WITHOUT MEANING, THERE’S NO END.
THE ENDING OF MEANING IS THE BEGINNING OF TIME;
THE END IS IN THE MEANING.
Studies suggest that sometime around five thousand years ago, man started to trace and document the passing of time. Sundials, or shadow clocks, were the choice of preference for ancient humans to track the passing of the sun over the earth’s horizon. Obelisks, which are monumental pieces of ancient engineering to track time, are believed to have existed since the year 2,000 BCE. To devise and actually construct these giants back then must have been, both physically and mentally, an arduous task. There certainly were smaller and lighter versions of shadow clocks before humans eventually set their minds to building the more ambitious monuments we see today in archeological evidence. One wonders, for how long before that have we been tracking time? Even more so, how long before the idea of tracking time could the concept of time itself have been born? Time as a physical constraint is not just an idea that was born from man at some point in history. Time gets as real as all limits get. However, if time is limitation, how can it be movement? A limit is actually the opposite to movement. Hence, where did we get in our heads the idea that we could measure time as movement?
Now, if it is not movement we are measuring, what is it that we are assessing? First of all, all measurement has to fit a framework. Point A and point B are always present in measurement. A beginning and an end are indeed the work of time, but this doesn’t mean there is movement. Let’s see how a calculation that implies movement behaves. Take speed, which is a simple concept implying both space and time, and let’s say we have a vehicle that is moving at 100km per hour. In the current understanding of time across all disciplines, most of us would agree, this vehicle is traveling a space of one hundred kilometers in a time span of one hour. However, what is being discussed here is the idea that since time is any limit, and space is all movement, the thing we are actually measuring is time, and only time. Let’s see how it works. In the previous example, we have four points of reference. We have:
Point A, which is the vehicle at kilometer X,
Point B, which is the vehicle at kilometer X + one hundred kilometers,
Point C, which is the sun in position Y,
Point D, which is the sun in the position of Y + sixty minutes.
As we can see in this visualization, to measure movement we are just using references. In it, static images of two objects, the vehicle and the sun, are creating a framework of relationships to which we assign a direction. It is a simple fact: there is no such thing as measurement of space or movement. Time as something that moves is a wrong perception.
The word “measurement” comes from the Greek root “metron,” which means “limited proportion.” The issue is that motion is not limited unless it is given a framework, and a framework is precisely a frozen proportion in time. Then, the dimensional properties, which are a series of relationships with a certain direction, must be a reflection of time too, not space. It is rather a stubbornness to be aware that space is no-thing, and still insist it constitutes height, length, and width. Whatever nothing is, it cannot possibly have any property because a property is the quality of something. Time, on the other hand, has been assigned a pattern.
We established a version of order in which, to secure continuity, we must move forward. In fact, the definition of the word continuity is to go onward uninterruptedly. What we need to internalize is that to continue is not just one particular version of the whole of perception, but a very clear limit to the direction of such version. To put it in perspective, let’s zoom in on the word continuity. We associate continuity with motion, but it seems to me that continuity is the opposite of motion. Whatever moves necessarily has to change, but that which changes can’t be what it was before. To continue is to multiply, which is to reproduce. To reproduce is a copy, and to copy is the attempt of the same. It is only if something stays the same – fundamentally – that it continues. Thus, to continue is to copy for the attempt to preserve what it already is. In this sense, motion is not continuous – nor interrupted. It simply is something entirely different.
Superficially, I understand that the idea of continuing is that if we keep moving forward, along with all other things, time will have a lesser effect on us. Thus, a sense of preservation is the result. However, a much deeper examination of the meaning of the word reveals what was really implied when it was first conceived. It seems as if continuity is really the pursuit of a parallel position to the movement of the relative things for which one wishes preservation, in reference to an end. Therefore, continuity itself is not movement, but the seeking of immutability in relationship to other aspects moving in a certain vector.
If that which seeks to continue achieves such a parallel position, and secures staying along with all other relative things, it will continue to exist as it is. This is mainly why to preserve history we must continue in a certain line, but as in the case of the word continuity, our history is the result of a specific version of time. History is the past, and it only finds its place in human utility by giving rise to a greater purpose. The only function of history is to create continuity. Nevertheless, as I just explained, continuity doesn’t really lead us everywhere since it is actually a limit. What one calls continuity now will be called history tomorrow because the pursuit to continue is to lead us towards an end anyway; that’s the ultimate goal of continuing, to reach an end, isn’t it?
Let’s look at the whole of time. A limit is any fixed point in space, but a limit is a limit because there is an observer. An observer sees a limit because he sees it in reference to another limit. Two references are the minimum prerequisite for time to be time. In the realm of human observation, the best of such references is a starting and finishing line. The issue we have, or the distortion, starts when we don’t see these limits in reference to other additional limits. Actually, this is where our sense of injustice comes from. Life is asymmetric; life is not justified in the middle of two margins. We don’t know when we really start, and we don’t know what death actually is. We call these unreferenced points in space “unknowns.” A fact is the limit of experience, and there is that fact in reference to many possible other facts that are still unknown to us. We tend to call the latter future. The whole process is simply called time.
The construction of reality wouldn’t be possible at all if time didn’t move backwards as well. Since space is able to move freely in and out of reality, it allows for time to move in and out too. From psychological introspection, it appears as if time going backwards is what makes all integration possible. Pretty much everything that adopts a form does so because of time’s capacity to relate limits. In physics, this action takes many names, from magnetism to gravity, or force in general. That is, limits form relationships, and in turn those relationships become additional structures of time.
Of course, when we say time goes backwards, we are not saying it is possible to rewind events as if reality was a movie. To think of time linearly is just an idea. Being more specific, “Past, Present, and Future” as a linear representation of existence is just an ideological construct to create order in our social structures. Time is the past, but as an act, it exists strictly in the present. The present is the parallel instant when all the probable outcomes of any given function are accomplished. The future is just an abstraction of those two. The immediate contradiction which arises is, if all abstractions are functions, and no function takes place outside the present, then the future only exists in the present. It comes to light; time is but an application to all other human inventions. See, just like Nationalism, Christianity, Hinduism, Capitalism, Communism, Existentialism, Nihilism, among others, time is merely an ideology. Thus, if time is the past acting through space in the present, what is really the future?
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