[p2p-research] integral time awareness

[Michel Bauwens]

I personally have read and use Gebser in my own attempts to deal with time
.... i.e. I make place in  my life, for combining different temporalities
(reading nap, time for family, time alone, along with internet time, the
latter being my 'job')


http://www.realitysandwich.com/emit_time

In the beginning there was stone, or nothing, or God, or the loud
unspeakable banging of things. There was an origin. And inside of us,
somewhere, is that origin. We couldn’t be here without containing it. Every
moment of time and all the interactions of nature have led themselves to us,
to the person reading these words in the space they’re being read in. And so
the very history of the universe stands in our bones, like a ghost standing
inside of a wall.

This is philosopher Jean Gebser’s “ever-present origin” from his book of the
same name. The point from which all lines and planes and cubes emerge, the
one that still pours forth our being, but which, at some moment, we became
unaware of, and which, if we want to speak spatially about such things, we
have “grown distant” from.

Somewhere in this great divorce, we developed our current concept of and
feeling for time, which so intensely typifies our current way of life, on
the peninsular stretch away from the origin that we live on. Gebser’s focus
on time impelled him to write the book.

There’s too much history to go over, too many potshots to take at the thing,
and too many expressions of time from culture to culture to get into the
nitty gritty of the history of time (for a great and exhausting study of
just that, I recommend *A Sideways Look at Time* by Jay Griffiths). I don’t
have time (or space) to do it. But we can look at what time *is* to us --
how it feels, how it “ticks away,” how it becomes something beyond claiming
as it falls into the past. We can, perhaps, even learn to interact with time
in a new way. “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time,” David Bowie
sang. Oh no?

Gebser claimed that we were entering into a new understanding of time and
that it would change our consciousness utterly. He claimed, like the
theosophists, anthroposophists, Hindus, and others, that human consciousness
has changed throughout our long history. Our new perspective on time would
herald a “mutation” -- the “integral” -- through which we could see the ways
we used to think -- the past mutations of consciousness. “Mutations” not
because they follow the reductive concepts of genetic mutation, nor because
they have the same feel as physical evolution; they are, instead, changes in
the inner landscape of the psyche and spirit. They are shifts in the pattern
of thinking and being that change those patterns utterly. Our selves change
in accordance to these mutations; our structures of perception, our
personalities, our relationships, all uproot and become *undone*. That is,
they no longer feel finished, and they become again. As goes our structure
of consciousness, so goes the world.

Gebser’s arguments -- intensely detailed examinations of art history and
language -- are compelling and powerful, and in themselves contribute to
changes in the consciousness of any reader strong-willed enough to make it
through the wordy book (for gentler but just as profound renderings of the
evidence, see Owen Barfield’s *Saving the Appearances, History in English
Words*, or *Poetic Diction*). His main point with the integral is that when
we change our vision of time, we change our world, and that this perspective
is changing whether we like it or not.

Physicist Stephen Hawking speculates that the “‘psychological arrow of time’
is pointed in the same direction as the cosmological and thermodynamic arrow
of time...from the past to the future.” Gebser and others ask -- what
happens when the psychological arrow changes direction? Or we aim the bow
upward

-- 
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