The Timekeeper's Waltz

Time.
That non renewable commodity.
The one thing we can’t get enough of.
It’s a safe bet that at the end of the day if we were offered more….another go around perhaps? We would take it. Yet so much time is spent criticizing, bitching, complaining about how hard things are. Invariably, if we have a hard time making ends meet then the complaints center around money. If we are wealthy, financially, our concerns and criticisms take on another hue. We can now afford altruism.
One thing is for sure: rich or poor, we can’t get our hands around the idea that our time here is finite.
Religious magicians have made a whole industry out of this fear. “Never mind the present, we’ve got the hereafter sorted.” And lives, whole societies and behaviour patterns revolve around this fear.
It’s true that where it all came from/where it is all going to is the great conundrum. To date nobody has satisfied me with an answer. Not the church. Not the concept of reincarnation. Not the big bang. Not parallel universes or ‘brane theory. Nothing gets to the bottom of “How it all started”.
I think Einstein was on to something when he conceived of the idea that time was not linear. But Albert stopped short. He had a few curiously provincial ideas about him for a man with a great imagination. The “steady state “ universe for one. How can someone who embraces an abstract nature of time simply refuse to believe in a dynamic cosmos? Maybe it was his belief in god that caused the contradiction.
So I have come to believe that our understanding of eternity, creation, infinity are all beyond our abilities, due in fact, to our inability to fully understand the nature of time. I also think that this understanding will not come about until our finite existence has been dealt with.. When our frame of reference changes to one closer to the truth of nature. More on that another time.
Our ability to perceive time, I believe, is a direct result of our daily perception of events. We perceive time in this fashion as a linear sequence. A.E understood that it was not perfectly linear; that it could change speed, but what he failed to comprehend was that it does not exist in a line at all. It merely appears that way due to the restricted frame of reference that we hold.
Imagine a fish that spends its life swimming against the current of the river in which it lives. Now imagine how that fish could ever comprehend an ocean.
Imagine a two dimensional being living on the surface of a sphere.
Now imagine a being constrained by the perception of linear event sequences trying to comprehend a perpetually rotating flow.
To me, the nature of time must in some dimensional way be circular. I think the reincarnationists intuitively know this, and try to express it in their somewhat childish beliefs. Certain religious ideas that, say, subscribe to a higher power that we will never really understand suggest an implicit notion of our limitations. Faith. That belief in something we cannot prove, becomes the currency. These concepts demonstrate to me man’s attempts at articulating that for which he has no words. Of conceptualizing outside his frame of reference. In this, he elicits a common need for support because true belief is beyond the individual, and we must attempt to make up for it with the voice of our neighbours. The concept of worship comes to life. Physicists, failing to understand the fundamental flaw in their ability to observe, create cosmological constants, dark matter, deep space neutrinos and a host of other flimsy, band-aid fixes for their theories. The big bang theory has so many theoretical particles, energies, types of matter that have not been discovered (but exist in the minds of the theorists, simply because they must or their theory is bankrupt) that it has become a sad joke of science.
A circular time flow removes the need to explain a beginning and an end to all things but due to our view of daily life is inconceivable to us. Perhaps that is why aesthetes and sages pondering these great questions exist in solitude. There are minimal distractions and routine.
This question; "What is the nature of time?" really came to light at the beginning of the 20^th century and formed our perspective. It, along with the great array of creative movements demonstrated by the modernists, set the tone for the first decade; when anything was possible, man learned to fly, matter was understood as energy, and philosophical thought blossomed in the Autumn salons of Paris.
The Timekeeper’s Waltz, then, opens the “Beautiful Accident” CD as this idea sits at the chronological head of things.
You can hear it on:



http://www.jango.com/
http://www.reverbnation.com/
http://www.itunes.com/