Rather Suspect

In 1949, philosopher Jean Gebser published the first edition of a profound work, The Ever-Present Origin. In this book Gebser proposes that, just like biological processes, consciousness has evolved (or, in his words, mutated) — and it continues to do so. Through a deep survey that cuts across the arts, science, painting, writing, archeology, and so much more, Gebser posits that consciousness has (and continues to) “gain dimensionality.” As consciousness mutates from the archaic, to the magical, to the mythical, to the mental, and (now) to the integral — consciousness is able to incorporate more information into itself.

So, for me this begs the question: what will it take for consciousness to deeply incorporate time into itself? Or — to put it in a simpler and more direct format — what does it take for us to deeply understand time?

Newton brilliantly added to humanity’s body of knowledge by engaging with the concept of the infinitesimal, while Einstein introduced the concept of relativity. Both greatly advanced our understanding of this slippery concept we call time — but today I’d like to propose that there may be a different way to explore this concept altogether.

What does it mean to “understand” time? Rather than focus on the concept of time in that question, let’s take a step back and look at a different word: understanding. We think of “understanding” as a concept based in knowledge — to “understand” something is to “perceive the meaning or intent” of it. And, when we deeply understand something, perhaps it is easy for us to make predictions about what will happen next. For example, if you hand a giant ice cream cone to a three-year-old who is holding the leash of a Golden Retriever, I think many of us can predict what’s going to happen next. We “understand” the situation pretty deeply.

But if we look at the word “understand” more fully and break it down, it shows itself to be quite limiting. To “understand” something is, presumably, to “stand under” it. Perhaps we can think of that word as us “constructing a platform” upon which we may place our new knowledge. If we’ve seen, on perhaps a few occasions, an over-zealous dog eat an ice cream out of a three-year-old’s hands, and then seen that same three-year-old burst into tears, we (internally) have that “platform” upon which we can interpret this scene when we next encounter it.

But look at these words I’m using to describe this incorporation of knowledge. “Stand under.” “Construct a platform.” “Place upon.” What do these words all have in common? They are all spatial words.

“Let’s dive more deeply into that idea.” “I get where you’re coming from.” “Let’s go ahead and connect the dots.” “We’re going to need to revisit that concept.” “Thanks for sharing that, I really need to take that in.”

The words and phrases we use to talk about knowledge are the exact same words we use to talk about space. These words suggest — perhaps — that our current mental framework is most comfortable “fitting” (again, another spatial word) new concepts into a spatial framework.

You might even be asking yourself as you read this. “Where do I put this new information?”

Clearly, not every knowledge-related word we use is spatial. But it does seem reasonable that there is a spectrum. Were I to draw an axis with words and phrases like “vague ideas” and “fuzzy thoughts” on the left side of the page, and “deep understanding” and “solid knowledge” on the right side of the page — I wonder if it’s likely that the more we “understand” something, the more spatial it becomes?

Which returns us to the concept of Time — and to Gebser. If we wish to “understand” Time, that means we must find a way to describe Time in terms of Space. This is exactly what Newton and Einstein did, of course, and thus these ideas felt like the “breakthroughs” they are. (Note the spatial nuance even of that word: breaking through.)

But one might ask the question: is Time something that can be understood, fully, inside a spatial construct?

To explore that, let’s jump to another metaphor for just a moment. Pretend there is a room with a security camera inside it (but no microphone), and you are a physicist sitting at a desk monitoring the screen showing what is transpiring in that room. In the morning, five painters enter the room with canvases, and you watch them create beautiful landscapes. At the noon hour, five gymnasts enter the room and put on an amazing floor routine. In the early evening, a set of bugle players enter the room and play Taps.

At the end of the day, someone asks you to describe what you saw. What would you say? Perhaps something like the following. “In the morning, five painters created some beautiful scenes. In the mid-day, five gymnasts performed some beautiful and athletic feats. And in the evening, five individuals came in, held a metal device to their mouths, and stood motionless for a minute before leaving the room.”

The point is: because your security camera does not pick up sound, the only way you can describe that scene is using the visual tools you have available to you. You are not wrong in your description — but you are fundamentally missing nearly everything that is going on in that room at the end of the day.

If our internal “knowledge” tools are overwhelmingly spatial — and it turns out that time is as well — then it is entirely appropriate to talk of “understanding” time. But what if time isn’t like space at all? What if, in the above metaphor, time is more like sound, more like music, more like Taps? Then our internal knowledge tools — not the tools we use to measure time, but to even think or talk about it — are insufficient to describe what’s going on.

Gebser called this level of consciousness the mental. We might also call that logical. But my question for today is, is this more accurately called, simply, spatial?

And if so — and if there are concepts that fundamentally are not spatial — then the idea of “understanding” something like time might not just be hard. It might be impossible. Because to do so is like trying to describe a set of bugle players using only a security camera.