The King Is Not Dead! Long Live the King!

Despite our most basic notions, history does not develop linearly. Rather, it is just there (past, present and future--or simultaneously). No, it is not static--it is creatively vibrating --but it doesn’t press into an unknown future leaving a trail of exhaust behind. History masquerades as linear simply because that is just how each of us experiences it. When George Washington died, the history in which he was involved continued on unabated. The fact that Washington died only meant he was no longer participating. George Washington’s acts aren’t finished, only he is. There is no separation, division or barrier between what he did and what we are doing. And if there is no wall between the past and the present, neither is there any actual distinction between now and the future. Now is only what we make it to be. I separate (my) now from other time-moments because now is the limit of my focused consciousness. From this perspective--that history is not just a completed record of the past but an unfolding course in which I find myself participating--I have found a heightened interest and connection with the past. I feel a new fraternity with those dead people I used to just read about. History can be likened to an ocean. As a wave moves toward shore, every molecule (historical event) in the wave is part of the same wave that every other molecule occupies (in that wave). I am a part of the past because the past is not passed. When the wave waves, the molecule doesn’t move forward (in time or space) it just fluctuates up then down as the trough rises to a crest and back. The molecule moves no closer to the shore but is in the same water as the molecules that are crashing onto the beach. I mistakenly think my memories are in the past and my idea of writing a best-selling book is only hope or fantasy that keeps me entertained. Actually my high school graduation is as much a part of my present as is the writing of this note. And the thought that I may have a best-seller in me is not lunacy. It is all a matter of focus. I have to focus to function. My memory of my wedding day has lost some clarity in my mind, and I’m unable to imagine my writing fame. But when I die, I’ll be freed from my restricted vision. If I die suddenly tomorrow before I get my book written, then the book wasn’t in my future. But as long as I am still living, it may be that I have the future publication already present in my 3-phased time. If I am going to write a book, the book is already written because my future is not separate from my now. My birth and death mark only the brackets of my material life. Where I find myself within these borders by the briefest of moments called “now” does not alter my relationship to either the past or the future. My life encompasses all three phases at once. My past and my future are not distant from me because the light of my awareness of now is but a pinpoint of a moment. And it is the same with my relationship to other people, both dead and not yet born. We are all in each other’s past and future. Thomas Jefferson is my contemporary in this broad sense of time. I just can’t rub elbows with him because when the Declaration of Independence needed penned he was on hand biologically, and I wasn’t. But when I read about his assignment by the Continental Congress to do this authoring, I sense that I am there looking over his shoulder. I feel like I know Tom. And the writing of the Declaration, like all events, is still happening. The way we raised our kids, the way I relate to my wife, the way she will handle my funeral arrangements, the way I teach my classes, the way I will vote in the next election are all my portion of the playing out of the Declaration. Jefferson did his part; I was involved then too. So was (not yet born) Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery, the demise of which Jefferson tried to include in the Declaration. If it is true, as I am informed, that some of the exact same atomic particles in the wood of Noah’s ark, for instance, likely are in my very living body in its current seven-year interchanging cellular cycle, then why wouldn’t all events (past, present and future) be present together. You might respond that this is merely an imaginative (theoretical) way of scrunching everything together and is not the way we actually live things out. But who is to say that the imaginative is not reality. I think imagination comes to us as hints of the hard-to-see actuality. The genius and the visionary get it righter and the rest of us catch on later, and the miraculous becomes astoundingly, happily the way it is. Then science comes in to verify it all. The miraculous is only surprising while we wait for the physicists to get the explanation down for us. I notice the physicists and theologians today are starting to sound like mimics. They just aren’t reading each other’s books. The Christian Gospels tell the life story of a man whose birth can be characterized as an event in the 3-phases of time, pulled together in the consciousness of a Bethleham embryo named Jesus. He lived a biological life just as we each do, but tried to persuade his closest friends to see time as a tense-conflated run of experiences highlighted by now-awareness moments.. He talked about himself as prophesy-in-motion, and the future as the present (the Kingdom is come). Similarly, but without the charisma and inspiration, today’s physicists tell us the same thing--that the laws of physics work the same whether going forward or backward. In a scientific (as opposed to experiential) sense, time is reversible. If Jesus and Nobel prize winning scientists are right, the history books should be written differently. New paths into the knowledge of life stories can be an exciting tour. Rooting around in otherwise dull facts can be turned into a realization that the present leads to the past, and the other way around too. Knowing the past can be facilitated by knowing the present and looking for the present in the past. Hey--it’s all one thing. The past is alive, and it is now. And the future has a hand in how today plays out. This is not scary; it is comforting. At the time of my own father’s death, I realized that I do not follow in my father’s footsteps--I am my father stepping. Doug Good