Cycling towards Oblivion

In this cyclic world that we live in, we cycle ever closer to breaking through the barriers that bind us.

Time is measured in both cyclic means and linear means, though we tend to accept time as ultimately linear. The Mayans had several means of tracking time, and our means mirror them in several aspects. We have our linear year, and yet we recycle months and days. Every year we experience January, February, and all the other months over and over. I've experienced 33 Januaries, 19968 Mondays, 139776 3pms. The most glaring difference is that we view our long count as being linear whereas the Mayans recognized it as cyclic. And it is cyclic, whether we realize it yet or not.

We have a perception problem...which indeed is one we are meant to have. We are so grounded and rooted in the small spheres in which we live, that it is very difficult to extend our vision upwards and outwards, to understand just how big everything else is when compared to ourselves. Those who travel the world, who fly, and the priviledged few who've traveled to space, they have glimpsed something the rest of us can't see. They have seen their homes look small, they've seen the earth look small, they've been places so alien to our normal understanding that it boggles the mind.

Propinquity - it refers to nearness and in demographical terms it refers to spending most of your life close to where you were born. Somewhere around half of Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace. This means that as a whole, we are not used to being outside the sphere we grew up in. Some of us have never left it, even to travel.

Our perception, is extremely limited to small distances and short time frames, and we really have no way of knowing if our "long count" is cyclic or if it stretches on into eternity because we have nothing to be considered believable evidence.

We have the words of peoples of the past, but we cannot be certain we've translated them correctly and thusfar we have accepted their beliefs to be myths rather than fact. We have the knowledge that the planets cycle, the suns movement through the zodiac cycles, even that the sun's own "life" cycles. We suspect that most things in the universe spin or cycle in some way,

Yet we still think of time as linear.


In my next post I'll get into what I meant by that first sentence.