Does the Future Really Lie Straight Ahead?
Or are we going through a long spiral, with a major upturn when we least expect it?
This post is a follow-up to my previous one, On the Cusp of Dream and Waking, which looked at our daily emergence into a world of order and predictability. Here we will be concerned with the other end of the spectrum, our diurnal subsidence into a realm of darkness and dreams. This daily cycle is in turn suggestive of the individual lifespan, as it arises out of a darkness before birth, has a trajectory over a number of decades and then subsides into the night of death. Likewise great civilisations arise out of obscurity, enjoy a prominence of variable duration and at length decay, to be succeeded by others or to go down all together into an enveloping dark age. Thus we sleep, we are awake and we dream on various intermeshing scales, alike as individuals and as collectivities.
Also here I am taking up from an earlier post, The Fulness of Time, which concluded with a promise to look further into the linear view of temporality which dominates our current understanding. Actually this is a theme which dovetails with the one just mentioned, so I’m hoping to draw both strands together in what follows. Let’s begin by looking at how a linear understanding of time has become something like our default setting, and the consequences this has for our broader outlook on the world.
1. The Great Disillusionment
Although the linear assumption is deeply embedded in our collective view of the world, its dominance is comparatively recent in historical terms. It took shape over the course of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, with Galileo already using straight line segments to denote particular intervals of time. However it wasn’t until Newton and Leibniz towards the end of that century that time was first envisaged in a consistently linear fashion. In other respects the views of these two great thinkers differed: Newton believed in an absolute time existing independently of the events it recorded, whereas Leibniz held that time arose out of the order of succession of phenomena, so that without phenomena there would be no time either.
Despite this important difference, their theories concurred on the crucial point of linearity. One authority on the subject, G.J. Whitrow, has summarised the matter thus: “Both believed that time was universal and unique, the universe comprising a succession of states, each of which exists for an instant, successive instants being like the order of points on an indefinitely extended straight line. This was the concept of time that was to dominate physical science until the advent of Einstein’s special theory of relativity early this [last] century.”
According to Einstein’s theory, rates of time run differently depending on relative motion, and space and time are merged into spacetime, so that effectively we live on a world line rather than a timeline. And yet the curious thing is that our common-sense understanding is still basically Newtonian; well over a century after special and general relativity, it seems like we still live in a world where time is assumed for all practical purposes to be absolute and linear. How has this anomalous situation persisted for so long?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the laws of physics, whether formulated by a Newton or an Einstein or some other great scientist, tend to be so abstruse in themselves, and quite often so radical compared to the understanding they supplant, that they can hardly penetrate the collective consciousness in their pure form. Instead they need to be translated into terms which are meaningful first to an intellectual elite, before percolating down from there into broader reaches of society.
In the case of Newton’s theories this translation happened quite quickly. The 18th century Enlightenment was shaped by the new vistas opened up by Newtonian mechanics, and in turn adapted these in various ways to its own concerns. In particular the linear understanding of time informed the Enlightenment idea of an orderly and incremental progress, one which would free us from ancient superstitions and the power structures built upon them. Like Newton’s abstract timeline, such progress would be open-ended and hence in theory boundless.
This novel idea had hardly been around a few decades before it was shaken by an event which was anything but orderly and incremental - the French Revolution. That tremendous upheaval inaugurated a period of two centuries of economic growth, together with rapid headway in a range of scientific and technological fields, punctuated however by the spasmodic turmoil of war and revolution. Given such convulsions the confidence of Enlightenment thinkers in steady progress guided by a detached rationality began to look rather quaint. Eighteenth century notions of a quasi-geometrical trajectory into the future thus lost much of their credibility, as they struggled with the challenge posed by theories that seemed better fitted to the new times.
Among these, Marxism gained particular prominence. For Marxist revolutionaries historical time had two distinct facets. There was a time of struggle in obscurity, of organisation, of the building up of parties and trade unions, and then there was a time of culmination when the revolution would take shape and transformation would be brought about. Curiously enough, there is an echo here of a much more ancient duality in the view of time, one that goes back to the Greeks, and which is expressed in the Greek language by two different words, chronos and kairos.
Chronos represents - and indeed provides the etymology for - chronological time, time in its quantitative aspect. Kairos is time as a unique moment, an unrepeatable occurrence. Transposed into Marxist terms chronos represents the slow build-up over time of the conditions for revolution, whereas kairos is the revolutionary culmination itself, the moment to be seized or forever missed. Quite a different picture from the untroubled linearity envisaged by the Enlightenment.
