What Would You Save?

Something posted by a friend on Facebook sparked a train of thought about the concept of "saving".

Like many words in English, "save" can be used in several ways.  Most of them boil down to "to preserve" or "to rescue" — and some imply a little of both.  When we use a bank for our savings, it preserves the money we've earned and, if things get tight, it can rescue us from economic disaster.  Used as a noun, a "save" in sports either preserves the team's lead or rescues them from losing a point, etc.  At its root, I believe the word "save" implies "resistance to change" and it's this I'd like to explore a little.  To quote the recently departed comic writer Larry Gelbart, "I need to write to find out what I'm thinking" — so what follows may surprise me as much as it does you.

There is a fairly new theory in physics which states that time does not exist (see "Killing Time" video above).  This means that physics is just beginning to catch up with ancient Hindu philosophy which tells us that time is an illusion (Maya) perpetrated on us by our minds.  The illusion of time allows us to make sense of the world around us by putting the one quality of our universe that does exist into more-or-less linear order.  That quality is "change".

In Western culture, we've come to take the notion of time for granted.  We are certain that time is real because after all, in most places you can hardly turn around without seeing a clock or calendar.  This is actually a fairly new thing for humans.  The earliest timepiece that we know of was the sundial and that's only about 5,000 years old.  Long while you think?  Humans have been around for a lot longer than that — arguably between 250,000 and 400,000 years.  So, for most of our existence, we concerned ourselves, not with the passage of time, but the with the changes in the world around us.

Judging by anthropological studies of the few primitive cultures that have survived into the modern world, our ancient ancestors had a profoundly different concept of time from ours.   They saw the cycles of day and night, of the moon and of the seasons as turning wheels rather than a narrow line joining past to future.  They saw that everything changes continually but that each wheel inevitably comes around to the same spot again.  Ancient astronomers extended this concept to include the movement of the planets and created calendars to describe larger and larger cycles — 180 years, 3,600 years 26,000 years.  Eventually humans sought to capture the concept of smaller and smaller cycles as well.  Days were divided into hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds.  Today we have parsed time into divisions as fine as "attoseconds" (10 to the minus 18 or .000000000000000001 seconds) with 100 attoseconds currently being the shortest measured span of time.

During the long process of defining time, the primacy of the cycle slipped away and was replaced by the concept of intervals.  We are awake for an interval of 16 hours and asleep (if we're lucky) for eight, the commute to work takes 45 minutes, the coffee is ready in five minutes.  We may note the changes but they are not at the center of our awareness.  If fact, rather than watching the changes in the world, we seek to hold them back as they come rushing at us.  We try to preserve them until we can deal with them, beg to be rescued from the difficult ones, or seek some kind of salvation so that we never have to deal with change again.  This, then, is the crux of my question: in the blur of life's changes, what should be saved and what should be allowed to slip away?

 —

At the bottom of the screen is a little blue button that says "Save Now".  If I click it — or even just wait a few seconds, it'll change to say "Saved".  It's a small thing but within this sphere of changes that I (somewhat) control, it provides a bit of comfort.

All the best,

Mark

Oh, what was in that post that started all of this?  You'll find it here: Stabbing Westward - Save Yourself

A Time of Change

With nights dipping to the 50's and the shadows closing in at half past seven, I'm inclined to think that changes are afoot.  This time of year makes me a little wistful.  Being a child of the summer, I've always felt that the world was most right when the Solar Lion was roaring in the land.  True, Mid-Atlantic summers can be beastly, but man! the woods and fields are so lush and abundant and a cold beer at the end of the day can be a gift from the Gods.  Still, change comes and I'd be foolish not to acknowledge it.

In the world of Western Magick there is a principle known as, "as above, so below", credited to the semi-mythical figure, Hermes Trismegistus (contained in something called the "Emerald Tablet").  This is most often expressed: "as above, so below, but after a different fashion", and taken to mean that any principle that we can observe in the physical world has its echos in both broader and narrower realms -- though it might require some pondering to see exactly how they correlate.  Thus, the yearly cycle of seasons is reflected in the longer cycle of climate, in the longer still turning of the Zodiacal ages and also in the smaller cycles of day/night, full/dark moon.  Some quality of "ebb" or lack is present in all cycles and some quality of "flow" or fullness is present at the opposite extreme.  These cycles have their resonances in the more subtle realms of spirit but I'll leave that discussion for another time.

No matter where we are in life, it's possible to look up for a moment and see the larger picture.  Imagine that you are walking down a city street and chance to look off to one side at some precise instant. You see a blade of grass aligned with a sapling aligned with a phone pole aligned with a water tower aligned with a sky scraper aligned with a mile-high column of clouds.  Beyond this is perhaps a constellation aligned with the spiral arm of the Milky Way and who knows what in larger and larger scales.  And it need not even be something directly observed.  We might be reading a book or watching something on TV when we encounter a kernel of information that aligns our understanding of some small thing with the larger principle it represents.  Sometimes these insights are so profound that we remember them years later and know that our life changed at that moment.

Change is occurring around and within us continually.  That things will change is one of the few truths we can depend on utterly -- nothing, truly nothing lasts forever.  Even still, there seem to be long periods of relative changeless-ness interspersed with great bursts of tumultuous change.  It is during those times of noticeable change that it's of greatest value to look around us and see how the changes in the microcosm of our lives is reflected in the world around us.  When the seasons are changing, we can pause and say, "What is changing in the broader world, and what is changing in me?"  We might even ask, "Since change is going on all around me, do I need to change as well?"

I draw the blanket closer around me and the cat snuggles in behind my legs.  Perhaps tomorrow evening we'll put the first fire of the season in the wood stove.  I know that my days of outdoor grilling are numbered but I see that a nice butternut squash came with this week's bundle of vegetables so pretty soon I'll be thinking about soup.  Maybe change isn't so bad after all.

Blessings to you,

Mark

For a great illustration of "as above, so below", watch this wonderful video, "Powers of Ten", created by Charles and Ray Eames.