As I were a shepherd on a lemon sea..and then the dream shifted.
I had a vision. In that state I saw myself lying, a dragon atop my Eggs of Memory. I saw suns, stars and moons. I grew beyond. I saw the universe expanding, slowly, consistently. And I saw that for all its change, it was a single entity. It was a moment of revelation. Time appears to move but remains still. It expands but just is. It is mobile and immobile congruently.
Then I awoke and moved to the window, beyond the diaphanous veils that kept the mosquitoes at bay. I moved to a place where the stars circled slowly around me, where I was One and Many. I simply was. And I gave thanks. I looked out across the vast limitless space at the dunes which remained silently mobile/immobile before me and I began to understand.
I began to gain a new awareness of Time.
I saw the stars in eternal movement. I saw them progressing to fulfilment and decay. I saw them born flowering, reaching their peak then fading to oblivion, to be replaced by new ones. Energy in motion. Birth and Death. The Cosmic Cycle. The Great Wheel to which the Buddhists refer, a cycle which has repeated itself since time immemorial, in an endlessly-flowing sequence which had repeated itself countless times and would continue to do so.
Linear time. Measurable, to a degree, but apparently finite for all of that.
And then I saw the river.
My earth journey began to make sense.
River hydraulics tells us the that rates of flow within a river are different. At the bottom of the river , the water flows much more slowly than at the surface. Thus, what happens at the surface occurs much more quickly. In a sense, what flows on the surface passes by a certain point much more quickly than at the bottom, which may take infinitely longer. Take a cross-section across a river. Time moves much more rapidly at the surface than at the bottom. While a slice of water may take a certain time to arrive at the same point when it is on the bottom, it arrives much more quickly if it is travelling at the surface.
And as I stared across the darkness at the orange dunes, 30 km away in the distance, I began to understand. In the vast incomprehensible space which was the Sossus area of Namibia, a truth began to make itself known.
Time has multiple meanings which are both complementary and congruent.
Then I heard an important fact.
While the dunes move on the surface, their bases never shift. As we perceive them. The tips shift and twist as the wind torments them ,and listen to any idea which blows through or by them. They are creatures of atmospheric impulse. They run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.
Fickle. Driven.
The bases do not move. According to scientists, they remain static, motionless, immobile. Passive.
But of course they do not. They have their own rhythm, their own sense of Time. They move , as all living things do, at their own pace and in their own way.
And I returned to the river. And to Time. And began to absorb the lesson out there before me in the dunes.
I was a creature on the surface. A pooh stick. Cast by the hands of fate onto a flowing stream, I swirled, uncertain, at the mercy of the Winds of Time, of Cause and Effect. A swirl, a brief ripple, present for a short time then gone, returned to the river. My time scale was no absolute but rather something relative. As a floating object my perception of Time was coloured by my sensory experience. I judged Time through the glass of my own illusion and experience and gave it the false status of an absolute.
As I stood among the dunes, as I scooped up the red sand, the warm red skin of the land and allowed the afternoon wind to brush it silkily from my hands, to take back this small piece of Mother Earth, I realised that the land and I were both made from the same basic building blocks, formed by the same energy. We were the same, only different. We were both subject to the same laws of Time and space.
We were both part of the river, both of it and governed by it. I, a mote on the surface , passing quickly and then gone, the dunes nearer the bottom of the river, moving in a slower current, but with an allotted span nevertheless. And Mother Earth herself, even closer to the riverbed, but not quite there, not quite of it. All of us together, one body, different parts.
And then I saw the River herself in her entirety and radiance. For all her apparent movement, in fact she exists in a single moment, in a Now which does not move. For all the apparent sense of time passing, Time does not in fact pass anywhere.
It just IS.
All the nows we observe exist simultaneously and congruently. Time is a single unchanging NOW. There may be currents within the river, but they are contained within it. Everything dwells within a single, unchanging present.
And I turned my face back to the dunes, with their duality of light and shadow, lifted my face to the warmth of the sun, and gave thanks.
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