Inaugurated by the beginnings of the French Revolution in 1789, the revolutionary age came to an end two centuries later, in an upheaval best symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Upheaval and turmoil have of course continued since then, but with a significant difference. For now in our post-historical times such things happen to us, whereas before there was a sense, at least on certain decisive occasions, that people could make things happen. It’s a subtle yet far-reaching distinction, and it has been accompanied by a change, again rather subtle, in our time perception.
A perception of time passing with mechanical indifference to human actions coheres with a world where things simply happen to us, where people no longer make history but are merely the objects or victims of a directionless post-historical miasma. This is why quantified time adds up, as it must do, yet is devoid of sense. For it is a marker indifferent to that which is marked, it is going somewhere but has no idea whither. Such has been the experience of time, in some degree since the beginning of the modern age, but more especially over the last 30 years or so.
These recent decades have seen something like a restoration of Enlightenment linearity, only now no longer as a vehicle for human aspiration. Instead the new straight line is little more than a modality of technocratic rule, and we are the objects of its control, indoctrination and experimentation. Nothing sums up better this mindset, and the mechanistic timeline underpinning it, than Agenda 2030.
Look at all of those alluring promises: a world without poverty, zero hunger, affordable and clean energy, and so on. Who wouldn’t want those things? But then ask yourself: if this were the program of a political party, would you believe it? If this were a PR campaign by a multi-pronged corporation, would you believe it? And if you wouldn’t, then why would you believe it when it’s the agenda of politicians, corporations, technocrats, news managers and so on, all brought together under the aegis of the UN, the WHO, the WEF, and associated “philanthropic” foundations?
This is not the place to enter into a critique of Agenda 2030 and the malign forces behind it, but simply to note its quantitative, linear and technocratic underpinnings. Each of the above-mentioned 17 goals comes with a long string of criteria, amounting to 169 specific targets whose implementation is constantly monitored. You can check out how it’s supposed to work here, but you’d be much better off looking at how it operates in practice, as demonstrated for example by the sustained assault on agricultural production throughout the world. We know how it goes: politicians and bureaucrats tell farmers what they can and cannot produce, in what quantities, with what amount of fertiliser, and so on, in order to fulfil a target for a future date, target and date being equally arbitrary in nature.
This is how Goal 2, Zero hunger, and Goal 12, Responsible consumption and production, look in practice: the devastation of agriculture as we know it, at the same time that facilities for the mass production of insects for human consumption are springing up around Europe and beyond. The latter are then presented dutifully by the corporate media as a “sustainable option” for the nutritional needs of the masses.
Such is the result of a mindset that recognises nothing but the quantifiable, as implemented by technocrats along a time axis of pure linearity. Why for example did they pick 2030 for their Agenda and not 2029 or 2031? Presumably because it’s a round number, as though that might make it mean something. But in reality it doesn’t signify anything at all, other than the craving of the few for boundless domination over the many. In that sense it’s a thoroughly sinister vision, one that relates to the Enlightenment dream of linear progress as a parody does to the original.
Bearing all this in mind, it will seem less paradoxical that our common-sense notion of time should remain set in the grooves of Newtonian linearity. For this is no longer something that occurs spontaneously, as might have been the case in the past. Instead it is reinforced, continuously drummed into our heads by the sect of the forecasters and the tribe of the enforcers, not to mention by the shrieks and objurgations of professional Greens. For as we should know all too well by now, Greens have become the loudest exponents of a number-crunching vision of the future, one where everything is reduced to a mechanical linearity laid out in service to the dismal quantifications of the carbon religion.
2. Spacetime and Human Consciousness
So much for the linear template in its current coercive expression. One can only wonder what Newton would have made of it all. But what about the theory which supplanted the Newtonian conception of time and space? Einstein’s special and general relativity have been around for over a century already, so I suppose it’s time for laypeople - including myself in that category - to get to grips with them, at least in their non-mathematical form.
In any case some of the key features of relativity are broadly familiar in the culture already, particularly the concept of spacetime, which fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Thus space and time in Einstein's universe are no longer flat (as implicitly assumed by Newton) but can be stretched and warped by matter. Gravity feels strongest where spacetime is most curved, and it vanishes where spacetime is flat. This core principle of Einstein's theory of general relativity has been summed up by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in the oft-quoted words, “spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve”.
