Ephemera

Monday, February 28, 2005

Oregon Seasonal Twinning of Days

The first time I moved to Oregon, back in the early nineties, I would sometimes awake and be uncertain as to the time of year. I'd look out my window at the gray monotones of cloud-filled sky, see the leafless trees and think: "It's spring. No, it's fall. Wait a minute..." Only later, when I was fully awake did the remembrance of the season return to mind, and along with it the contiguous sequence of days from far-off Then to the eternal Now.

What made things more disorienting were the constant back-and-forths across the country, visiting family, then moving back to New Hampshire, then returning once more to Oregon. The reverberation of this is felt in my dream life, where more often than not I am traveling somewhere. Why just last night, I was back in Sanbornton, New Hampshire. The Town Hall had been transformed into a strangely Eastern Community Center(and by Eastern, I mean East like India). There were colorful pillows in a side room arranged around a television set. The keeper of the voting roll mis-pronounced my name. Apparently we were voting for something. I said to my wife, "We've given up a lot to be in Oregon."

How we happened to be voting in a New Hampshire election while simultaneously living in Oregon I do not know-- the internal logic of dreams, I guess. I do know that shortly after I spoke to my wife, I saw my high school English teacher. He looked at me and frowned, as if he could tell at a glance I was not where I was supposed to be, or perhaps he understood that I had not remained true to the potential of my supposed gift.

Only much later did I realize that the twinning of days exists truly. Though in Oregon, there is an echo of this even in the seasons. The late winter and spring sunsets so closely resemble fall-- sunrise, too, on the weekends when one arises just a bit later.

Born and raised in a harsher clime, the mild nature of the weather and seasons often displaces me chronologically. For instance, I look out the window today and see a cloudy, windy day with green grass and blooming flowers; this would be early April in New Hampshire. The warm weather yesterday was the weather of May. The calender tells me it is the last day of February, but my heart tells me this cannot be true. This false spring leaves me homesick, makes me want to return to my birthplace, but I know that the calender does not agree with this feeling. School vacation does not agree. My work schedule does not agree. Perhaps this is why I go back again and again every night and why I awake confused and out-of-step with the rest of the world.

Loving Fate (As Opposed to Envying Others)

Most would agree that envy is a disagreeable, if not self-destructive emotional reaction. Even the Bible admonishes one against being covetous, which is a first cousin to envy. If I recall correctly, it was actually God speaking to Moses when he gave him the ten commandments-- in fact, now that I think of it, it was one of the commandments.

I think it's interesting that God never explains why you shouldn't covet your neighbor's stuff, He just says: "Don't."

Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of reality and why we're here. If my prior post is even remotely near the truth, that reality is this movie we're here to view on the screen of our senses, then it would appear we do ourselves a disservice when we focus on what someone else has rather than on our own story.

Maybe the reason why we're not supposed to be covetous is because we came here for the purpose of witnessing the dramatic unfolding of our own existence. What's going on with our neighbor is his own business, his own story. If there's any reason or meaning in our existence, we won't find it while we're looking over the fence at our neighbor's new car, boat, wife, fill-in-the-blank.

Maybe we're just supposed to pay attention to our lives Right Now.

In the movie-that-is-life, we are both Actor and Observer. The Observer knows that the drama has been pre-engineered, that the end already exists in the last few frames of film. The Actor exists in the Now moment and faces a bewildering array of choices: should he wear sneakers or shoes, eat bananas or toast, take the new job offer, divorce his unfaithful wife? Drama exists when an individual playing a role must act fatefully, i.e., he must of free-will choose the path that fate has placed before him, and in so doing, pay the consequences for all his choices and actions.

If the actor on-screen began to mumble about other actors playing other roles, it would be quite dissatisfying for the movie-goers, the Observer.

If, while in character in the middle of "Top Gun", Tom Cruise began to talk about Dustin Hoffman's or Jack Nicholson's acting career, it would be bizarre in the extreme. As Observers, we need Actors to stay in their respective roles during the course of the particular drama.

Since we are all Actors and Observers, would we not be better served to love our respective fates? This does not mean that we adopt a fatalist stance toward life and accept evil-- otherwise, there'd be no drama. If we are sick, we ought fight for health. If poor, we should fight to better our circumstances. What I mean is that we should accept that we are currently in the role of a sick person fighting for health, or a poor person fighting for wealth.

