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"And if the
world perceives that what we are saying about
him (the philosopher) is the truth, will they be
angry with philosophy? Will they disbelieve us,
when we tell them that no State can be happy
which is not designed by artists who imitate the
heavenly pattern?" (Socrates
in the 'The
Republic') Abstract:
This article
describes how the different concepts of
religious time can be understood and combined
into a unified and integrated concept of
world-time in contrast with the timelessness of
the modern information culture. Introduction Islam,
Christianity and the Hindu universe of religion
share a mission: to unify the people of the
world in one concept of God. The original idea
of a world order is from them. It has been the
passion of the papal inquisition fighting all
heresy. It has been the passion of the Jihad
proclaiming the true belief and it has been the
motive of hindu guru's coming to the West to
drive out the spirit of materialism. Historians
are not sure what to say about it: does religion
set the people of the world up against one
another or are the religiously motivated the
real peacemakers? In the Bhagavad
Gîta
Lord Krishna
proclaims the war as the ultimate surrender and
act in service of God at the one hand, at the
other hand He proclaims the peace and victory of
the enlightened righteous rule. In conclusion
there is mention of an eternal war of wisdom
against ignorance. All religions agree: if God
and His justice rule the world there will be
everlasting peace. The first question of our
survey is thus: 'what would the nature of this
righteousness and peace be?' In the
twentiest century we have the multicultural
multifaith reality of modern society. Modern
media opened up minds and hearts, and everyone
nowadays can know everything about the other
man's belief next door. We have a holistic
vision of a multifaith worldorder unified by the
information culture. But this is a realization
of an 'elite' of digital people in command of a
computer. It takes a computer to have an equal
interactive respect for all cultures. Yet the
information is not the same as the people
themselves. The computer poses a new challenge
to reformulate our social definitions:we still
have to meet the other culture, the fellow man
in the social reality and work on a concept of
social agreement, tolerance, righteousness and
peace. The internet can be a 'timeless' reality
of divine respect for all cultures of divinity,
science, politics and natural instinct. But the
very locality the user of the timeless
computation of information has, forces this
culture to formulate a directive of timed local
management. The virtual idealism of the
information-age is able to escape from this
local reality of timed interaction of real
people in a real world. But there is no way to
conceive of a worldorder of real people in real
life interaction that manage an escapist
philosophy of time. In fact the management of
time is a main theme of the worldreligions, the
worldly politics of power as well as of the
sciences: it defines their sense of reality and
forms the command of their localized
cultures. With this
escapism we have arrived at a central
philosophical problem: is time the devil of
illusion we have to fight? Is the timeless
reality of the enduring soul the one reality we
are after? Or would time be the unifying force
and divinity making for a qualified -
fundamental, essential - duality of the complete
whole of the omnipresent God? In this article I
would like to defend the latter proposition. I
would like to defend that the ultimate purpose
of all religion, politics and science is to
arrive at a social (world) order of time. I
would like to defend that without the concept of
time, nor religion, nor the scientific community
nor politics make any sense at all. I would like
to defend that the repression of this reality of
time is nothing but escapism from the necessity
to have religious sacrifices in respect of time,
a political rule in respect of a paradigm of
timing and to have a scientifically responsible
management based on the holy trinity of matter,
space and time. I would like to defend that the
whole repression of the complete reality of time
is nothing but the history and psychology of our
ignorance, our suffering and our despair about a
better mankind in a better world. I would like
to defend that the digital revolution of the
information culture doesn't make any sense
either without a serious consideration of local
timing. Religious
timing To the
different concepts of time we have sacred time
and religious time. They come closest to what
may be called cosmic time: the big time of the
complete whole of the cosmic reality ('true
time'). As
Prof. Kearl
formulates:
sacred time is the past, present and future
collapsed in one eternal now making for our
connectedness. Religious time is the time that
is respected on religious grounds. It is usually
bound to natural order by means of calendars,
sundials and/or clock (-schedules). In this
article I will stress the importance of
religious timing. It has shaped our scientific
and political outlook and is thus basic to that.
