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     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 the qualified duality of the complete whole of the omnipresent God? Stressing the latter position, this article describes how the different concepts of religious time to the Original Person can be understood and combined into a unified and integrated concept of worldtime. This suggests the basis of a worldorder unifying the religions. Practically it proposes a reform of as well clocktime as calendartime also accounted for under science at this site.


 
 

 

 

"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')

by A.A.

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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