No doubt it would be rash to jump from a general notion of spacetime to a belief in the curvature of time in human existence, as expressed for example in a cyclical conception of history. Nevertheless it seems safe to say that Einstein’s theories do not rule out a cyclical vision of human unfoldment, as Newton’s theories seemed to do, at least when interpreted by the major thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Furthermore relativity seems to tell us that we are involved in spacetime in a far more intimate way than we could ever be with the external and objectified coordinates of a Newtonian universe. Spacetime, it might be argued, is somehow a part of us, in a way that Newtonian time and space are not. And since the human being is a form of consciousness embodied in matter, it might not be too far-fetched to adapt Wheeler’s quote along the following lines: spacetime tells consciousness how to evolve; consciousness tells spacetime how to curve so as to facilitate its own evolution.
Far from being mere predicates of time and space, as we have been taught to believe, we as humans would then have a closely reciprocal relationship to the unfoldment of spacetime. We would actually be moulding it in accordance with the development of our own consciousness, and our consciousness in turn would be informed by the spacetime that has thus been shaped.
Einstein’s theory showed that the orbit of planets around the sun was a function of the curvature of the gravitational field in response to planetary mass. But if spacetime could be imprinted also by consciousness rather than by physical bodies alone, it might well turn out to be receptive to conscious aspiration in its unfoldment. Such aspiration is implicit in the evolutionary thrust of all of life, becoming explicit in the life of humanity as it evolves upwards out of cyclical repetition, achieving as it does so something like a spiral development.
It is in the nature of spiral progression that it should track us backwards as well as forwards, yet it is also in its nature that each seemingly retrogressive phase should prepare the way for an upward turn. And so a severe rollback, such as the one we are currently experiencing, may well be paving the way for a greater upward thrust in the end, just as someone will take more steps backward the greater the jump ahead that must be taken. All of this is lost, however, on a linearised mindset, which can perceive only a repetitive and predictable extension of time going on mechanically by itself.
Within that general linear concept we do of course pay attention to cyclical phenomena. Economists and speculators, for example, are forever trying to read the runes of “the business cycle”, while commentators of all stripes make pronouncements about political or cultural cycles. School terms and university semesters still punctuate the cycle of the educational year, which in turn has a major impact on the recurrence of holiday seasons. So the cyclical continues, yet it is subsumed into a meta-narrative that is clearly linear in character. We are going forward in time, the years succeed each other in arithmetical progression, and a glance at a calendar or, more personally, in the mirror, is enough to prove it.
We can say then in a broad sense that linearity has always been there, and cyclicity also. The one can never do entirely without the other. Hence again the attraction of the spiral paradigm, for it takes account of both while harmonising them with each other. The cyclical aspect of the spiral is obvious enough, but also it contains within itself a trajectory which from one turn to the next assumes something that resembles a linear trend.
3. An Upward-Spiralling Progression
The cyclical and the linear have always been in evidence, but the balance between them shifts very substantially over the course of history. At one end of the spectrum we have archaic man, who ritualises the cycles of life precisely in order to exorcise the danger of an escape into the uncharted waters of the linear, of what will eventually be called history.
In spite of his best efforts, however, the linear impulse will have its way, bursting forth from the integument of ritualised existence. Then at the other end of the spectrum there is where we are now, convinced we are headed forward through an indefinite linearity, hardly suspecting that a cyclical pattern might be quietly reasserting itself after all in a new and more encompassing form.
In any case the patterns of cyclicity observable over the course of human history have been far from static, but rather have tended to expand in accordance with man’s own increasing scope of conception and range of activity. The most primitive collective expression of the cyclical was still wedded closely to the progress of the sun through solstice and equinox. Next the reign of a king, traced through his upcoming into manhood and his down-going into old age and death, extended the cycle into something like a chronicle of the passing years. From there the focus shifted naturally to that of the dynasty, and thence to the rise and fall of empires through which the forward thrust of the linear began to express itself, even as the cyclical still maintained its dominance.
The advent of the modern age in Western Europe, prefigured by the Renaissance, marked the point when linearity at last pecked its way out of the cyclical egg, and over the course of a couple of centuries left the discarded shell behind it, or seemed to do. Yet what if this were just the start of a new and enlarged pattern, one that has produced an arc so gradual that we hardly notice its curvature? Although the analogy hardly flatters us, our temporal conceptions would then be rather like the spatial ideas of primitive man, who peers around himself and concludes from his unaided perception that the Earth must be flat.
