Gotta Get Back In Time

Socrates’ famous remark, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”, is perhaps history’s most pithy commentary on the illusory nature of reality as it is lived. The magic that maintains the illusion, and the element which makes the illusion necessary, are one and the same. Sometimes dressed up as The Fourth Dimension, that which beguiles Socrates and all the rest of us hides in plain sight as the common coin of daily drudgery, time (see “time is money”).

Our collective complicity is necessary for the magic to work; we maintain the illusion by accepting the received wisdom that time marches ever forward in a linear fashion, and, even more importantly, that within this inevitable progression cause always and necessarily leads to effect. Cause and effect is the most fundamental given of our daily experience of reality, and as such shapes our encounter with time, thereby empowering time to delude us all into believing that reality is unassailably monolithic. To encounter reality instead as soft clay, one must first disenchant the spell cast by time, a spell that bewitches via the sorcery of cause and effect.

Time’s power, its ability to pen us into the present moment with its attendant horrors and without hope of escape, rests in our programmed experience of the present as impenetrably remote from the past, and untouched by a not-yet-existent future. In our belief in a bright line which separates past from present we are like a racehorse wearing blinders; seeing only that present moment right before us ,we rush forward, blind to the big picture that is our true reality. This big picture is captured best by William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” To that I would only add that the future is not even future.

What Faulkner understood, and what we like to ignore through our purchase of time’s snake oil, is that the past is right here in the room with us in the present. Psychoanalysis is nothing other than a system of healing founded on this, time’s dirty little secret. Those psychotherapists who insist upon attending exclusively to the here and now are trafficking primarily in illusion, as whatever help they offer leaves the patient still stranded on an island that does not exist. Psychoanalysis stakes its claim that speaking in the present is giving voice to the past. Everything we do and say in the “here and now” is always a reckoning with everything that has come before; the present moment is nothing other than an improvised encounter with the past. This is all well and good for as far as it takes us, but where Faulkner and Freud’s past leaves off we are still haunted by cause and effect. With a nod to Dickens, enter the Ghost of Christmas Future.

To repeat, the future is not even future. The radical step necessary to demystify the nature of time is the acknowledgment that “cause and effect” is joined by its equal partner in the realm of causality, “effect and cause”. Conditioned to believe that an effect can only follow a cause in the sequence of time, what we traditionally refer to as “cause and effect”, we have repressed our knowledge of the truth that effect can and does occur in the sequence of time prior to its cause, a phenomenon we might simply label “effect and cause”. Amidst our repression we give voice to our intuitive insight into “effect and cause” with that everyday cliché, “everything happens for a reason.” This cliché, commonly used as a verbal crutch when, as so often happens, there is a void in the place where we go to find meaning, is actually a trace of deep folk wisdom. This is the knowledge that if the reason or cause for an event cannot be found in the past, that the void is not an absence of meaning, but a sign pointing to the future genesis of that meaning, i.e. the cause of the effect is yet to come.

A popular Taoist legend, copied here from www.webtapestries.com, hints at the presence of the future in the “here and now”:

‘A chinese farmer's neighbors came over to offer him their sympathy after his horse ran away. "I'm not so sure it's a misfortune", said the farmer. The neighbors left, shaking their heads.
The next day, the farmer's horse returned, and three wild horses came home with him. The neighbors returned to congratulate the farmer on his good fortune. "I'm not certain that it is good fortune", replied the farmer. The neighbors left, more bemused than before.
Later that week, the farmer's son broke his leg trying to train one of the new horses, and the neighbors came by to offer condolences. "I'm not sure this is a misfortune", said the farmer again. The neighbors left, discussing the man's mental state among themselves.
The next day, the emperor came through, gathering up young men to be in his army. They bypassed the farmer's son, since he had a broken leg.’

The traditional interpretation of this legend is rather straightforward: since we can not see the future, we are unable to determine what is blessing and what is curse, so let us instead live detached from our mind’s storylines, peaceful and awake in the moment. Seen from another angle, however, the legend is subversive to the reification of the concept of cause and effect, clearing space for a liberating relationship with time. Understood thusly, the legend is an exemplar of a chain of “effect and cause”, with the horse’s escape “caused” by a temporally subsequent “effect”, the return of the horse with three additional wild horses. Continuing the chain, the return of the four horses is “caused” by the “effect” of the son’s broken leg, and, finally, the son’s broken leg is “caused” by the “effect” of the conscripting emperor.

With the radical move of establishing the reality of “effect and cause” accomplished, our understanding of the interplay of past, present, and future can be fine tuned. It is an oversimplification to oppose “cause and effect” against “effect and cause”, as if only one element, past or future, comes to bear on the present. It goes without saying that some degree of “cause and effect” will always be in play in the present; in the legend above it would be foolish to deny that a series of events, perhaps the farmer’s son having left the farm’s gate open, has played a role in the outcome of the horse’s departure from the farm. However, in every present moment “effect and cause” partners with “cause and effect” to shape the possible experiences of the present moment. In this example, the horse’s subsequent return with three additional horses is equal to the postulated left-open gate as a causative force in the horse’s escape. To be crystal clear, the events that occurred after the horse’s escape were just as important in causing the escape as the events that occurred prior to the escape. “Cause and effect” works in tandem with “effect and cause”, equal partners in crafting the potential present. The old saying “that horse has already left the barn”, commonly used to express the irretrievable quality of the past, may also be understood to say the future is now.

We may discard our notion of time as a linear flow from past, to present, to future in which each moment is sacrosanct in its isolation, and in which each inviolable moment lays a stranded human monad. In its place we might think of time as a thread with three strands woven together such that encountering the thread at any site along its length we come into contact with all three strands: past, present, and future. This thread is both the abstract notion of time and a lived human life, unending as time itself. Lest this understanding of time threaten with the specter of hard determinism, rest assured that all which is created by the past and the future in crafting the present is but a stage for the creative improvisation of the now. We always act in relationship to the past and future, but our actions within the scope of this stage are free and unlimited. As for time travel, there is really nowhere to go. The boundless landscape of past and future are right here in the infinite present.