nothing is off limits and I believe that in learning we get step by step a wee bit closer to understanding God and what He has provided. It is only those with closed minds who never advance beyond the door of ignorance. So with that in mind who’s with me as I study "time" and its various aspects? Let’s move on and leave bread crumbs for the rest....
TIME: THE CULTURAL ACCOUNT
Western man is progressively putting more and more emphasis on the material things of life. This is a sad repudiation of our Christian heritage which is pre-eminently spiritual in its ethos.
We have sent missionaries to other people with the intent of converting them to a more spiritual way of life: but it often became apparent that these same people to whom we sent our missionaries actually took a more spiritual view of life than we do ourselves.
We assumed that the basis of this spiritual emphasis was in their case mere superstition, and undoubtedly this assessment has frequently been correct. Nevertheless, while we found them poor in this world's goods, they often turned out to be oddly well-to-do in the non-material aspects of their culture: and in spite of their poverty they usually found meaning in life where we seem to have lost it.
World views contrasted
Now, anthropologists have observed that many cultures of non-Western tradition do not bifurcate their world into two kingdoms: the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the sacred. Western man tends to make a clear distinction in which the material world is taken to be the real world and the spiritual world is taken to be a fantasy, a creation of our ignorance. Primitive cultures, and many of the high cultures of ancient times, on the whole took a very different view of things. They saw the spirit world as everywhere interpenetrating the material world and, in fact, regulating it. It was for this reason that, in the case of an accident, they customarily asked not "How did it happen?" but "Who did it?"
Events were not analyzed intellectually: they were experienced as personal confrontations. They felt themselves to be citizens of what to them was a kind of 'commonwealth' of animated beings. Many of them still feel this way. If what one reads is true, the Hopi pre-eminently view their relationship to the world as such. What we call the unanimated forces of nature (with a small n ), to them are the animated wills of Nature (with a capital N ). Such people have always been humbler in the presence of elemental forces, less brash in their attitude towards the world around them, more aware of the comparative impotence of man when his behaviour is contrasted with that of animals. The relationship between man and his world was not, or is not, a me/it relationship (as it is with us) but a me/thou relationship.
As an illustration: in Egypt where annual records of the levels of the Nile river were kept from earliest times, the Pharaoh made gifts to the Nile every year at about the time it was due to rise. When they cast their sacrifices into the river, they also threw in a document stating, in the form of a contract, the Nile's obligations. The important thing was always to be in tune with Nature rather than on top of it.
The individual felt part and parcel of the universe, in sympathy with it, able and willing to deal with it on a person-to-person basis. In this personal relatedness he had no difficulty in seeing himself as surviving beyond the grave. Nature survives the apparent death of winter by spring, why should man not survive burial by resurrection?
It was only when the animate Wills of Nature were turned into inanimate forces, and when the characters of these wills were reduced to mere characteristics of things, that man followed suit and found himself reduced to a mere thing among things. The responding soul was turned into a reacting thing, nothing but physics and chemistry.
Whereas native people animate Nature and so relate to it on a personal basis, our de-animation of nature destroyed this sense of relationship and left man feeling orphaned in a hostile universe.
This sense of alienation has led Western man to seek the recovery of relatedness by reducing himself to the same inanimate status, thereby becoming a mere cog in an impersonal machine, but at least part and parcel of it all once again.
We have, in short, robbed ourselves of any spiritual significance. We have become bundles of electrochemical reactions instead of vital, conscious, animated souls capable of active communion with God and his world. Where other cultures have maintained their sense of fraternity with their living world of trees, stones, rivers, mountains, sun and moon and stars, and mother earth, we have come to treat these things as material objects and then sought relatedness with them by reducing ourselves to the status of objects. It may be that either way is unrealistic, but man in these other cultures has probably done less harm to the dignity of his own being.
Time-conscious vs event-conscious
Now, these two rather different philosophies of life have produced what might be called an unexpected spin-off which has not been given sufficient thought. The more deeply embedded we become in the world of things, the more profoundly conscious we tend to become of time. One cannot have a pervasive concern with the three dimensions of space without being equally locked into the fourth dimension of time.
It is not an accident that Western man has expended so much energy perfecting clocks that parcel out time in smaller and smaller fragments upon which he places a more and more precise economic value.
We have thus come to quantify almost the whole of life. Never in human history was man so conscious of the importance of material possessions and of the necessity of preserving physical life, while paying less and less attention to its spiritual values. And never in human history was man so concerned to keep a precise record of the passing of time.
