The Soup of Time

The imperceptible flow of time sunders and cleaves around us as we rotate on the axis of consciousness in the torrent of passing ages, yet it leaves us scarred with the marks of detritus made in human flesh. Past, present, and the future lay on the same ruler of existence, omnidirectional and equal, the great equalizer of humans. And still, we torture ourselves with base vanities of looks and aesthetics, trying to uphold the image of ourselves that we have created to appease the expectations of others. Even the most self-conscious and self-aware are victims of the internal conflict of inability to deal with and acknowledge the implacability of the passage of time. It renders us into cosmic saw-dust while we try to do our best to act unscathed physically and mentally by it. We play the mummer, firstly for ourselves then for others. It is a sad dance of deceit and conceit. We are all in the loop, yet we chose to believe the great lie, that everything is as it seems, the blind tripping the blind and pretending it is not happening.

However, this error is maybe a life-saving feature in the evolutionary development of humans. If we were at all times aware of the passage of time, would we be able to do anything with it, or would we sit down in despair with the meaninglessness of it all? When compared, what is the length of average human life with the age of the ever-expanding universe, but a pinprick in time? We act and play on the omphalos of chaotic gods, gods of time, mendacity and hypocrisy, with permission and knowledge given to us by ourselves. Though this may be a life-saving feature on the surface of our plane of existence, it is a leviathan hiding on the subconscious level. It is truly fascinating how many ways we can put ourselves on the rack, to break ourselves with nothing but bare and uncontrollable thoughts that permeate in the tar pit of darkness that precedes us.

This brume of darkness that envelopes us through our day to day existence descends upon us most strongly in the presence of others – when we have the strongest need to act and deceive, and it comes closest to lifting in our most solipsistic rites of meditation. We go through our lives in the penumbra of the passage of time. It looks death in the eye as an equal in the gallery of horrors that make us shudder.

Nevertheless, one should not try to parse and allocate time and try to become aware of every minute of one’s life because it would be entirely futile and quite undoubtedly painful to live like that. One should be diametrically opposed to that and embrace the passage of time and getting old and coming closer to death as days go by because we are all at the same time the time that is flowing and the flow itself, or to put it more sharply, in the words of Alan Watts, “You are the universe experiencing itself.”