Religion has laid the foundation for our present
day time-politics and scientific paradigms and
is also preparing us for our future. Religion
itself is offering us a vision of historical
time: it tells us how we learned to live with
the time of God over the centuries and it offers
us all the basic elements of the present day
theological, scientific and political
discussions on the subject. The
vedic split of time-consciousness
"I am the
time, the destroyer of the worlds ..."
(Bhagavad
Gîtâ
11.32)
Earliest cultural history begins with the
oldest records of human conduct: the vedic
scriptures. Especially the so-called fifth Veda,
offers us the stories, the purânas of
mankind relating to divinity or better: divinity
relating to humanity. Time and again in these
earliest records God descends in all kinds of
forms to earth (as 'avatars') to reconfirm the
practices of righteousness and love and defeat
our demoniac falsehood of original
sin. These earliest
records are specifically personalistic: the
common people wouldn't understand God as a
mathematical formula but would learn only from
the realization of the real hero, a Lordship
that would redeem them. And to the present day
personalism persists: definitely teachers,
hero's, leaders and martyrs are needed to lead
us the way in sacrificing our illusioned state
for the sake of the ultimate truth. This is the
early realization of time-management: there were
no clocks, there were people to conform to:
authorities, elders and wise to help the people
find the meaning of life. This naturalistic,
personalistic form of time founded the religions
as social practices of personalized authority.
The brahmins, the spirited intellectuals of the
original aryan culture would be the real leaders
and authorities and the politicians, the kings
and warriors would be their instrument of
control. At that time, before the great
'worldwar' of the Mahâbharat the spiritual
world and the material world were one undivided
society based on the highest standard of human
values. At the end of this glory of this vedic
time Lord
Krishna
merciless put an end to all falsehood of
governance of the offenders [from the same
family] of the classical values of
compassion, cleanlines, penance and
truthfullness : the meat-eaters who appeared to
be murderous and stealing demons, all the
promiscuous who turned out to be the offenders
and aggressors of the true love for the good
order, all desire after and possessiveness about
the wealth that didn't really want to share and
all intoxication and deceit deemed necessary to
cover up the lies. Although Lord
Krishna
won the war with Arjuna,
it was a Pyrrus victory: after His campaign of
righteousness there were only old men, women and
children left to rule the country. Emperor
Parîkchit
, the first vedic ruler of the New Era called
the iron age or Kali Yuga (starting
approx.
3000 years B.C.),
had to face the horrible facts: the wise were
far out of the reach of the 'organized' society
and his excitement about it only confirmed the
definite break in history between the spiritual
world and the material world. From then on there
was the materialist world of human weaknesses
that would exist on the governmental tolerance
for intoxication, adultery, righteous
'speculative' theft of wealth and meat-eating.
The other world was the secluded world of the
spiritual people living in secluded communities
making little societies of their own to preserve
the original values and discipline of rule. The
modern time was thus founded as a schizoid
reality of a personalistic command of time in a
spiritual world at the one hand and an
impersonalistic command based on human
weaknesses at the other hand. The original
purpose of an impersonal spiritual command of
time doing justice to the person was lost. This
original purpose of time-management was only to
be found as a precept for calendering and
scaling in the Bhagavata Purâna in a
unitary description of "The
Division of Time from The
Atom"
see also: time-quotes). Ever since the
Indian society (and the world) has wrestled with
false authorities of preaching: either it was a
personalistic religious subcultural command
unacceptable to the mature options of
state-managment or it was an alienated command
of worldly interest unacceptable to the
subculturally kept original standards of human
values. This can also be observed with the
modern
Gurus
that came to the West: they could teach the
human values, but had great difficulties of
preaching the proper rule of spiritual time
despite of the fact that it was prescribed in
the same books (notably the Yoga
Sûtras of
Patanjali
and the Bhagavata
Purâna
of Vyasadeva;
see
time-quotes)
that they were preaching from. Many gurus became
known as bogus-gurus preaching against the
precepts of their own scriptures the timeless
reality of the soul offering no substitute for
the detachment from the materialist timing
preached. The philosophy of Yoga got a bad
calling in the studies of western intellectuals:
yoga was nothing but a lazy escapist philosophy
of Indians that couldn't settle for a proper
society themselves. It would even be a threat to
our sanity, according to the psychiatric norms
of sanity for a proper orientation in time and
place. It looked more like the preaching one
does in order to learn. The christians preached
the compassion they should learn to practice
