Time, Earth, and Humans

I attended a meeting at TNS on the Anthropocene on Friday and time was a concept that was played with a lot during it. Of course, the way humans experience time and the way our planet (and by extension, our solar system) experiences time are much different. Within the panel someone brought up that if Earth’s life were a 24 hour clock, modern humans had been here for about 1 second. The panel then debated on the nature of the rapidly changing climate in past years and how our ecological “Goldilocks” stage was an anomaly, not the norm. This made me wonder if any sustainability efforts are fruitless, as the Earth is already guaranteed to change it’s temperaments once more. I just wanted to take some time to look at the facets of time in relation to humans in the mean time, as well as some time-based concepts I find interesting.

Time is a human construct, made to gives us comfort and practicality. Much like Elizabeth Loftus’ false memories studies, we too can change the way we view time and the experiences that take place within it. Stephen King shows off this shift in perspective very well through a device in his books called “ka,” a spiritual element in a large number of King’s book. It can be guessed that his inspiration for ka can be loosely attributed to some Egyptian and Indian religions who believe that ka is a multi-part essence of the soul. King’s ka is a bit different as it represents fate and life-force. It’s actually described by Stephen King as “a wheel whose only purpose is to turn.” In this way, ka is fate, and in his books ka also works as time, and though it’s moving continuously, it isn’t always in the same way. A small example can be seen in his book 11/22/63, when a time traveler goes back and prevents President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, destroying the ka of the world and incurring several retaliations from fate. King actually incorporates ka and its importance in over fifteen of his books. Ka has the largest presence in his Dark Tower series where universes, worlds, and humans are continuously destroyed and created in a never-ending loop.

Ouroboros is another useful symbol for understanding time, as well as the inevitable creation and destruction it hosts. It first originated in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld in 14th century BC, though it’s unknown who exactly created the text. In the book it shows the powerful god Ra in the underworld uniting with the Nether God Osiris while both hold a snake which is in the process of eating itself (aka Ouroboros). The depiction represents the beginning and end of time as conscious beings know it. Plato critiqued the Egyptian development later in his writing, Timaeus, “the universe moved… this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created with no legs and without feet.” Despite having no limbs with which to defend itself, and no real way to walk, destiny rolled on and on. It is through Plato’s building of the character Timaeus that we see Plato’s convictions around time arise, that each being’s existence and destruction within time coalesce into a holistic completeness (or ka is maintained, in King’s words).

To see things through a more human lens, we can look to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his work regarding the Ouroboros. He saw the Oroborus as one of his own Jungian archetypes or an “innate, universal prototype for ideas.” In his book Man and His Symbols he addresses the Ouroboros as a primordial image, and one of great importance. “The Ouroboros,” Jung writes, “it has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process… a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious. Prima materia was very important to Jung as he believed it to be the matter that made up the original material of the multiverse, an idea formed by Aristotle. Though the matter is formless, it is omniscient, omnipresent, and unconscious. Jung makes it clear that the Ouroboros is merely a figurehead for the never-ending nature of existence. In essence, the Ouroboros and ka are the same thing, both circular symbols that never stop and always continue moving while holding the fate of the universe and those who inhabit it within their grasp. Ka and Ouroboros help us to see how this has been a mortal concern since 1400 BC, when in fact the nature in which we measure those years wasn’t created until nineteen hundred years later. We will always struggle with the magnitude and size of time, but the cyclical and repetitive nature of life can bring us comfort.