“Every Kairos is a Chronos, but not every Chronos is a Kairos.”
Hippocrates
Minds happen in time, always in the middle of life. Minds become consciously aware in a long and arduous process in time, in Chronos, registering the duration of their existence.
Minds also liberate, at times, sometimes, at specific times, times called moments, or Kairos.
Minds, your mind for example, my mind for example, process time differently.
Minds carry different memories, and so different futures, and so contain different moments of significance. That is the root of diversity and multiplicity of perspectives.
All true, all real, all different, all same.
All experience.
Experience is a composite. A coagulation in time, a freeze frame in the flow, experience happens within Chronos. But the value of experience, the very meaning experience implies happens in one particular and highly specific moment, in Kairos.
And as Hippocrates already knew every Kairos is a Chronos (for every moment happens in time) but not every Chronos is a Kairos (because not every ‘time’ is a moment of experience of value). In other words, Chronos happens all the ‘time’ but Kairos very rarely. The opportunity if so, is everywhere but not everywhere is an opening.
Sounds obscure? Maybe superficially so, but not really. It is quite simple to understand.
Kairos is timing. Perfect timing. Kairos is thus the moment when a decision is being actually made. The opening into new paths of possibilities. Hence the supreme importance of Kairos. The actual opportunity of creating value.
Kairos was king long before carpe diem was a thing.
It should be obvious by now that just like the ancient Pythagoreans I firmly believe that Kairos is a universal principle of the Mind, and if so of the mind.
Experience is a composite.
Not a single reality, nor a simple reality, experience is a composite of interactions between layers. One of these layers we call I (the agent), another layer we call That (the world- all that which is-‘perceived’- as not I). There are other layers that we can describe but these are irrelevant if we do not first wrap our minds around the first two.
Experience grows by increased interaction between an agent and the world in which said agent is embedded.
Increased interaction happens when the level of subtle perception increases. Perception in turn increase when the level of description of said interaction refines.
Refinement of descriptions is the very bed rock from which principles of knowledge arise.
To initiate an understanding process, we must per necessity originate a point of beginning for the same process. A beginning in turn, is an arbitrary point of origination that we intuit has the potential to create value.
We are as a species endowed with this amazing mechanism of storytelling, a sub system of our conscious aware position in the world.
As such, the myth creation activity of the mind is that which gives value to life. (about the mechanism of storytelling and so the myth creating apparatus of our minds I shall write separately).
As strange as it may sound, the myth creating activity of our minds, exposes us to the ‘real’ — the other/s, and that in itself makes us simultaneously vulnerable and paradoxically humanly unbreakable.
“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
Kurt Vonnegut
There are some who would tell us that time is an illusion and Chronos does not exist. There are others, and they are legion, pinpointing the idea of the present as the foundation of existence. Others yet will insist on the cyclic nature of time, whilst others still defend the idea of linear time, seeing Chronos as performing a continuous ballet towards entropy.
For my part, I take Chronos as a background, more like a prop to my conscious aware sensation of existence. I take time to be a particular description, a turbulence in the flow of life.
Sometimes, time is slow, sometimes, time flies, sometimes it feels static, unmoving. That is the great mystery of time, that it gives itself to a number of interpretations as large as the number of possible interpreters.
The times of experience however are different. Times that give value are not part and parcel of Chronos but islands in the flow, localized events of meaning.
That is where Kairos comes in, defining a particular moment in time as ‘out of time’; as a moment of meaning creation, a moment of value.
Kairos, I understand as the weaving of the many forces of the mind into a collapse of potentialities and so diminishing infinity into a finite path, which in the next moment opens again into eternity. The Kairos moment, which we may as well call the moment of commitment, changes everything. For it propagates like a wave within the field of Chronos. And so, in a very strange way, Kairos, the moment is when it all happens, the Big Bang of conscious awareness. Kairos changes the future and the past and thus if one is lucky enough to be ready, a course of liberation initiates.
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
…
A note: It is obvious that I have taken Kairos, originally from the field of rhetoric to mean something different (but maybe not so different) than the usage the original Greeks intended. But then again that is the prerogative of a thinking being.
Thank you for reading