Tracing long-drawn-out curves through historical development would be one way of lending substance to a cyclical conception of our world. Another quite different way would be to identify correspondences between moments widely separate from each other in time and space, moments which could have little in common on the face of it, yet which reveal striking underlying similarities to a closer view. Thus we might find that the phases of youthful growth exhibited in quite diverse civilisations tend to echo each other even across great historical or geographical distance, just as their moments of apogee and decline reveal similar hidden affinities.
Provided with such an understanding we might for example compare our own world with that of the late Roman Empire. Needless to say, the surface differences between the two are immediately apparent, and yet considering both societies as end-of-cycle phenomena, a whole range of underlying similarities also reveal themselves. Perhaps the most general of these is the sense in both cases of a society way past its best. Thus Rome in its long-drawn-out phase of decay was effectively a post-classical society, even if the outward trappings of the classical age remained largely intact. Likewise we are living already in an avowedly postmodern world, even though the legacy of modernity is still evident in our own outward trappings.
Post- societies can define themselves only by contrast with the past, telling us what they are not while being unable to say positively what they are. They live on in the hollowed-out hulk of the old while having neither the energy nor direction to create anything substantially new. Or where novelties do manage to be devised, they tend only to accelerate the demise of the reality which gave them birth. The existential uncertainty generated by computer simulation and deep fakes testifies to this well enough, not to mention the habit, especially among the young, of simply “living online” while the material world about them languishes unattended.
Rome in its classical age fought off the barbarians, while in its decline it sought to assimilate them through resettlement within its borders. Meanwhile the imperial city turned gradually into an indistinguishable welter of every conceivable race and ethnicity, of every creed and philosophy, united by little more than a passion for bloody entertainment and a shared servitude to autocratic rulers. The native plebeian classes of Rome, having long since lost any sense of coherence and identity, could no longer oppose their own interests to those of their overlords, the result being that a great gulf of wealth and power opened up between them.
Any of this sounding familiar? When mass migration reaches proportions where the organic bonds of the host nations are eroded, how can there be any sense of natural solidarity among the newly-mixed population vis-à-vis their rulers? This the rulers understand perfectly well: an atomised agglomeration of humanity is powerless against them, especially if it can be kept at once distracted by entertainment, controlled by surveillance and ground down by economic necessity.
The breakdown of a country’s organic bonds and of the values that underpinned them pave the way for another characteristic common to then and now: rampant corruption. When the life breath goes out of the physical body, corruption in its primary sense, understood as the breakdown of organs and tissues into their simpler biological components, necessarily ensues. Likewise when the life breath ebbs within the body politic, when the organic bonds of mutual respect, affection and responsibility are loosened, corruption inevitably gains ground.
Rome managed to totter on for centuries in its corrupted state, because no one blow delivered against it was strong enough to bring about its collapse. Our own decline into corruption is to be measured in decades rather than centuries, but that has only made the downward curve much more remarkable. The outcome, however, will presumably be the same, unless some new source of vitality and inspiration is discovered which can revert the trend. If this happens then our current end of cycle can indeed take a new turn upwards, and in doing so reveal itself as a spiral after all.
4. Towards a Mass Hypnagogia?
Many more analogies could be drawn between our own times and those of Rome in its long decline, as they could also be drawn with the terminal phase of any major civilisation of the past. Common to all such phases is a sense of bizarreness and unreality, expressed through a taste for the monstrous, the misshapen and the grotesque, as though the whole society were caught up in an involuntary danse macabre. There is an oppressive sense of fatalistic stupor, yet at the same time a craving for the spectacular, as though the latter could relieve, however briefly, the burden of a pointless existence.
I suggested an analogy in my previous post between the transition each morning to the waking state and the emergence of man from the collective dream of the mythic age, an emergence that would take him at length into the broad daylight of rationalistic modernity. Now I propose a similar analogy between the individual’s passage towards sleep at night and the crumbling of societies that have lived out their civilizational day. For usually we go to bed at night feeling weary and slumberous, happy to let daytime experience subside and dissolve. And yet something very curious happens along the way, something easily missed because it is so brief, not to say strange also.
Rather than sliding directly into unconsciousness we typically pass through a fleeting phase called hypnagogia, where the stable images of daytime break up into a bizarre play of fugitive forms. It’s rather like a diffuse and random fireworks display, and yet that display has the curious property of inducing sleep rather than waking us up again. Sensory features of hypnagogia, according to Wikipedia, include “phosphenes which can manifest as seemingly random speckles, lines or geometrical patterns, including form constants, or…figurative images. They may be monochromatic or richly coloured, still or moving, flat or three-dimensional… Individual images are typically fleeting and given to very rapid changes.” A notable feature of hypnagogic imagery is that it lacks narrative content, a feature that sets it apart from dreams, although it may provide a transition to the dreaming state.
