EXTERNAL AND INHERENT TIME

[Summary of a talk given by Jan Cox on 11/04/1988] 

Only humans have a sense of time external to themselves.  Lower animals and all rhythmic inorganic matter have a sense of time that is inherent—based on rhythm and inseparable from its own physical being.  Man experiences a gap, a lag between what he thinks and what he does; between planning and action.  The whole 3-d world is based on and would collapse without time.  At a lower level men have an inherent, non-verbal sense of time but it is overridden by the intellectual sense of time.  There is no division between “in-here” and “out-there” except in Life’s need to have men perceive such a gap.  Time is a party to this perceived gap, but it’s never seen as such; never seen as external, though always acted upon as if independent and external in all human activity.  The non-verbal, inherent sense of time is felt as “you”.  It is a rhythm based in the genes and it can be out of synch with the intellectual sense of time, giving rise to felt-emotions of foreboding, feeling “out of sorts” etc.  To understand the conflict between these two senses of time relieves a Neural Revolutionist of much confusion suffered by the ordinary.

 

When anything makes “perfect sense” it can then move to a new level (can, not will), where it then makes no sense whatever.  This is why nobody can agree on “the truth”—it seems to change.  A new idea is at first, to everybody, nonsense.  The unknown always sounds at first like untruth; it must be in conflict with the already believed (i.e., what makes perfect sense) to be new at all.  The new idea is a force that acts to deform the status quo of the nervous system, within the degree allowed by the limits of its elasticity.  Eventually however, it must “snapback” to its original shape.  The elasticity of the intellect is the potential for people to change or else they would not even believe in change.  The elastic limits must be very narrow however or one’s field of expertise will not make perfect sense.  The expert who radically shifts to conflicting beliefs is not taken seriously anymore.

 

It is almost impossible to learn, feel or do anything new in ordinary life.  If it were possible then everybody would learn something, shift to a new level and then know nothing again.  Life cannot grow on such terms.  When the elasticity of a body has been exceeded it is useless then to its former level.  In the case of the intellect it is insanity; to the Neural Revolutionist it is relief and possibility.

 

Although believed to the contrary by the ordinary, it is impossible to learn from your mistakes.  The importance of this for the Neural Revolutionist: he must be able to learn not only from his mistakes but from everyone else’s as well.  There is not enough time in one lifetime for all possible human mistakes to flow through you.