By envying someone else who looks like he has it better than us, we are refusing to accept the role fate has assigned us. The impassive Observer in the back of our consciousness, the One who can look on equally undisturbed when our lives cave in around us or we are catapulted to the heights of our ambitions, this being is the one who observes the actions of a free-will moving down the path of fate, who knows that the end is pre-determined by initial conditions. (Even if the Actor would hotly contest this circumscription of his possibilities.)

Someone once said that true wisdom is loving one's fate. Happiness is not getting what you like, or even liking what you get. I think it has more to do with being at peace with what happens, even as you may try to effect the outcome. Maybe by understanding that all that is in the Now is the result of all that has gone before we have a better... I don't know.... gesture to make before our time on the stage is over.

More on this later.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Timepath

Some time ago it occurred to me that time may not be a unidirectional arrow.
Sure, in one respect it always goes forward, but what is it going forward in? If we posit a universe in which space and time bagan with the Big Bang, we can visualize the history of all points in space and time rolled up in a higher dimensional space, much like a reel of movie film is rolled up in its case prior to being loaded in the movie projector. In certain instances, frames that are separated by many feet of film might actually be nestled side-by-side.
When the movie reel is loaded in the projector, the mechanism that advances the frames in front of the lense and the stroboscopic projector light functions much in the way that time functions in our reality, advancing the moments forward frame by frame so that the images and sounds may unwind in sequence and tell the story of the cinematographer.
Thus, to the viewer, the movie appears to be the fluid, changing images and sounds on the projector screen. One constructed reality is projected into our physical reality. It is displayed in a fashion that makes it a simulacrum for our world, by co-opting the rule of sequential, uni-directional time in the mechanism of the projector. In reality, however, the movie exists in entirety, from beginning to end. The initial conditions in the fictional world at the beginning of the film, the explications of plot and character and the domino-effect transformations of cause and effect within this film are already there.
One might imagine our physical reality as the higher dimension in which the film in its entirety resides. From this we might extrapolate by imagining our four-dimensional universe nested inside a higher dimensional space, from beginning to end. Time, cause and effect, karma-- all of these appear to unwind off the spiral as the film of the universe passes through the projector of consciousness. In a higher dimensional reality, everything that has happened or will happened is already there. What chaos theorists call "a sensitive dependence on initial conditions" is the law of consciousness operating within the film-universe. We choose this because of that. We're at this exact point doing these exact activities because of the sum of all past decisions, conditions, inherited genetic traits, and all of these depend on that which transpired before.
We appear to have free will, but is not our will conditioned and informed by all of our past decisions and experiences. In other words: If things were different, they wouldn't be the same.
If this model were true, of time and space as a type of movie coiled together in a higher dimensional space, it might explain unusual phenomena such as deja vu, pre-cognition, clairvoyance and telepathy. It might be that our consciousness turns from the illusions projected on the movie screen of the senses. Perhaps we have other capacities, other modes of being in which we sense the presence of the other "frames" nestled close by us on the tightly wound film reel of reality. Thus it might be that past, present and future moments are closer to us than would first appear. Moments ten years in the past and thirty years could be close enough to touch one another ever so briefly.
In dreams, perhaps our minds are able to see around the corner of Time, freed briefly from the internal logic of the waking dream of reality. A part of us may intuit the presence of these past and future selves, and communicate in an older language of thought and feeling. Haven't we all had the experience of "having been here before"? Perhaps a part of us was.
More on this later.

Friday, February 25, 2005


Stop looking at me! Posted by Hello

The Twinning of Days

It occurred to me on more than one occasion that certain sunsets of the spring resemble those of the fall. On a hunch, I downloaded a chart of sunrise and sunset times for my latitude and imported them into an Excel spreadsheet. I proceeded to analyze.
After taking into account Daylight Savings Time, I found that there were indeed days that had their twins with respect to time of sunset.



4/1/2005
5:50 Sunrise
18:39 Sunset
12:49 Length of daylight

10/7/2005
6:17 Sunrise
17:39*Sunset
11:22 Length of daylight
*Daylight Savings Time: +1 HR

I found it interesting that the twin for my birthday, October 7th is April 1st-- April Fool's Day.