themselves slaughtering aboriginals, Indians,
Negroes and other so called primitives all
around the world. The same way the Hindus with
their so called 'mâyâ-vada'
bogus-teaching preached the enlightenment they
should practice themselves meanwhile killing all
sense of time and timing that are necessary for
a proper society. Thus the original vedic split
of time consciousness penetrated all cultural
reality as a
fractal pattern
showing the same break of order from the lowest
to the highest level of organization. In the Indian
society of today has this split politically
resulted in a complicated reality of at the one
side an Indian State Calendar set to the
tropical year, the year of the seasons, called a
sayana year starting at the equinox in
spring and local traditional calendars set to
the stars, in what is called nirayana
years fixed on the star Chitra. Next to these
solar years for civil use there are at the other
hand lunisolar years used for mainly religious
purposes in which there are leap years leaping
to the nirayana-year fixed on Chitra. The
difference between a Gregorian and a Indian
State calendar year is in the more systematic
division of the number of days in a month and
the start of the year: they are calculated to
the passage through 30o of the
ecliptic called rasi's, which again is a
traditional notion. The authority on the
religious fixation on the Chitra star and the
rasi's is laid down in the so-called
surya-siddhanta, a scripture basic to all
traditional Indian calendering (see the pdf-file
Indian
calendars
). Christianity
and its time-fallacy From the
judaic realization of personalized time
christianity, through rabbi Jesus,
realized the necessity of getting rid of old
roman and other 'primitive' personalistic
concepts of divine time-management. Only one
Lord can be served at a time, all others are
false gods with corrupt philosophies of power.
But the very personalism of the religion of
christianity itself proves the ignorant state of
the unenlightened Christian: if it would really
be a non-political pure spirituality it wouldn't
be in offense with other time-politics. It would
recognize the unity of the God of time in the
diversity of the cultures. It would have simply
unified it to its original roman intent of being
cat-holistic ('Pax-Romana'). Rabbi
Jesus
became a supreme Godhead despite of his
personalistic human claim of the dualism of
Father, Son and Holy ghost. He couldn't help
being a miraculous avatar in the old vedic style
to defeat the demoniac falsehood of priests and
politicians. In stead of realizing the power of
the supersoul in a proper structural respect of
the duality of time and matter, He became the
hero of the Super Ego to which we all could
realize our psychological complexes according to
Freud's
psychoanalysis. Instead of a unified christian
community we arrived at a hopelessly divided
political community full of warfare and delusion
about alienated concepts of political
time-imposition (as with Napoleon
and Hitler
). The original vedic split of time proved
itself incurable: there is no political solution
for the time-problem. The more political
manipulation of time, the worse the wars about
the false imposition. Time is a subject of
individual selfrealization, however boguslike
preached by the guru's, this was the truth we
had to accept. We had to accept the fact the
Bible warned against: the imposition of time,
others changing our settlings of time are of the
Beast (from
Daniël
7.25.)
. Equally we digitally had to face another truth
of the Bible: for everything there is a time and
a place (Eccl. 3:17). This is a biblical
holistic claim: on the condition of respecting
the time one can have ones way however
primitive. One has the right to learn and get
experienced. Thus each culture of time in fact
should be respected according to the Bible.
Christians should be holistic, or even better
gnostically integrated, however reformed or
catholic they claim to be. And truly
Christianity has wrestled with the concept of
time not really understanding the Lord's prayer
as a directive to implement the time of the sun
and moon in 'heaven' then 'on earth', being
critical e.g. with the julian reform just before
His coming. From the early St.Augustine
on it has fought against a factual lack of
differentiation in timekeeping. From the early
roman clepsydra's (waterclocks) there was a
suggestion of time-similarity called cyclic
time: each day would be repeated 'reincarnating'
alike the other and that was an offense against
the ever new redeeming quality of the Lord
Himself who would be of progress and never
return to Sodom and Gomorrah. This same aversion
from cyclic time is reflected in the modern
concept of electromagnetic time defying the
newtonian respect for the natural cycles of the
sun and the moon. Of course the error was that
not the cyclic of time is the problem but the
lack of differentiation in respecting it with a
clepsydra or mechanical clock. Each scientist
can explain that the better the differentiation,
the better the instrument of measurement. As
such modern science is based on an original
catholic fallacy of time respect, Einsteinian
relativity or not. The only proper clock is in
fact the clock that doesn't tell you the time,
but only shows you the time. And that is the
clock with nine hands: the solar system.
