The Creation of Time
Time as illusion
Our idea of time is That, an idea, an illusion. Our concept of time is inextricably linked to the consciousness of ourselves and our way of ‘being’. Animals live outside time just because they have no consciousness of themselves, of their being as separate individuals, they just are and totally focused on their environment- now. Animals do not fear other than in acute danger, they freeze or they fly, some fight. In their normal state they do not suffer. Humans suffer because they carry the pain of the past and the fear of the future, their being lost in time. Moreover there is the terror of death, when will it strike, not only us, but our loved-ones as well; and where do we end up after death? Do we come back?
This is what the ‘rule of time’ does to us, it makes us think too much, incessantly so, and it lets us forget to live in the present. Time fills us with fears and follies, with beginnings and ends.
Time as rhythm
Time is not a physical dimension, like the dimensions of space which sustain continuity within the eternal dimension, where time is the un-foldment of the three dimensions, permanent creation. Time is based on our sense of change in basic rhythms, a rhythm-intuition which is basic to us all. We immediately hear when something (seriously) goes off-beat, that is an ingrained intuition, we hear the change, because the gap in between the beats has a definite form and flavour in our immediate memory and when the form changes un-harmoniously, the expected rhythm falters and the uniform harmony disappears, this is noticed instantly.
Time as change
With our sense of change and rhythm we can find rhythm and cyclical change in the transformations of nature around us and it is only by setting two of those rhythms against each other that we can develop a measure of time. It is of paramount importance we see the need of two cycles to get a measure of time, because we need a definite begin to start counting, a solid begin, and that can only be another natural cycle, with a unique natural rhythm, which forms the solid base to gauge against; our ‘now’ needs a reference to solidify, because when we say now, it is gone; nevertheless we can register our now moment by fixing it in universal rhythms of numbers in cycles, so to solidify the now moment we fix it in numbers, the event of ‘now’ is thus registered in our agenda (database).
Think of how much this happens in daily life. Out of the now and its continuing presence in space, time is created as a huge amount of dated ‘files’ by the ‘clock of time’, which we use to aid our memory and fix future events, we are not like those rare human beings that only need to see something, ‘whatever’, to never forget it again, we see to it that all are registered at the time of becoming what they are, that is, data. The day cycle is the basis of our number system and is gauged against the immediate heartbeat range, the second, always at hand to count the cycles in minutes and on, if need be. So time is the relative motion of two natural cycles. We still need the rhythm of the Cesium atom, to gauge our time intervals, our pieces of change.
Time as a cycle
Suppose we had only seconds, our heartbeats, how are we going to measure time, how do we synchronize our clock, and when? And how do we choose a ‘when’, ‘when’ there is no time yet and how are we going to count, anyway? From ‘one to infinity’? No, we would make cycles ourselves, to make sense of our counting. We need cycles to create time. When the day would have an erratic rhythm or no rhythm at all, we know it wouldn’t work, it would be chaos.
There is no sensible ‘when’ without another cycle to measure against, say, the day, our most fundamental cycle-rhythm. It is 6 o’clock in the morning or 6 in the evening. But how would we know it was always the same rhythm in duration without seconds, minutes and hours and the numbers that support them, without our own fabricated rhythm and cycles of change, the clock? The cesium clock is gauged against Hertz, which is cycles per second, at 9,192,631,770 Hz, so another cycle again
Time does not exist intrinsically, because without numbers and counting there arises no time (-frame), there is only duration, but duration is ‘being’ in the most fundamental sense, a ‘continuity’ enduring, surrounded by constant change. But is ‘being’, time? When you see that ‘being’ cannot properly be based in time, but is timelessly placed in eternal space, then the illusion of time may evaporate. Some mystics claim ‘Nothing changes’.
Music and math
As we have an intuition for rhythm, so do we have it for musical notes; we hear harmonies and dissonances, these can be traced back to resonance and interference patterns of the wave lengths the musical notes consist of.
It is important to note that we can objectively show that some notes don’t fit together, this is the mathematical part of music theory that may have first been discovered by Pythagoras, who analysed the phenomenon of resonance and how it related to whole numbers and their ratios within music and its tones. He was probably the first to develop mathematical music theory.
I quote : “”Although it is said that he himself was not a musician, Pythagoras is now generally credited with the discovery of the diatonic scale. Having first learned the divine theory of music from the priests of the various Mysteries into which he had been accepted, Pythagoras pondered for several years upon the laws governing consonance and dissonance””.
With this great Greek soul originates the harmony/music of the celestial spheres, a ‘harmony of heaven’, a deeply mystic cosmological concept, which Kepler, much later, thought of having revealed in a ‘geometry of the solar system’, with all kinds of mathematical volumes (Platonic solids), like crystals.
The mathematical model I propose here in these pages is also a geometry with cosmological scope, although this may not yet become clear at present; the mathematical model is also about natural numbers. The interplay of the first five prime numbers is in this proposed mathematical view the basis of all interaction of wave patterns, the ‘substance of reality’.
It was because of the interplay of whole numbers in music theory that Pythagoras claimed that: ‘all is number’, all the universe would be based on numerical harmonies. He might also have said ‘all is music’. This is the mystique of mathematics as a reflection of musical harmonies. Pythagoras was a mystic, like other ancient scientists and philosophers; he had a large following to which we owe more in Western philosophy and culture than is usually appreciated.
