In yesterday’s DM, we invoked Mayan scientist José Argüelles, who factors us to the facility of creativity, artwork and synchronicity that follows on surrendering the Western Gregorian Time Calendar.
The Mayan sense of Time contains the cycles of the totally different life types, the rotation of the seasons, the oceanic instances, and the waxing and waning of the moon, the solar with its binary sunspot cycles, the varied planets of their orbits, the celebrities, constellations, and galaxies all type one common synchronization of innumerable celestial our bodies sure collectively by a standard order in time, the synchronic order.
The Mayan Legislation of Time maintains every thing in synchronous relation to every thing….This moment-to second synchronicity is sort of a focalized telepathic thought beam radiating immediately in each course sooner than the pace of sunshine. Thought “is of the identical instantaneous nature as time—sooner than the pace of sunshine.”*
As a non secular theologian, I discover José Argüelles’ pondering on a brand new (and extra historic) understanding of time important. First, it reminds us that pre-modern mystics like Hildegard, Francis, Aquinas, Eckhart, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich and Nicolas of Cusa all lived earlier than mechanistic time dominated.
Their view of time was not rigidly mechanistic as Pope Gregory rendered it in 1582. “Two units set up the unreal time: the Gregorian calendar and the mechanical clock.” Each have been “firmly in place because the bedrock of the European worldview” by 1618. This notion of time retains the noosphere within the unconscious, subjected to a worth system that emphasizes financial energy (time is cash), particular person self-interest, aggressive battle, conflict, nationalism, and the pursuit of novelty and capricious whims (video video games, higher iPhones, and so forth). And one may add, billionaires who present such devices after which purchase politicians with their earnings.
Secondly, by naming synchronization as central to the time of noosphere, Argüelles is emphasizing the vital position of mysticism. Our deep, unitive and mystical experiences happen in a synchronistic sense of time. If it’s true that we’re all mystics, then with synchronism arriving extra totally, a mystical or unitive view of the universe is at hand on a big scale.
Thirdly, as Argüelles makes express, to maneuver past mechanistic time is to problem capitalism. For in fashionable, capitalistic instances we’re taught very early that “time means cash.” However for Arguelles, the brand new shift is that this: “Time means artwork.”
Implications are profound for schooling, faith, politics, economics, artwork, group constructing and a rise of pleasure and happiness. And for the artwork of arts—ritual. “With out ritual there isn’t a group” teaches indigenous African ritualist, Malidoma Somé.
Argüelles is pointing to an explosion of formality or ceremony within the coming period of the Noosphere. The Cosmic Mass is primed and able to go for that second.
Allow us to make extra artwork and fewer cash.
Years in the past, after I was instructing in Australia, an aboriginal girl mentioned to me: “In our tradition, we work 4 hours a day and the remainder of the day we make issues.” “What issues do you make?” I requested. “Ritual,” she mentioned. “We beautify our our bodies to be as lovely because the snakes and birds we stay with. We observe music, instruct the kids and put together the feast that follows.”
Is that this not the brand new work for the longer term? In ritual we have a good time our widespread pleasure and gratitude; our silence and customary grief; our creativity, communion and consuming collectively; our bringing within the ancestors to help us in turning into non secular warriors prepared for the laborious work of justice and transformation.
bell hooks wrote that the following revolution will likely be a revolution in aesthetics. Shifting from “time means cash” to “time means artwork” appears to be integral to that non-violent revolution.
*Jose Arguelles, Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Subsequent Stage within the Evolution of Human Consciousness, pp.55f., 66.
“The Cosmic Mass: Reinventing Worship and Faith,” in Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Submit-Denominational Priest, pp. 363-383.
Banner picture: “Stone model of the Maya 260 calendar on the Smithsonian. Picture by Matthew Bisanz. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What does shifting from “Time means cash” to “Time means artwork” imply to you? And what wouldn’t it imply to our tradition and our survival as a species? And to different species as effectively?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Ardour For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Knowledge for Laborious Instances
Order of the Sacred Earth:An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion, by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug
Creativity: The place the Divine and the Human Meet
The A.W.E. Mission: Reinventing Schooling, Reinventing the Human
