I'm listening to: Weezer - Island in the Sun

Something I came across today was this book called Time and the Soul. It's actually a heavily disguised 'self-help book', and I say 'self-help' because I think anything philosophically stimulating is helpful to the self, and this one is particularly pertinent. I only got to finish the first section of it, but there're a couple of ideas which really struck me.

The idea of the human mind/life as the site of conciliation between the eternal and the temporal, infinite and finite, etc., as well as the existence of an unchanging essential form in any person. Of course it'll take quite a bit of substantiation to do this any reasonable amount of justice, but that's what the book is for. You can see how these two go hand in hand. Worldly events governed by superficial measures of time and their transience are often juxtaposed against this unchanging fundamental form, and recognition and acceptance of the latter will provide colossal empowerment to the individual who realises he/she is no longer bound by commonly conceived notions of time. It's definitely not easy to chew on, and I'd be shocked if anyone buys the idea simply from reading what I've said.

Today was incredibly special. Just prior to reading Time and the Soul I'd experienced something that could validate the author's claims in a very personal way. A potent combination of the right people at the right place at the right time transported me back more than three years to revisit a bygone period in my life. The feelings which heralded our arrival back in the past were unmistakably familiar, yet accompanied with surprise at the vibrancy of the moment, pulsating with a life of its own that psychological memory will always fall short of capturing. It wasn't just a shadow of the past. To put it succinctly, such experiences are old but always new; a seeming paradox. Yet it takes as little effort as the shifting of perception to view it from another angle, to see that it can be perfectly congruent. For example, a vintage item you pick up at the flea market is both old and new at the same time if you'll go beyond the physical age of the object alone to also take into account your own experience of it. It's a very rough analogy but I'm hoping just to illustrate how such a paradox is built on mere shortsightedness.

Similarly, this might appear to fly in the face of my agreement with the guy and his famous quote about never stepping into the same river twice. Of course, the river is everchanging, yet its essential river-ness will always remain. So to determine if it is still the same or not, it's just a matter of perspective with regard to the meanings we give to the terms "same" and "different". With the truth being a combination, neither and both are correct or wrong to varying degrees. There isn't an absolute answer.

Time's passage doesn't always go by the clock, in the sense that it sometimes seems to fly or crawl by at completely different rates, and one has to wonder if it can be objectively measured out at all. The illusion of being able to do so is perhaps a result of neglecting the subjectivity of the human experience, though apparently vital to everyday life. I think it's important to understand that's all it really is.




Too early to say goodnight