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November 11, 2016

Can We Escape from Time?

aathe-persistence-of-memory-1931.jpg

When it comes to the philosophy, and indeed the physics, it goes without saying that it’s fascinating to see brilliant minds “taking up residence in Grand Hotel Abyss” (to borrow George Lukacs’s crack about Theodor Adorno).
What would be good, though, would be for someone to call us back when the thinking leads to something, anything, that we can see or feel or sense or even understand—because all this astonishingly brilliant thought and science and learning and history, all these amazing stories, as far as I can tell, have no consequences at all. Our commonsense subjective understanding of time is as telling, as tyrannical, as it ever was. A century-plus of fervent speculation and analysis of time and time travel have led to exactly no outcomes. We are as stuck in the present, as irrevocably exiled from both past and future, as ever. | by John Lanchester | The New York Review of Books

Posted by gerardvanderleun at November 11, 2016 10:01 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

Time? It doesn't exist. There is only now. What we call the past is what some one wrote as 'history' and is true only as for their perception.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at November 12, 2016 10:13 AM

Intellectobabble and gobbledygook are the old abnormal and the current kookiness, because we now have no time for aught else.
Omar had it right, `Yesterday, this day`s madness did prepare ...`

Posted by: Howard Nelson at November 12, 2016 2:49 PM

On the other paw:

"Q:... You also use the terms mahadakash, chidakash and paramakash. How are they related to person, witness, and the absolute?
Maharaj: Mahadakash is nature, the ocean of existence, the physical space with all that can be contacted through the senses. Chidakash is the expanse of awareness, the mental space of time, perception and cognition. Paramakash is the timeless and spaceless reality, mindless, undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source and origin, the substance and the essence, both matter and consciousness -- yet beyond both. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space, the prime cause in every chain of causation."

H/t Nisargadatta Maharaj, `I Am That`
and so are we all.

Posted by: howard nelson at November 12, 2016 3:44 PM

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