We moderns struggle with a truly terrifying array of distractions and confusions that are propagated by our situation in language and culture. Though the ancients struggled with various differently terrifying matters of war and tyranny, slavery and religion (I speak here primarily of the city builders), our lot is truly bizarre in comparison due to their foundations in meaningless activities, relationships (especially with corporations and nations), that are profoundly dissociative.

Yet what I wish to highlight here is a fact we not merely overlook, but are actively incentivized to dismiss. While we are occupied with objects and endless empty representations of living, learning, being and discovery… near at hand, like water to fish, or air to flying creatures… we misconstrue the nature of our lives. They are not, as we are trained to believe, relations with objects, but rather »with time.

Let us together consider for a moment that all of our movement through space, our «travel… is not primarily a movement between or within objects, but rather in »time. And all of our activities are transformations of temporalities of which we are primarily unaware due to the strange gravity and compulsions emerging from our ideas about and relations with objects and places. Most of these places are artificial, and thus hide the nature of their temporal basis from our interior vision and awareness.

It is a trivial matter to notice that our technologies of »convenience are lethal to awareness and deep relation. In fact, their purpose is to skip over time, or transform it. The oven, the refrigerator, vehicles, the library, and the internet are all contrivances that fundmentally transform time. Most of them are purposed superficially to provide various apparent benefits. But beneath the surface we are undergoing a broad array of lethal dissociations… whose cost in the present and future is catastrophic and cruel.

If we resist the profound compulsions that arise in our modern language, thought and activity, we will »begin to remember… that time, not space, is fundamental to all organisms and intelligences. Only then may we recover the broad array of senses and intelligences that are natural to our minds and souls.

It is not what we do in »physical space that deeply matters, but rather how we transform, create and populate new forms of »time by selecting activities and even technologies with which we conduct our waking-world experience. Each form of activity or relation is a distinct mode of time. And it is here, not in space or object-relation, that we find not merely our origins and nature, but the actual possibilities of our minds.

Reflect on the nature of time-as-relation-with (and for), and it will immediately become apparent that organisms are to time as stars are to light… we encharacter local and distribute temporalities in ways our sciences have yet to even imagine, let alone explore.

If there are other nonhuman intelligences (and I claim not merely that there are, but that all organisms are thus), it is »time and light they fundamentally attend, relate with, understand and are sensitive to the transformations of. Not objects or machines. These are uninteresting because the actual nature of organismal reality escapes them entirely. »Actual travel is always in time and relation »first, and comparatively rarely in space. We moderns are trapped in a labyrinth of absurd expectations and misapprehensions about objects, money, representations of humanity, and space.

We have collectively failed to understand the findings of relativity and quantum physics because we are focused upon objects and utilitarian ‘machines’. Yet look closely, and discover that the whole construction of our ideas is focused on »prediction. This is is fundamentally about temporality. Our species never transported the revelations of physics to our thoughts about identity, meaning and relationships. We still think like Newtonians or even Aristotelians about matters so fundamental to our consciousness that … without correction … our minds and world suffocate in the resultant vacuum within and around us.

Our behaviors, and our machines, transform time. Machines, especially, create dead time (like our modern ‘knowlege’ creates forms that lack interiority and are uninhabitable), where, for nearly the entire history of life on earth and human intelligence… there were vast universes of »relation as temporality.

The crux of our existence is temporal and relational… not spacial and objectified… and it is here we will discover, one day, our actual origins, and the endless families of intelligences which are not merely the birthplaces of our minds… they are the ‘inner sun’ that lights our lives and hearts.