Time and History

At the confluence of continuity and discontinuity time emerges. Time is their merger, the cosmic vapor that their fusion releases.

Time is not an independent cosmic property but a psychological reality; not autonomous but generated b relation. Time is a mode of experiencing life: the mode where difference and change is considered as the primordial property, the very essence, of life.

Death and Eternity share a common point: they both annihilate time. (Therefore, Death is Eternity.)

History is the concept and the mechanism that renders time meaningful to human experience.

History negates the autonomy of the present, erodes the present, undermines the independence of the individual by bounding it with the chains of tradition, and crystallizes time.

Why every present neglects its own geniuses and acknowledges those of the past? Because the genius defies time by negating the historical necessity which molds current patterns of thinking and acting. Yet time validates, and persistence in time is seen as the criterion for greatness (as if greatness has to be deprived from a present). There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between "diachronic" and "everlasting" present.

History as a discipline indulges in illusion more than any other endeavor by taking as granted that it deals with reality. Do concepts like "period" or "style" have any relation to reality? History works with abstractions; that is, mental constructions, thereby sharing the same building materials with illusion.

History's role is certainly a political one: to "correct" the past, to use it as a tool for legitimizing the present (the case of how it was used by fascist and communist regimes alike is instructive). Even when History "restores" justice (a "neglected" genius) there are political overtones: History celebrates its importance and necessity. When History is persistently used to fuel separateness and hatred or to justify crimes, why should we allow ourselves indulging in the past?

History is the past coming from the front door in the daylight of consciousness, fully exposed, objective, and independent. By detaching the past from the present, History attempts to cleanse it from any suspicion of guilt and any shadow of uncertainty. History is the caring mother who appeases her children by assuring them that nobody will emerge from the thrilling darkness of the past to disturb them. In this way, History obscures instead of revealing the past by projecting it outside the experience of the present, by rationalizing it, by giving explanations for everything so that no dark corner can remain unscrutinized. History is the editor of the past, the filter that render it immune to the fatal radiation of the irrational, the unpredictable, the fathomless. Why do we avoid to recognize the truth that History is the most effective and powerful repression apparatus that the human civilisation has ever produced?

To change history one has to change the concept of time.

When Christ was asking people to desert their families and disperse their fortunes, he was preaching unhistoricity, negation of the past, of roots, of tradition. But he was also preaching emancipation from the anxiety of the future. "Abandon history and follow experience, the everlasting present" was Christ's message.

The challenge is to pass from the historic mode of existence -where the past, real or constructed, engulfs and struggles the present by imposing restrictions and historical necessities- to an unhistoric mode of experiencing life -where there is a everlasting present which absorbs the past into continuous action and anticipates the future integrating it in the present. An unhistorical present is the only realistic eternity.

The idea that the past is something different from the present is a pure abstraction. The present is a solidified, exhausted past. If present engulfs the past, then there is no reason to waste time on something which is already inherent in our present. Instead of having time arbitrating our lives, we can use it as a tool by regulating our lives according to the rhythm more suitable to us.

A monk and a stockbroker do not experience time in the same way because their lives follow different change frequency and patterns. We may use a simple example to understand how we can control time. Let us imagine the human being as a sphere. The more one focuses one's consciousness towards its surface the more intensively one experiences time (the eventful life of a businessman, a journalist, an adventurer). Inversely, the more one transfers one's consciousness towards the sphere's nucleus the less susceptible one is to time and change (the life of a monk or a thinker). Yet both the core and the surface are parts of the same sphere which behaves as a whole. Awareness of this mechanism will clear the way for us to transform time into a tool for controlling our lives.