Why Clocks Don’t Keep Time & How “God” is Timeless
A call to humanity
The desire to be “scientific” has corrupted the names we have for experiential concepts. People conflate realness with quantifiability and reducibility. They sacrifice their humanity to artificiality at the altar of a false god called Scientific Accuracy. “Sound” no longer primarily represents experiences of hearing, but numbers on an abstract dimension measured by lifeless instruments. Unforgivable violence has been done to “color.” According to The Accurate, color becomes more real as it becomes more impossible to experience. Blue isn’t the murk of a stormy ocean or the sky’s infinity, but a statistically identified range on an abstract “color spectrum.” The same people who fret about AI takeovers gaily suck the blood out of life by conceptualizing human experience in the mechanistic language of robots. There is no better example of this destruction than the tragedy of “time.”
Consider the following:
I hear the familiar creak of the kitchen floorboard and burrow deeper into the entryway closet in terror. It’s quiet now, but the intruder can’t be more than a few feet away. I take a deep breath and close my eyes in the silent blackness. Time stands still. An eternity goes by before I hear a crash in the bedroom.
We speak of time “freezing,” “coming to a halt,” “standing still,” etc. Why? Because true time is life’s movement. Time/life only moves when things are happening and “things happening” is a phrase for the sequential inhabitation of distinct thoughts. Time stands still when we are one (one thought). Time freezes for the narrator in the passage because she is intently focused on one possibility, one thought, namely that the intruder would find her. Time doesn’t move until the experience of hearing the crash disrupts the heretofore singular stream of perception-thought, thereby altering the possibility of that possibility in her mind. Attention re-directs, a new thought is thought, time unfreezes.
This is the time we experience. We are human beings, not hands on a watch. Life is not lived at one consistent pace until death. Who lives that way? Robots! No! Living that way is death! Wake up! Life is ups and downs, twists and turns. It is traffic’s forever boredom, fun’s fleeting bliss, a crushing breakup’s perpetual hell, the blur of a nerve wracking speech, the spiral of a good song. Asking a clock to describe the flow of time within the moments in life vanquishes life itself. The abolition of man is the sacrifice of blood to bloodlessness.
Only when “time” is reclaimed by humans can “timelessness” be understood. Even many supposedly religious people worship Scientific Accuracy. They are often worse than The Accurate for they are unaware of their profound duplicity. They’re so seduced by the false god that they can’t find it in themselves to care that their holy books were written over a thousand years before the Scientific Revolution and the invention of mechanical clocks. They take the word of the modern people they claim threaten the sanctity of their enterprise and contextualize “time” scientifically. They read about God’s timelessness with a perspective that’s bound to miss everything and congratulate themselves for their “faith.” When science-obsessed atheists and so-called believers can debate about “God” and understand each other, “God” has already been murdered.
Timelessness is the loss of the awareness of life’s movement. We exit time’s flow when we sleep, lose ourselves in communal activities, become engrossed in difficult yet interesting tasks, do certain drugs, achieve mindlessness through the practice of meditation, prayer, intense exercise, or the like, and die. God’s timelessness is a certain way of losing (and regaining) awareness throughout life for “God” is a way of living. Which way that is depends on what you mean when you say “God,” on what thoughts your use of the term “God” inspires in you.
Your time is your life. Choose your “God” and abide.
Wake up everyone, it's not too late
To save the remnants of our hearts
So stop giving up
Our last shot at love, our only chance to find the meaning of
The beat beneath the blood
We laugh at honor and are shocked when we find knives in our backs
We follow those who cheat and steal
Look in my eyes, you won't find your way back
Our only compass smashed under our own heels, under our iron will
The abolition of man is within the reach of science
But are we so far gone that we'll try it?
— Thrice, “The Abolition of Man”