Timeless Vagaries
Yangon, Myanmar, February 14th, 2016
Salaroche

(This is a traslated copy of an email I sent on Thusday, February 11th)

Friends:

I hope that a good degree of satisfaction in your work and a healthy degree of good humor in your life are always within your reach on a daily basis. After all, as Jean-Paul Sartre used to say, "Happiness doesn’t reside in doing what you want, but in wanting what you do."

Just sending you some small reflections that yours truly wrote last night and edited this afternoon regarding the relativity that is innate in many of the things around us, which is often known to excite curiosity in some of us, not because of the variety of perspectives it entails, but for the repercussions involved.

Examples of relativity abound on this planet, including the usual question of happiness as a mood or mental or emotional state whose source does not always appear to be the same in the different people.

That which in some people can produce happiness, in others it may only produce indifference or even contempt. For example, for a football (soccer) fan possessing very limited financial means, getting a front-row seat for the World Cup finals would be cause for a rejoicing unsurpassed, while for many others it would mean absolutely nothing.

But the fact that happiness may be indeed relative does not mean it cannot be experienced by each and every one of us. And since it is a universal feeling, it is worth inquiring a bit about the source of its origin. For example, if happiness is an effect caused in different people for different reasons, would not its relativity reside only on the surface? 

Obviously the feeling of happiness is only one, even if its intensity can be experienced in different degrees by the different people, meaning that what makes it relative would only be the causes that generate it. Consequently, if happiness is like a nectar poured over our mental and psychological states by pressing the button of personal causes that generate it, could there exist an internal button that generates the same effect regardless of any external cause? If such a button existed it would make the relativity in happiness disappear into the realm of illusion, no?

In this world there are in the present and there have been in the past people who claim to have found that inner button, but for the rest of humankind relativity seems to apply to a whole host of concepts, situations and perceptions, even when speaking of things of everyday smallness. Among the latter the first to draw attention would be the question of time.

It is also very well known that when someone is happy or engaged in matters of their interest or pleasure, time seems to “fly" fast, whereas when one is bored or busy with unpleasant matters time progresses at a very slowly and often irritating pace. It is possible, then, for time to be the number one exemplar of the concept of relativity. Without going too far, an email I sent yesterday from the country of Myanmar, Southeast Asia, to some friends in El Salvador, Central America, could be a good example of how relative time can be. 

Let’s just consider that at the precise moment that the email was sent, I was at a point in space that its recipients in El Salvador would reach only twelve and a half hours later, which is already hinting at the inseparability of time and space. We could basically say, then, that the email in question was sent to them from the future and that the email traveled through time to get to them in the past.

Similarly, very early in the morning of Wednesday I held a telephone conversation with a software engineer from San Diego, California, which also broke the barriers of time in a consistent manner for half an hour. I called him at two-thirty in the morning on Wednesday and he answered me at two o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday. This means that our conversation technically inflicted a crack in the fabric of time and our voices travelled from the future to the past and vice versa for a whole half hour.

Of course, those small two cases are only microscopic samples of how relative time can be, but through them we may take a glimpse at how, from a global perspective, time could easily be regarded as non-existent. Under this light, any global event happens at the same instant across the length and width of the planet simultaneously, which, by extrapolation, would allow us to say that the same thing happens throughout the infinite expansion of the universe.

Consequently, then, it is permissible to imagine that in this plane of existence the universe is constantly living in a perpetual “now” where maybe the concept of time could be reduced to a construct developed by ourselves for our own convenience (or maybe not) 

Whatever the case, the relativity of time is a factor with implications that go far beyond the effects it may cause upon our perception of things, including our perception of time itself.

Along those lines, some scientists in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope have lately been floating the theory that Hubble is indeed a time machine in the style of the machine described in the novels of H. G. Wells. 

According to that theory, when Hubble captures the light of a star located billions of light years away from our planet, what it really is perceiving is not the star itself, but the state in which that star existed at one point in space situated billions of years before, meaning that Hubble is indeed perceiving the past.

Meanwhile, who knows what could have happened to that star during the time it took for its light to reach Hubble’s lens. It may have actually ceased to shine and, in the cosmic “now”, it may have even ceased to exist.

But it really doesn’t matter, as, since that time conflict exists only within the parameters of space, it all still turns out to be, just like the concept of time, something entirely relative. In fact, and always within the reality of the universal “now”, the star in question and our corner of the universe have always existed in the past, currently exist in the present, and will exist forever in the future in a manner permanently simultaneous regardless of their evolutionary state.

And it is through the Hubble example that the concept of space is revealed in all its relevance as the indispensable counterpart of time, thus clearly making of these two parameters the masters of all capacity of perception that the human mind may ever possess to attain any knowledge of the reality that surrounds it.

And since these two master parameters continue to reign over our minds imposing a number of limits over it in an almost dictatorial way, it is simply consequential that in freeing the mind from that yoke of perception the result be a direct acquisition of awareness of a state of being where time and space shine by their absence.

That is to say that in stripping the reality we perceive of their temporal and spatial garments, the resulting nudity of consciousness would be nothing other than the fundamental primary perpetual substrate upon which is projected all possibility of expression and at the same time is itself the inexhaustible source from which emanates all possibility of existence.

It is also quite possible that the statements presented in the previous paragraph be perceived as sheer hyperbole by some readers, but how else could anyone describe any state of consciousness that resides outside of time and space? How could anyone describe anything of such magnitude when none of the living languages ​​has the right vocabulary to express it? And how could any language have developed such vocabulary when the generalized force of time and space constantly imposes limits on the mind’s capabilities of conception to the point of rendering it almost useless in this regard?

Ultimately, however, and as it is evidenced in our bodies, the traces that time leaves on the flora and fauna of this world are entirely undeniable. As much as time may be relative, its march through this existence is clearly inexorable. All generations of living beings are born, develop, flourish, decay and disappear constantly over time. And whatever the level of relativity the latter may have, the result is always the same: the existential cycle will repeat itself ad infinitum until the cosmic flow and ebb that initially generated it is extinguished.

But in truth there is no problem because all relativity exists only within the parameters of time and space. Once our true identity is stripped of these quasi-dictatorial limitations it has the opportunity to enter forever into a universal state of being where happiness self-generates itself for eternity and where our own consciousness is the fundamental consciousness of everything that is, has ever been, and will ever be. 

And so we find ourselves faced again with the question of hyperbole but, how else could anyone express the above concepts if not with words that sound like hyperbole? Especially since, by definition, in this world there is no single language that may allow us to describe the indescribable.

When the individual being becomes aware of itself beyond relativity, that is, outside of time and space, it finds itself in a state of being entirely devoid of any characteristics. And that state of being does not possess any particular characteristics because it possesses them all, hence the inexistence of any vocabulary that may allow us to define it with sufficient specificity.

In short, looking momentarily to the relativity of things leads some of us to also consider the antithesis of all this, which is generally conceived as the absolute, that is, the unity of the whole, which also happens to be the center from which emanates the multiplicity of forms that we have come to call "reality." 

Anyway, all these things are but part of a small conglomerate of issues that in a daily and incessant manner keep bouncing between the temples of some of our heads.

Meanwhile, the ship sails on.

May you be well and see you soon.

Salaroche