As far as the phenomenal world is concerned Pythagoras may have been quite right to reduce the actual phenomena to wave patterns, as in music, which are governed by resonances, which is a whole number ratio as harmony. Harmony and disharmony are always in play in life, but we know that by effort we can learn to play and live more harmoniously and with more confidence, that we can improve our overall condition and ‘performance’ by learning, learning to understand the natural rhythm of life.
Heartbeat
Our intimate sense of time, as we experience it, is partly based on the heartbeat. Not only do we know the heart’s rhythm intimately, we can also be very aware of its changes in rhythm.
The second, our smallest unit of time, is in my view based on the heartbeat of 60 beats in a minute. This may sound unlikely at first, because, after all, it would seem based on the 60-number system, but then, what other natural rhythm could they have found then the heartbeat, to begin with, and the great thing is that this sexigesimal number mathematics did indeed fit the cycle of the earth around its axis, respectively the sun around the earth, and that this was intimately related to the human heartbeat, which in turn then placed the bond between cosmology, and humankind, in a divine light. (This often happened with certain standards in measurement)
Just as they used bones to measure things, as they did later with the foot, the hand, the palm, finger, thumb (inch), you name it, all units based on the human body, always at hand and in intimate relation to the measure of mankind, the ultimate ‘measure of all things’.
The average heartbeat is around 70 per minute these days. Physically fit people though, like athletes, have a lower heartbeat in general, and I measured electronically 49 with a sturdy Orcadian fisherman, so it means that it was not necessarily someone with a heartbeat of 60 per minute they found the first time, but once it was clear that the numbers found were approximately compatible with the 60-number system, that would have been the decisive thing and it was a matter of finding the right person with the heartbeat of average 60 (or maybe they chose 66), which then could be practised by drummers, so that they knew it by heart. This could be checked now and then at the equinoxes. These rhythms then would have been applied to the rhythms of the big pendulums by adjusting their ‘rope’, which in their turn would gauge a star’s nightly traverse of their ‘windows on the universe’.
In principle any number between 60 and 72, which ever may come out as the final number in the Ring of Brodgar (when will we really ever know?), could constitute the number of seconds in a standard minute of 60 in an hour at the time.
However improbable it may sound, this way people could have had their own ‘wrist watch’, their pulse, say 70 in the ‘space’ of the minute, gauged against the official rhythm of the observatory at Maeshowe (the first GMT on the British Isles). It may have been worth a pilgrimage to Orkney to collect the measure of time from Maeshowe and bring it back to your observatory or community. The newly excavated spectacular site at the Ness of Brodgar, between Brodgar and Stenness, may have been a pilgrim’s centre, for the ‘Pilgrims of Time’, who, no doubt, would also come to wonder at Orkney’s natural marvels, as there are the Northern Light and the profusion of (double) rainbows and, let’s not forget, the relative closeness of Orkney to Ursus Major (Big Dipper) circling the pole star, which was spectacularly close to the Dipper’s centre star at that time; the pole star of Antiquity was: Thuran, Alpha Draconis.
I think that the entrance stone of Newgrange (right) and the similar stone found at Pierowall, island Westray in Orkney (left), both symbolize the Big Dipper with its seven stars circling the pole star Thuran. The pole star would be in the north direction of the straight line of the Newgrange Dipper stone.
We see the strong conceptual resemblance of the two huge stones. This pair forms the most decisive proof of the intimate cultural relationship between Orkney and the Boyne Valley in Ireland;
another big stone from the Orkney island Eday shows the same style.
Hyperborea and Atlantis
The exceptionally sophisticated Stone Age culture of Orkney and its extreme northerly position – it was considered near the edge of the world in Antiquity – make it the best candidate for the seminal myth of Hyperborea, the mythical island beyond the North winds, inhabited by immortals, and because Orkney shows all the signs of a drowned country after its Neolithic heyday, it is also, for the same reasons, an excellent candidate as the seed legend for the Atlantis myth, because of its exceptional sophistication.
The only two known stone circles and henges of Orkney, Brodgar (60-72 stones, over 100 m circle diameter) and Stenness (11-12 stones, with diameter exactly the same as the diameter of the outside perimeter of Stonehenge), within sight and hearing distance of each other, with the magnificent Maeshowe chamber not far from the Stenness stones and aligned with the important emerging centre on the Ness of Brodgar in between the stone circles – all at the practically same latitude as the huge chamber of Quanterness some 6 miles due east, with the hillside chambers of Cuween and Wideford nearby -this whole megalithic setting may be seen in the light of an epochal accomplishment by Stone Age man:
‘the Creation of Time’.
This Neolithic landscape is the inspiration for my researches in Archaeology in the light of the emerging cosmological interest in late Neolithic Europe, with the focus on the sophisticated stone age culture of Orkney. It was in my camper between the monuments that I first conceived they must have been busy with Time and that they in fact might have been the original creators of the concept of time and that in these isles we find the (hidden) evidence of the first cosmological and mathematical integration in architectural design and ratios in Europe, and un-explicably linked to the Pyramid ratios in Giza, Egypt, being built at about the same time.