Other cultures had clocks and, like the Chinese, they gave much attention to improving their accuracy in any ingenious ways. But they were not intended to be read as marking fragments of time (seconds or minutes) for the individual but only for the co-ordination of events involving groups of people. And ninety-nine percent of the people felt no need to possess such devices nor sought to regulate their lives by them except on occasions of community effort. The ordinary man had a highly flexible sense of the flow of time, this flexibility depending entirely on the importance of the task engaged in. When there was no task that had to be done, there was no counting of time, and no sense of wasting it either. Time lost did not mean for them things lost, money lost, progress lost — in short, some of life lost as though life was parceled out and ended with death when time ran out.
There is a real bond between things and time, because things occupy space, and space and time are inextricably bound together. And those whose philosophy is materialistic are accordingly far more time conscious. This applies not merely to certain individuals within a culture, but to the whole culture itself.
When the ethos of a culture is materialistic, that culture is also likely to be strongly time-conscious. Many cultures throughout history which, unlike ourselves, have attached far less importance to things, have also attached far less importance to time.
This is true of all primitive cultures. Such cultures do not even think of themselves as living in time at all: they actually live in eternity.
People who are absorbed in the material world are absorbed in a temporal world: those who hold things lightly hold time lightly. Those who are unwilling to share their things find it difficult to share their time.
Time is money: which is another way of saying time is things.
Societies which bury all the treasures and material possessions of the dead with the deceased are in fact much closer in spirit to the child of God whose citizenship is in heaven and who lives in eternity, for such cultures are far less bound to the things of this world and do not find it difficult to relinquish them. During the early settling of the New World, many White men discovered that the graves of native people frequently contained valuables such as gold and silver, and they became chronic grave robbers. American Indians were often reluctant to move to new territories (sometimes even to better ones) because they could not bear the thought of the desecration of their burial grounds which they quickly found out was likely to happen as soon as the White man moved in.
It might be supposed that such people buried precious metals with their dead simply because they were not so "precious" in their sight. There was a reasonable abundance of gold and silver and it cost them little or nothing to collect it. But we know now that later on when such precious metals became more scarce, they still buried items which were not as accessible — for instance, perfectly good sewing machines were buried with dead women. Such items were of considerable practical importance once they formed part of their culture and they could not be easily replaced. Yet they did not hang on to them. They buried them, as they had buried precious metals. Sometimes a perfectly good hunting knife of hardened steel obtained from a White man would be buried with the dead owner, and one must conclude that the economics of such "waste" were overridden even when they were irreplaceable.
There is much evidence from studies made by anthropologists during the last century that primitive people do not hold the physical world to have the same paramount importance in their lives as we do. As a consequence they do not mark time as we do either, and perhaps even more significantly they have not treasured physical survival as we have.
Man straddles both worlds — the physical and the spiritual — even in his fallen state. The physical world is not merely a world of three dimensional space occupied by things, but a world also marked by a sense of time. The spiritual world is inevitably, from this side of the grave, a projection of our space-time world --
only we somehow conceive of its space as being qualitatively different rather than quantitatively different, and its time as being something which might appropriately be called eternal rather than merely extensive.
The Old Testament strongly reflects an awareness of the spiritual nature of this world. The Hebrew poets did this in the Psalms, calling upon all nature to worship the Creator in a spiritual way, inviting the mountains to skip like little children with sudden joy (The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs. Psalm 114:4) and the floods to clap their hands (Psalm 98:8 ) . We think of this as fantasy.
Primitive people would not. They see a constant interaction between the visible and the invisible, betweennature and supernature, between time and eternity, between the animate and the inanimate. These two worlds do not form two kingdoms but one, and the more important world in certain respects is the supernatural -- more important because it is more difficult to control and therefore less predictable, and more important because it is constant while this world is always changing.
Living, as such people do, in daily awareness of this non-material world, they normally have a different time sense. The idea of cutting up time into segments of equal length and with more and more precise and diminutive divisions seems to them pointless. To get a native to use a watch in order to keep an appointment more accurately, or to report for work on a regular time basis, seems to him unreasonable. He is not clock conscious but event conscious: and for him 'event' usually means 'community event', shared event, and therefore corporate experience. To own a watch is fine as a prestige symbol, but to be in bondage to it is a form of slavery no sensible man should allow. The idea of an alarm clock that wakes a man while his soul is still wandering abroad in his dreams is the height of folly. The rudely awakened individual will be in danger of walking around for the rest of the day without any soul until sleep overtakes him again and his soul can finally catch up. All day he is a kind of half-there person.
That’s enough for now for you to think about. See you next time.....
Love,
Denis 
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