Time vs. Change

Time vs. Change

I fancy two American writers as genius standing out and above most folk writing novels and such. Film arts are different.

One is Ursula K. LeGuin, and the other is Neal Stephenson. Both are cursed with the presumption that what they write is science fiction.

My youngest son, who was visiting for Father’s Day, stated that in his view, and that this was true for many others, … all what is happening today is well described in an early work of Stephenson’s called: Snow Crash.

He asks and answers: What kind of a society are we heading toward? A major character is an Italian mob boss, who owns most of the pizza joints in America. Everybody knows he is a mob boss.

He promises 30 minute to your door delivery. One of his drivers is named Hiro Protagonist. Hiro runs into some not-his-fault difficulties and is saved by a passing by teenager, who spends her spare time delivering messages, while riding about town on a “skateboard” which has a kind of wheel, that consists of hundreds of little feet like spokes, each tied to a chip that reads the road, and adjusts faster then seems possible when obstacles appear.

This novel had more inventiveness in a page, than does most of modern literature in the English language. Think Nostradamus marries Shakespeare.

While Stephenson writes about what seems to be the future, it is mostly very inventive social commentary on the present.

LeGuin’s novel “The Dispossessed” has many many virtues as well. If you know Steiner’s “The Philosophy of Freedom”, this novel imagines a fully human world, in which the anarchy of real individual freedom is allowed to run free. The individuals choices are sacred, in a sense.

Yet, like anything human, and less ideal, the whole social order that results is flawed, hard, and most of the people who live this way prefer it to too much order, yet realize that in practice it is a bit impossible to get that perfectly right.

Running as a kind of speculative undertow, LeGuin’s main character is a physicist, who struggles with the meaning of a very tricky problem. While we see and describe a world where events occur in linear time-frames of change, he posits that physics must not only deal with the sequential, but the simultaneous as well.

People stuck in their preferred variation of the “what is”, tend not to notice that past and future are fictions and rumors, with everything actually taking place in a sequences of Nows upon Nows upon Nows.

Rudolf Steiner describes the Mystery of Golgotha as: the turning point of time. Tomberg, discussing the four prior sacrifices of Christ, as one beginning when the sphere of warmth of the Saturn planetary condition was set in motion by the Christ Being condensing into the Center, and sacrificing the ability to move.

There is an aspect to our reality, where all that happens is happening at the same moment of Now. The sacrifice of movement is continuous. The sacrifice on the Cross is continuous.

The Second Coming is continuous, although, in the Steiner culture to which I have access, there seems more weight on reading Steiner, than on meeting Christ. Mostly these folk, in a very human way, tend to imagine that there is something they can only discover in the future. That the Second Coming is ahead of us.

Still, given that the Second Coming “is” Now, what in our normal experience is the nature of that experience?

We don’t breathe without Him. How much closer do you want? Oh, yes, a hint … there is a quality of breathing in thinking … attend and see the mystery right where you need it to be. Judge Not. Pray in secret. Meditate on the mysteries in community (reverse cultus). Practice asking (thinking), seeking (willing), and knowing (feeling). Most of all, trust yourself.