A Sideways Look At Time by Jay Griffiths
A smart, witty, and colorful in-depth conversation about the meaning and influence of time on humans from a cultural, anthropological, and sociological perspective. This book coincides nicely with Joseph Campbell’s work on myth and mythology, Bryan Key’s work on subliminal advertising and the power of language, Carl Jung’s work on the collective unconscious (in the social implications of a western imposed universal/global time on the human psyche), and many other works relating to time, time travel, culture, the collective un/conscious, globalization, agenda setting (calendar making/clock synchronization), and nature.
Griffiths proposes that the time, or western imposed universal time, is masculine, mechanical, linear, chronological (from the Greek god Chronos, rather than their other god of timing - Kairos, the god of chance, mischance,and opportunity), unnatural, and reinforcing of pageantry (and to some degree authoritarianism), rather than cyclical, feminine, wild, natural, biological, or tied to the universal energies that are the true dictators of time. I agree with most of what Griffiths discusses, however I find her view to be rather cynical and a bit bias in its disregard for the masculine vision of cyclic time (which she fails to explain at all - think business cycles, heart rhythms, creative destruction, daily routines and patterns, reincarnation, etc.). Griffiths most important point is her description of time as a power source. She says that by controlling time, the powers that be can influence not only our day-to-day lives, but whole generations of lives. This is important for understanding how information can be used to frame the long-term agenda on massive scales by creating the illusion that humans have control over their own space and time, essentially replacing pure free will with a sort of unconscious force-fed determinism, that is largely unnecessary and possibly unhealthy for the species as a whole. |
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The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time by Fred Alan Wolf
Wolf writes as a physicist explaining not only the connections between science and spirituality, but also of time and its relation to probability and possibilities. This work is significant for understanding the collective conscious and the collective imagination. Wolf shows how the relationships between knowledge, memories, probability,and future potential outcomes are interrelated and vital to the observation of actual events. He shows that the conscious mind can be made ‘aware’ of information (possibility waves) that can have significant influences (when added and squared or squared and added with other possibility waves that occur during awareness – see chapter 8) on the probabilities (probability curve) of the occurrence of certain future outcomes.
In sum, Wolf’s work can be used to demonstrate how information effects the probability that certain future outcomes will occur. This in turn can be used to show how the collective conscious can be steered toward the inevitability of certain future outcomes by the loading or weighing of information that increases the probability certain future events will occur. This of course also affects the collective imagination which creates new possibility waves and new future outcomes. Wolf’s work may also be useful for understanding how to measure the collective impact certain types of information may or may not have on any given population sample. The impact that is to be measured is the actual occurrence of events in a sample population that are both directly and indirectly influenced by the collective actions of the media. |
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