Horologically the clock of clocks is an
astrarium: a projection of the totality of spin
of the celestial sky, the earth, the planets and
the moon. From such a clock one can only see
where everything is, the actual naming of such
an unique event of spin is a matter of cultural
preference. Some like to scale the moon, some
the sun and some even might qualify the zodiac
of the celestial sky as a time-scale. Of course
the reality of time in its totality is shown by
a clock that has as well an astrarium
representation of the natural order as a respect
for all the different cultural systems of
telling the time (see the
'cakra-tempometer'
clock-design
of The Order of Time). Technically there is no
problem to have such an holistic respect of
time. The obstacle in our way is purely
psychological: we have this christian hang-up on
cyclic time for the sake of differentiation in
such a way that once we have the electronic
capacity we do not immediately have the
morality, motivation or intelligence for it.
First of all one should admit to the temporal
fallacy: for differentiation one does not have
to defy half of the, parallel , time of God -
His maintaining cyclic aspect, and compulsively
stick to the serial aspect alone. Second of all
one should learn to recognize the historic split
of our time-consciousness which makes a
short-hand political solution impossible. Only
after a long social evolution of great parts of
the community restoring its original respect for
the natural cyclic of time with a reformed,
properly differentiating, horological concept,
there is the chance of a democratic majority
that could justify such a political
decision. The thing
Christianity did right was to settle for the
greatest unit of time-measurement we know in
civil use; the year. It took pope
Gregory
300 years to change the Julian calendar to match
it with the seasons. Although also this fixation
will we be outruled by the 'law of time' (time
is dynamic) in 2500 years with one day, it is
the only true commitment of christened Rome to
time: we may repeat ourselves, but only after
one whole year of differentiating on the time of
the day. Of course, although not even the actual
pope himself takes this rule and decision
seriously considering the church its conforming
to standardtime, still it gives us a clue to the
way with which we could deal with the problem of
cyclic time. Even for cyclic time the pope has a
'time and place'. The biblical settling for the
7-day period of the week was spiritually a
proper thing to do making the consciousness of
alternating between work and contemplation, but
to this 7-day rhythm as yet there was no natural
(divine) reference of leaping as one did with
the solar year. From the Bible we as yet do not
know which date exactly would be a sunday (there
is a suggestion that it could be the ninth of
the - lunar - month Lev.23:32). Islam
its countering culture Plato
once said:
" time is
the moving imago of the unmoving eternity" (see
also quote at the top). According to the old
Greeks we should live in imitation after the
heavenly pattern. It were the members of the
school of Posidonios
that created a device to compute the positions
of the sun and the moon - what we now call
"The
Antikythera
Mechanism",
one of the first real mechanical time-devices
after the clepsydra. This philosophical concern
describes the attitude of the Islam relating to
time. The Islam is one of the few religions that
truly respect the natural order as
the reality and will of God. Mohammed prescribed
the pure mooncalendar that is not leaped so that
only once in the 32 years it aligns with the
solar calendar. With them e.g. the period of
fasting, the Ramadan, is shifting every year
with ten days back over the gregorian calendar.
This disrespect for the seasons, which seems to
be impractical to western standards, suggests
that Mohammed explicitly wanted to contrast his
culture with that of the Christians who since
the reform of Constantine in 325 AD fell into
the formal (commercial) repression of the for
the Romans once so glorious lunar order by
introducing with emperor Constantine in 421 AD,
the fixed weekorder following the roman
marketdays. The muslims recognize that not human
forms of Godheads or animals should be taken as
the form of God. They only allow the respect of
mathematical forms like time-scales or graphical
patterns of flowers etc. Their original
intention was to set the clock at twelve to the
setting sun and thus regulate the time for their
prayers. At present though they have a dual
respect of religious time and civil time
conforming to, but fundamentalistically opposing
with, western standards. In fact the
fundamentalist fights his own acceptance of
western time-standards. In the Middle East
religiously one respects the position of the
sun, but one has centralized the concept to the
position of the central city where the ruler
resides and the religion concentrates. Their
religious clock cannot be bought in the shop. It
is just a time-table for prayer that should
reflect the order of nature, the will of Allah.
