Clock Time Metastisizing Toward 2012

Eagerly awaiting 2012 is like hurrying toward tranquility. We are beset with time sickness, and the reset of that orientation is not to be found in time, but beyond time.

Aldous Huxley, in his book, The Perennial Philosophy, points out that the religions and political philosophies that are framed in linear time are the ones that do violence and generate suffering. The progressive may seek radical means to create a future world where conditions are more ideal. The reactionary may take repressive measures to turn the clock back to some imaginary earlier time when "traditional" values reigned. Both seek to find their salvation in time, in the temporal world, and both will employ temporal means to get there, usually claiming that the ends justify their dubious means. The more we identify with our mortal, aging bodies, the more we descend into clock time, as our bodies are bound to clock time in so many obvious ways. Our spirits are timeless, and therefore our psyches, which might be said to occupy a middle area have an amphibious nature, as Huxley describes, able to live in clock time and eternity.

I'm trying to ground this distinction and find a way to integrate it into my awareness while living in this clock time driven ream. I'm not much of a meditator and don't recall any definitive experience of release from the temporal into the eternal. If I adopted an ambitious program of meditation to achieve that goal, I would, of course, be binding myself once more to a linear time track. I can't travel toward eternity, it is more, as John Major Jenkins suggests, comparable to breathing in or out, not a place or time to go to. The way that occurs to me as the grounding, integrating way of withdrawing from clock time can be expressed in a two word phrase I coined some years ago, "existential impeccability." Existential impeccability means being impeccable right now, not to achieve some aim or goal, but simply to be impeccable for its own sake. When I seek to transform myself using the temporal it always seems to back fire, just as when the US government seeks to control the temporal it encounters "blowback."

Let's consider the issue of nutrition and eating. Diets are notoriously unsuccessful, and this may have to do with their heavy handed temporal aspects. One has a future goal, say an ideal weight or improved health, and therefore accepts privations or excessive asceticism for a period of time to reach that goal. Trying to secure a future, one attempts to live in a projected timeline, an uncomfortable flatland which many aspects of our selves will usually rebel from. We do violence to ourselves in our eagerness to achieve an end, and there is blowback, a rebound of some sort. The alternative to the diet or other time bound regimen is existential impeccability where one chooses this moment to eat in a healthful manner as a gesture done for its own sake without regard to a future result. From the stance of existential impeccability we are path oriented, not goal oriented. We stay centered in an axis mundi of empowerment and actualization by focusing on impeccability in our relationship with ourselves in the now. With this focus we are always at the center of our circle of influence and inner independence. With our focus on existential impeccability we are also as effective and harmonious as possible with all outer relationships.

The forms of violence done by temporally bound imperialist governments and evangelical religions each have their analog in our personalities. If I focus on capturing the hottie, I descend into the nightmare of history, in this case the personal history nightmare of the adolescent soap opera. I live out of the moment in anticipation of the phone ringing, etc. This is the insight shared by the 80 year old woman who said that she had now learned that striving to be loved was less fulfilling than to be love. When I get ambitious about anything: capturing the hottie, becoming a celebrity, making a popular DVD, I step out into the flatland clock time world, I rush toward a precious to find the wholeness that had I but slowed down and turned inward I would have found within.

I trick myself with clock time when I accept galling privations now to achieve a goal, or when I indulge now and imagine that tomorrow I will turn over a new leaf. Reaching for a stimulant like coffee can be a way of metabolically binding to clock time----I sacrifice existential impeccability to get something that speeds me up now and slows me down later. This is the classic pattern of temporal means. There is always the archetype of the devil's bargain. Buy now, pay later, and you always pay more later than what you got now. But you don't just pay later, you pay the instant you make the decision, even before you act on it, because you have damaged your inner relationship to yourself and tied another binding knot to Maya/matrix. Tie enough of those knots and, as Jung put it, the life giving rhythm of the aeons becomes the dread ticking of the clock.

Several centuries ago Meister Eckart expressed the timeless wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy:

"Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time."