Consider again my analogy between the collective end of a civilizational day and the diurnal slide of the individual into darkness. Typical of the collective case, I suggested, was a heavy, almost semi-conscious atmosphere shot through by gaudy spectacle. Doesn’t that already suggest a parallel with the hypnagogic state? Not in too literal a sense, for then we wouldn’t have a society at all any more. But while we are not quite there yet, we may be already approximating such a condition, and in our more “advanced” cases of freakishness are already well into it. In this respect let’s consider some of the cognitive effects of hypnagogia, drawing again on Wikipedia.
“Hypnagogic cognition, in comparison with that of normal, alert wakefulness, is characterized by heightened suggestibility…” Yes indeed, how suggestible we can be, especially when subjected to propaganda that is orchestrated on a global scale, delivered relentlessly and with utter lack of scruple. “Subjects are more receptive in the hypnagogic state to suggestion from an experimenter than at other times…” Interesting, isn’t it? Do you ever have the feeling we’re being experimented on more intensively all the time? Consider some examples. How will the human digestive tract handle the consumption of feed produced from insects? We’ll find out. How will our cell mitochondria or our endocrine and nervous systems cope with the impact of 5G? We’ll find out. And what about the consequences of the experimental mRNA Covid injections that most of the world’s population was cajoled or forced into taking? Ah, now there we’re already finding out…
In conclusion, Wikipedia tells us that subjects in this phase “readily incorporate external stimuli into hypnagogic trains of thought and subsequent dreams”. It’s not enough that we be receptive to the propaganda; the latter really only works to the full when we make it our own, when we “incorporate” it, believing that we have arrived at the conclusions it suggests for us through our own independent thought processes. That’s the cherry on the cake from the experimenter’s point of view. Hard to achieve with a human in standard daytime awareness, but so much easier when whole populations are lapsing into a quasi- hypnagogic stupor.
5. The Metaphysical Dimension
This may seem like a grim note on which to end this two-part summary of the cyclical process as I understand it. Properly appraised, however, there is no cause for despondency. Consider only this: when we are having a dream, we are totally absorbed in the dream, it is effectively our reality for its own duration. When we go about as seemingly self-responsible agents in our daytime world, it seems equally obvious to us that this is “the world” as such, and again we are wholly involved in it. Likewise when we enter what by comparison is the very brief hypnagogic state, there is nothing else for us but that. And then it is followed by dream again, or by deep, dreamless sleep.
Throughout these successive states, however, there is a common background identity which enables us to say, “I had a good day”, or “I slept well”, and to feel in each of these assertions an equal validity. Even in dreamless sleep that identity is there as an extremely subtle presence, so that even that featureless darkness is felt to be an integral part of what we are. This presence then is an unchanging witness of constant change, whether expressed within each of the diurnal states or through their succession from one to the next. At once unmoved and all-perceiving, it is cognate with the Atman of Vedic philosophy, which is the expression in individual terms of the Supreme, the Brahman, out of whom this world and all others is held to arise.
Thinking again in terms of the individual life cycle, old age is inclined to conjure up for us an image of feebleness not just of body but of mind, in the worst case presaging senility and dementia also. In traditional societies, however, senescence was associated in the first instance with wisdom, expressed through a calm perspective on the wholeness of life over and above its individual phases and episodes. This wisdom of old age provides in turn an inkling of the incomparably greater wisdom inherent in the Atman, the unmoved mover that beholds alike the cycles of the Earth and the cosmic cycles beyond it.
We are the seeming actors of that immense drama, but we are also the inner Witness in which the entirety of the action takes place. What is proper to us as humans is to live to the full whatever role has been assigned to us within the play, but without losing awareness of the Seer who contemplates it, that deepest part of ourselves which is unchanged in the midst of our changing surface identities.
Whether our already frazzled reality will descend into darkness altogether, into pralaya as it is called in Vedic philosophy, a period of deep unconsciousness prior to a fresh “day” of creation, or whether it will manage to transform itself into the new without a passage through that dark interlude, is imponderable from our present perspective. Nor is it necessary to know such things. Enough that we do what is right and true to ourselves in the here and now, accepting whatever kind of culmination presents itself. Then the terminating phase of the cycle may in the end reveal its true character as the upward turn of a spiral, one that transforms human consciousness, and the Earth itself out of which it arose.