Coiling Time
Whether time is a circle, a sphere, or a 4D tesseract, it’s about using whatever reference points we can to stretch our conscious perspectives open as far as possible
“There is no linear evolution; there is only circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later everything points towards the centre.”
— C. Jung
While the idea of circularized time has been around for longer than we could actually imagine, its trend as a modern philosophical concept tends to buoy around quite a bit.
Especially of late, the whole ‘time is a circle’ bit has gained some overdue traction in mainstream spheres.
A few years ago, I myself began deconstructing my perception of time — delinearizing it as much as possible to try and deviate from the social and cultural constructs that ensnare our understanding of how we tend to move through reality.
While riding the waves of Eastern philosophy and Western idealism, I began considering everything to move not from point A to point Z, but from point A to A.
Cyclicality — nothing new in the grand scheme of philosophical thought.
And I’m far from being the only one to try and express this concept via linguistics, which itself is only one limited way by which we could try to understand (or contributed to a shared understanding) of how we actually move through time.
In other words, it‘s one thing to say that time is circular, but to actually express the reality of the situation, subjectively and objectively, existentially and empirically, is a far steeper hill to climb — one that forces us to venture outside the capabilities of language and beyond the parameters of daily consciousness.
Nevertheless, we all seem to be instinctively onto something more as we continuously seem to want to deviate from the traditional 2D approach to perceiving time — at least in a modern context.
Below are some initial observations from my experience with delinearizing time. They’re not worth much, if anything, but they so far seem to be self-sustaining, having withstood a few short and subjective years’ worth of intensive conscious application.
I. History
Through a fundamental delinearization of time, we deepen our connection to history, appreciating it as an ongoing dialogue and valuing the lessons of yesterday all the more.
Whether personal or shared, our histories function as our bearing for any subsequent maneuvers we undertake and, often, the biggest mistake we seem to make is to overlook or disregard them.
We should essentially regard all data points as timeless — something that happened 2500 years ago could be just as useful and critical to our modern contexts — no event should be regarded as an isolated occurrence of the past.
Together with the present, we can use history to triangulate our future movements with much greater accuracy.
We thus undo (or minimize) the modern arrogance that we’ve assumed via our social and cultural progression, culminating in a narrow perspective and looking on past generations as inferior, or the past itself as finite; we can instead see that they’ve shaped our present in ways that we can’t even calculate.
All the dots, together, form a bigger, vastly more significant, picture.
II. Evolution
Our evolution has only been made possible because of our ability to navigate consciously through time — we learn from the mistakes of yesterday, apply the cumulative knowledge gained over eons, and orient ourselves towards our ambitions of the future, all to situate ourselves optimally in the present.
Our ability to recollect, analyze, and imagine has allowed us to leverage past, present and future in ways that categorically fuel our continued evolution.
On a shared basis, it wouldn’t take much to see how this unfolds from a biological, paleolithic or anthropological angle. Deconstructing our perspective of time, collectively, can help us to strengthen our shared identity, especially when consider ourselves a species that has evolved together, endured together, and prospered together.
Current (and ever-present) cultural divisions aside, the human saga unites us in more ways through time than we generally appreciate, and every positive footnote in our story is wholly necessary for the continued evolution of whatever it is that we are / we are part of.
On a personal level, however, things are a bit more obscure given our tendency to remain zoomed in close per our subjective positioning.
Skill building, learning, physical or psychological development — we can succeed more consistently if we leverage the future as an open resource rather than treating it like an imminent deadline, and if we realize that the past can do more for us if it remains an active element of our present.
If we employ a time-depleting perspective, our focus becomes short term and immediate — we rush our development seeking instantaneous results.
If we employ a long-term focus, investing in a future outcome that doesn’t yield results until well after tomorrow, we can better cultivate the fruits of our ambitions. We’re then rewarded with quality over quantity as we use time to our benefit.
Time is, ultimately, the means by which we can measure our evolution; it’s the tool that propagates our progress and the force by which we can infuse meaning into every winding turn along the way.
III. Creativity
Non-linear problem solving is one of the most effective ways by which we could improve a multitude of cognitive functions from memory to multi-tasking, not only on a short term basis but also in a more permanent sense.
New findings regarding neuroplasticity confirm that our neuronal pathways are capable of much more than we generally assume them to be, and instigating the more complex, stretched-perspective neuronal excitations goes a long way to immeasurably improving our cognitive capacity.
By embracing non-linear problem-solving methodology as a default modality, we can habitually develop our potential to idealize innovative solutions, breaking free from traditional problem-solving dynamics.
We can navigate more effectively along a greater horizon of possibilities, integrating all future-oriented potentiality, accounting for the vast interconnectivity of relevant reference points.
Our ability to prospect opportunity, to anticipate outcome, to decipher possibility as we better understand the cycles and evolutions around us; our perspective not fixed towards one particular point in time (future nor present nor past) but focused on all of them at once.
The world around us doesn’t restrict itself to our cognitive and perceptive limitations — and we shouldn’t assume that it does.
IV. Reverence
Through reverence, we can expand on our conscious perspective in ways that we simply can’t do via mechanisms of intellect.
This is why Eastern philosophies or religious ideologies are typically so poignant on this front — on the concept of appreciative and disciplined existence.
When we examine certain parts of the natural world — celestial processions, geological formations, subatomic fluctuations — we continuously learn that a holistic perspective is critical to understanding them.
Time is no different.
Understanding the cycles at play — from seasons to sagas — cultivates a kind of unwavering awe that sustains the innate drive we operate with.
When we realize that we are history repeating itself ad infinitum, that we’re a unique but nonetheless common reiteration along an endless chain of sequencing, we can appreciate the process of change all the more.
Our admiration for our position relative to the surrounding chaos of reality, from socio-economic instability to ecological unpredictability to cosmological uncertainty — the fact that we can even come together as a self-conscious assembly of matter to perceive it all is something to be enthralled by.
Language itself can’t describe the relative privilege of our existence.
V. Meaning
Taken together, history, evolution, creativity, and reverence all cumulatively catalyze into the one thing we seem to search for incessantly: meaning.
In less dramatic words, delinearizing our perspective of time makes our existence exponentially more meaningful.
Everything means more, either because it’s part of a greater pattern at play or because we ourselves realize that there’s no end to a process we can never decipher.
Actions of yesterday mean more — what we did or didn’t do years ago, what our ancestors did or didn’t do, what our planet or host star did or didn’t do.
Breaking down the cultural perceptions that have grown over our default mode networks of thought, like a tangled vine over intuition, allows our interaction with the natural state of reality to become more direct.
With regards to time, specifically, we’re enabled to interact with it more directly — the way we’re meant to, affording us to extract whatever kind of meaning we want, need or seek.
Ultimately, it’s not about whether the idealization of non-linear time is more or less correct than any other.
Whether time is a circle, a sphere, or a 4D tesseract, it’s about using whatever reference points we can to stretch our conscious perspectives open as far as possible — because its from this flexibility that revelations, via direct experience, begin to emerge.
This is all about widening the perceptions that, in my experience, increasingly reveal themselves to be stunted by the social and cultural constructs and the artificial baggage around us.
If we could break through the insulated patchwork of these constructs, we could form a more direct experience with our reality, not only with respect to time but to the entirety of the enigmatic whole as we know it.