From them we learn not just to settle for a
lunar calendar that following scripture is
according to the objective or absolute of nature
(see also the Hindu Bhagavata Purâna, see
time-quotes),
but also to settle for the actual position of
the sun, real solar or true time and the
moon. Conclusion Considering
the diverse religious concepts of time, as
restricted to the concepts of the three greatest
of Hinduism, Christianlity and Islam, and their
problems of practical management one may
conclude to a concept of time that could be the
basis of a worldorder unifying the major
religions. From the christian directive we may
realize the necessity of a properly
differentiated concept of time: the necessity of
a clock that does better than repeat itself
after twelve hours supported by a calendar fixed
on the seasons. The second insight is that of
the calendar according to the Vedas. It is just
a scriptural precept that is not even practiced
by the vaishnav gurus themselves that brought it
to the West, but it is still the most
comprehensive religious time-scale available. It
is set in respect with a year that is ruled by
one movement up and downward of the sun along
the equador, thus making for the astronomical
solar year beginning at the 22 of dec. It
divides the year in 24 15-day fortnights thus
making for a scale that is as well suited for a
24 hour scale as for a calendar with 48, by
fortnight with a fifteenth day leaped, weeks
with six seasons marked by 6 seasonal leapdays
(from 366 stardays). All the calendar needs is
transposition to the solar year to make for the
one and only scripturally supported religious
calendar. (It is called the
Cakra-calendar
see tables
and time-quotes
and Bhâgavatam
3-11).
Its 15-day periods allow for two weeks of
christian culture with an extra 'Cakra'-day
added. The principle of a tradition of a
nirayana-year set to the star Chitra is
respected by having a shifting celestial, or
better galactic, new Year that is set to the
center of the galaxy, the 'Navel of Vishnu'.
From the Islam we learn about the necessity of
true timing: true solar and true sidereal time.
Combined together these diverse religious
aspects of time can be respected with one clock:
the
cakra-tempometer as offered by The Order of
Time.
Although this clock is a purely principle
construction it could be the clock of the
future. At first hand it could seem needlessly
complex. But that duality is the way humanity
behaves with the position of the sun and stars.
It is not made for the repression of one system
by the other. For practical purposes, missing
the machine's honorable engineering, one can
simply use an old clock, set as a
reference-clock,
next to normal standard-timing, islamic to the
sun with the
equation of
time
and a normal gregorian
calendar with the 48-week Cakra-calendar marked
on it.
The ritual regular resetting of the clock to the
sun would be a remnant of religious discipline
as long as clockmakers do not provide for true
timepieces (see
web-application)
. According to the need for a restoration of
social respect in our digitized
information-culture in the local sphere, one can
use the Cakra-days as days for study and
socializing defying the modern media that have
put the fellow man with the culture of standard
time at a distance (radio, t.v. , telephone,
internet). Religious to the phases of the moon
one can contemplate one's soul. Thus one can
imagine a 'filognostic'
digital
revolution
with a new tempometer clock and a multifaith
information culture at the one hand, while at
the other hand restructuring our social times
for the sake of restoring the originally
appreciated social control of one's locality
supported by the wisdom of contemplation. This
way religious classical timeprecepts can lead us
to a new world order that is restorative to the
natural order of God and socially positive to
the selfrealization of each individual in the
here and now. A.A.
18-10-'99 (last
update: 9.08.2005) Links: -
Calendars
and their
history:
a basic article on various religious
calendar-systems and their
calculations. - See also the
other
articles on this subject
from
this site. -
LEOW Choon
Lian, wrote a project
on
Indian
Calendars
(PDF-file) - For the
Vedic concept of time consult the
Bhagavad
Gîtâ of
Order
and the Bhagavata
Purana, the story of the Fortunate
One, - For
time-quotes from the worldlitearture go to
The
Quotes
pages See further
the
time-directory of the Linking
Library
for more links. © 2000
The Order of Time: this article is published for
this site. Publication elsewhere only on
permission.
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