Time and Technology: The Fourth Dimension

2010 is soon upon us, another year in the Gregorian calendar – our way of making sense of “passing time”.

But what is time and how is our perception of it changing with the influence of the technology flooding our experiences?

The realization that the nature of time and thereby the definition of time, varies depending on the structure of consciousness that is consulted, is fascinating.

According to Jean Gebser there are the following dimensions of time:

0-dimensional archaic pretemporality

1-dimensional magical timelessness

2-dimensional mythical natural temporicity

3-dimensional mental-rational abstract linear time

4-dimensional integral time-freedom or achronicity.

It is this fourth dimension of achronicity that I would like to address in this post.

I have been actively involved on this website for just over a year now and also joined Twitter in July.

This use of technology to communicate and interact has had a profound effect on my experience of time.  In the beginning, when I saw a certain name pop up on my screen, my mind would begin with some mental arithmetic and the table I have created for myself would come into play.  This table consists of time zones as they relate to Pretoria and which I have now memorized:  New York: -7; Minneapolis: -8; Boulder: -9; San Francisco: -10; Dubai: +2, Bangkok: +5, etc.

More and more however I no longer have to do these sums.  Depending upon when I go online I more or less know who I might find “there”.

Winter/summer time and my pending move to Dubai obviously necessitate changes to this table and my mental arithmetic has to come into play again for a while.

Increasingly, however, time of day or night is no longer an obstacle to communication. 

Recently I heard the story of a guy who had an online interview via Skype for a pending job opportunity in another country.  After the interview was completed the interviewer said to him: “I have realized that it is actually the middle of the night for you now.  You must have had to get up and put on your suit especially for the interview”.  “Actually, only on the top half of me”, he replied, standing up and revealing his pyjama pants!

Time for me is disappearing as it were, making me realize more and more that it is only a construct of our minds.  Its existence is not ontological but epistemic.  Its necessity as a divisor is changing as technology provides the means to link us across time zones and locations.

The lower-right quadrant is the single largest determinant of the upper-left mode of consciousness.  Information and communication technology is making possible more and more moments of kairos, more moments of synchronicity.

Kronos, the son of Uranus and Gaia, and thus a child of heaven and earth, might have prevailed in third dimensional, perspectival time, but now it is Kairos, the god of the “fleeting moment” who is beginning to be noticed.

And just as Kronos , transcended and included the mythical structure with its circular directionality, so too Kairos will transcend and include linear time which was oriented towards the past and the future.

In this fourth dimension, time is taken as an object of awareness.  Time is no longer binding.  Consciousness can now access collective wisdom, the wisdom of universal consciousness. 

Consciousness becomes aperspectival.  At times it does feel like a madness, as one realizes that all perspectives are relative, but on the whole it is enlightening.

In this dimension, we return to 0-dimensionality while maintaining full consciousness.  Experienced is a differentiated, integrated and conscious wholeness rather than an undifferentiated, unconscious fusion.  3-dimensionality still retains its validity but its exclusivity is lost.  It is the “place” where creativity comes to the fore.

Tarthang Tulku speaks of the Great Space which does not have a temporal dimension but which is the source of inspiration and spontaneity.  There is no longer a going and no separate places.  It is the place of “at home” where one is intimately united to the All.

Welcome home!