i love this so much
to us, time is a shallow horizonal stream flowing out from the past, through the present, into the future. we are increasingly obsessed with its increasing acceleration of movement. the clock ticks ever faster. every tick converts a segment of the distant future into the present, yet this present is swept so swiflty into the past the we have no present left to experience in its fullness.
this conception of time as a flowing horizontal stream, an unwinding scroll or ribbon, accounts for our fascination with the past -- with histories and biographies. we are no less obsessed with the portion of the segments -- into programs, schedules, budgets. "i have no time!" this is the despairing cry of Twentieth Century man, panicky with unrest.
we are a people without a sense of the present.
now let us look at indian time. benjamin whorf, in his profound analysis of the Hopi language, calls it a "timeless language." it has no three-tense system like our own. it contains no imaginary plurals like a period of ten days. hopi time always has zero dimensions; it cannot be given a number greater than one. the hopi language thus avoids the artificiality of expressing time by linear relation, as units in a row.
hopi time, then, is a true psychological time. "for if we inspect consciousness we find no past, present, future; everything is in consciousness, and everything in consciousness is, and is together." hence indian time is not a motion. it is a duration. a constant anticipation and preparation that becomes realization. a sense of ever becoming within a pool of immovable time.
this conception of time as a flowing horizontal stream, an unwinding scroll or ribbon, accounts for our fascination with the past -- with histories and biographies. we are no less obsessed with the portion of the segments -- into programs, schedules, budgets. "i have no time!" this is the despairing cry of Twentieth Century man, panicky with unrest.
we are a people without a sense of the present.
now let us look at indian time. benjamin whorf, in his profound analysis of the Hopi language, calls it a "timeless language." it has no three-tense system like our own. it contains no imaginary plurals like a period of ten days. hopi time always has zero dimensions; it cannot be given a number greater than one. the hopi language thus avoids the artificiality of expressing time by linear relation, as units in a row.
hopi time, then, is a true psychological time. "for if we inspect consciousness we find no past, present, future; everything is in consciousness, and everything in consciousness is, and is together." hence indian time is not a motion. it is a duration. a constant anticipation and preparation that becomes realization. a sense of ever becoming within a pool of immovable time.