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Time as Infolding


"The notion of time may be
 unfolded into an independent
 pure science... a science of
 pure time is possible..."

Sir W.R. Hamilton, 1837

 

This Section on Time is dedicated to the late Charles Muses

These diagrams of the 5-dimensional nature of Time are from his wonderful Foreword to Jerome Rothstein's
"Communication, Organization and Science"


 

Chronotopology


Charles Muses
(courtesy Thinking Allowed Productions)

Dr. Charles Muses -- a mathematician, philosopher, and computer scientist who died in 2000 -- was author of Destiny and Control in Human Systems and The Lion Path. Muses has developed an approach to astrology couched in the language of systems theory. In a Thinking Allowed interview, he described the theoretical principles underlying the methodology he has come to refer to as chronotopology -- i.e., studying the structure of time. One has a sense from this discussion that contemporary astrology is, perhaps, a decadent form of what was once a philosophically well-grounded and noble pursuit:


MUSES: The hypothesis of chronotopology is that whether you have pointers of any kind -- ionospheric disturbances or planetary orbits -- independently of those pointers, time itself has a flux, a wave motion.

MISHLOVE: In quantum physics there's this notion that the underlying basis for the physical universe are probability waves -- nonphysical, nonmaterial waves -- underlying everything.

MUSES: These waves are standing waves. Actually the wave-particle so-called paradox is not that bad, when you consider that a particle is a wave packet, a packet of standing waves. That's why an electron can go through a plate and leave wavelike things. Actually our bodies are like fountains. The fountain has a shape only because it's being renewed every minute, and our bodies are being renewed. So we are standing waves; we are no exception.

Time is the master control. I will give you an illustration of that. If you take a moment of time, this moment cuts through the entire physical universe as we're talking. It holds all of space in itself. But one point of space doesn't hold all of time. In other words, time is much bigger than space.

A line of time is then an occurrence, and a wave of time is a recurrence. And then if you get out from the circle of time, which Nietzsche saw, the eternal recurrence -- if you break that, as we know we do, we develop, and then we're on a helix, because we come around but it's a little different each time.

MISHLOVE: Well, now you're beginning to introduce the notion of symbols -- point, line, wave, helix, and so on.

MUSES: Yes, the dimensions of time.

MISHLOVE: Symbols themselves -- words, pictures -- point to the deeper structure of things, including the deeper structure of time. I gather that you are suggesting the mind is part of a nonphysical, mathematically definable reality that can interface and interact with physical reality, and in which physical reality is embedded.

MUSES: There can be some things which are physically effective which are not physical. I can give you an illustration, a very recondite one, but there is the zero-point energy of the vacuum. The vacuum is defined in quantum physics as space devoid of radiation or matter -- no energy, no matter. Yet there is an inherent energy in there which can be measured -- this is one of the great triumphs of modern physics -- and that is physically effective.

MISHLOVE: The energy of a pure vacuum. 

MUSES: Yes. Yet it obviously is not a pure vacuum. The so-called savage would say to us, "The room is empty, and the wind is a magic spirit." We know it is air. So we are like the savage in saying that the vacuum is empty. There is something there.

Muses, in effect, has been echoing the ancient claim of the Primordial Tradition that there is a fundamental unity between the universal mind and the cosmos itself -- including the unfolding of time. The structure of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm is expressed in mathematical, scientific and mythological symbols. It is the intuitive grasp of these symbols which is ultimately the goal of astrology. 

Such a system must always be larger and more enduring than any rational attempt to understand or contain it. If this perspective of astrology is correct, I would predict that rationalists will forever shun astrology's pseudoscientific face. And, ironically, astrology and other "superstitions" will persist because the yearning human soul never be content with rational materialism.

Excerpted from http://www.williamjames.com/Folklore/ASTROLOG.htm