Could time be circular? Is the linear notion of time the right one? Many indigenous cultures seemed to have some notion of a circular or at least highly rhythmical time pattern, in ways that may be hard for our Western minds to fathom.
Apparently the strict idea of a linear time began with Jewish scholars, and of course since the ‘scientific’ paradigm has set in we are all led to believe time is very much a straight line. Apart from the sci-fi films where it can get a little jumpy at times.
Yet anyone who has an even passing interest in Einstein will know that he and all the other modern physicists believe time isn’t very straight. It’s intimately connected with space – wrapped up together as spacetime. It doesn’t behave like a normal straightforward clock. It can speed up or slow down depending on how fast you are moving, and it can quite possibly move backwards. In fact I think they’ve even observed this in the Haldron Accelerator thingo. For a little example, my friend Ruben tells me in a black hole that they kind of swap roles – time becomes space and space time. I’ll have to get him to explain that again some day.
Anyway, I often think back to a childhood experience… As a high school student walking up the big hill to our house at the end of a day, lugging all the text books which I hadn’t read. I’d gaze longingly at the top of the hill and wish I could be magically transported up the top. As I plodded along thinking this thought, I’d inevitably find that my dream had come true – I was suddenly at the top, the bottom now a distant memory. I had somehow warped time, or at least made it a little jumpy in my mind.
When I think back now, I realise in some way I am still at the bottom of the hill, looking up longingly to the top. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean I am actually there. I am also in my death bed, looking back at the life I have lived. I am also peering out from the cot at the blurry colourful world in front of me. It’s happening simultaneously, in the past, in the future, in an inevitable, circular way.
I’ve read other stuff about time being circular based on seasons, years, days, life-cycles… But I think there is something more universal than that. My human mind can only glimpse at it.