In Silent Meditation

I recently read William E. Connolly’s book Pluralism, in which he introduces ideas that challenge time as a linear succession of specific events that are fixed in history.  Connolly proposes that memory and anticipation are linked to the perception of time.  His ideas are drawn from the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who proposed something to the effect that time and duration can only be perceived through intuition.  “Duration,” Connolly writes, “is this rapid flow back and forth between several layers of past and future anticipation as a perception.”[1]  In a given moment, a memory might be called up, and in the reconsidering of the event, the future might be different than it might have been had the memory not been dredged up.  The way Connolly puts is that “Duration is the flow of time as becoming.  It is waves of memory protracted into a present unfolding toward an altered future.”[2]

These ideas are not new to me.  Until the past few years, I had not heard of process theology, but many years ago, I read Stewart Edward White’s The Unobstructed Universe and Jane Roberts’ The Seth Materials, as well as a number of other “mystical” texts that explained time in a non-linear fashion.  Time is not static, but is fluid.  The past is affected by the present, and the course of the future can be changed.  This isn’t something tangible, as if one could physically go to the past and change the future à la Back to the Future; rather, it is a spiritual endeavor.  It is a construct of memory and perception.  Consider this personal example:  a female graduate student is writing a final paper while her spouse of less than a year plays guitar in another room.  The music being played was written some twenty years before, when the two were friends, married to other people.  In hearing the music, the student is virtually transported to the time in the past when she first heard it.  She reassesses the memory, for now the music that was played in the past has a new connection to the present, and the future is thus changed because there is a new emotional response associated with the original time when she first heard the music.

Burgson wrote his papers on time, duration, and free will in the 19^th century.  He was not alone in his thinking.  As I readdress this line of thought, I discover connections between Burgson and the Golden Dawn, mysticism, theosophy, and me.  In my little bit of research, I discovered something that sparked a memory.  I vividly recalled reading a book when I was in my late 20’s by someone named Maitland.  It was a book about Isis Mysteries.  I understood little, but it was old, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Maitland was related to me somehow.  I have always heard that everyone named Maitland or Lauderdale were related, and Maitland was my mother’s maiden name.  Sitting at my computer from the vantage point of 2012, I was transported to a small room on Venice Boulevard, just a block from the boardwalk at Venice Beach, curled up on a mattress, cup of tea beside, reading this ancient book that I had borrowed.  I felt the cloth binding, inhaled the musty scent of yellowed pages.  I turned the pages, hardly understanding the archaic language of 19^th century occultism.  I closed the book, and it was gone.  I had given it back to its owner, determined to find a copy I could have for my own so I could decipher the puzzles of this mysterious Maitland.

For a moment I sat balanced on a wall between the 21^st century and my own past.  I sensed that time had changed and though a mystery was solved, a new one had been created to take its place.  Edward Maitland was a writer, humanitarian and a hermetic mystic.  He is somehow, though distantly and thinly I’m sure, related to me.  What does this knowledge mean?  Is my future somehow altered by the visit to my past?  Perhaps it is, at some level.  I am certainly not a different person because of it; but I have no doubt that I am changed, ever so slightly, by the introduction of this new information.  When I, the graduate student, was transported back to a moment when I first met my husband under circumstances that could not have foreshadowed our marriage so many years later, I knew that something changed.  There was a new emotion attached to the song that hearkened back to the first time I heard it.  That emotion, of course, was the love that I feel for my husband today.  Now that the memory of that very first time is imbued with the emotion from today, I can never go back to the original experience.  It is new, it is different, and it changed everything.

Time is not a dimension.  It is a becoming. Each memory becomes a new moment. Each moment, we become something new.  Each day becomes a new expectation, and each thought becomes a new reality.  Standing once again on the border between times, I am aware of my becoming as a reality filled with wonder and awe, helping others to find their way into a new eternity.  I expect it.  I am becoming.  I am being.  I am.