The Insidious Captain Clock and His Mechanized Conquest of the Soul

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In our culture, we have placed a set of habitual notions about time on top of the soul’s instincts and intuitions about rhythm and temporality.

Today, we sense the nature of time in clocks and calendars. Look anywhere, in physics, in politics, in philosophy, in psychology, and you find SOME version of clock time as the image of REAL time. Even Einstein worked with time as meaning whatever a clock says.

But how does the story of time in our culture really go? Think about it this way: Have we in the west gotten our sense of time from a careful cultivation of our relationship with Nature? Do we understand time because we have gotten ever more sensitive to Nature, to Mind, to Experience itself? Or is there another story?

Once Upon a Time, people didn’t have clocks. Do you know how we got them?

I’d love to start this story in the far reaches of primordial memory, in the origins of the world. But for now we won’t go back that far. We can start with once upon a time when the rhythm of the day was kept by the church bell. It synchronized people with a sense of the divine. Even if you aren’t theistic, you can appreciate this attunement to something that seems inherently meaningful.

The passing of the day involved a rhythm of prayer, a rhythm of ritual, a rhythm of reverence. The passing of the year went the same way, because the divine made things grow. We had to at least attend to the cycles of seasons and the sacred arc of the sun in the sky. The music of the church bells brought a constant reminder of participating in an ethical order.

But things were not exactly idyllic. The agriculture practiced in many Indo-European and Asian cultures could be characterized as invasive, especially where it involved tilling or otherwise interfering with large tracts of land. Invasive agriculture in the west especially primed the pump for capitalism, maybe in England more than anywhere else. But throughout Europe, markets and industry became increasingly important. And that meant that labor became sellable on the basis of a new kind of time. Time was no longer rhythm and season, but a circle of equal units, each of which had equal value in a market economy.

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But this way of dividing the day spread pretty quickly. It spread in a strange way. Initially clocks were used to keep track of labor. They belonged to the capitalists, and they were kept in factories, behind closed doors, or they were items possessed by the wealthy. Workers began to worry that the capitalists might slow the factory clocks in order to get more labor than they were actually paying for. The workers had no way to verify for themselves that they were working the agreed amount of time, and that meant they would have to get clocks of their own. This created a market for inexpensive, and eventually quite portable clocks.

But as the clock spread, so did its conception of time—i.e. the capitalist’s conception of time. The way of ordering a workplace so as to make a profit became the default way of ordering everything else, because life began to revolve around the activities of the market, rather than the activities of Nature . . . and the sacred rhythms of life and the soul were displaced.

A regime of time management invaded every area of life, including education, religion, and leisure time. How many of us go on vacation without every escaping the clock? Indeed, we often have very tight schedules on vacation, with tours, dinners, flights, and entertainment all booked and planned, in part because we have to fit so much into so little time.

It’s important to sense the difference between time on the one hand and temporality on the other. There are rhythms of life, and we tap into them in various ways. We also create certain rhythms personally and culturally, in relationship with Nature. Prior to capitalism, the church bells indicated a temporality, but they did not indicate TIME until the spread of clocks. Long ago, spiritual practitioners of the east measured temporality in terms of sticks of incense. One would mediate for 3, 4, 5 or more sticks of incense, rather than today’s meditation sessions measured in minutes or hours.

As the anthropologist David Dinwoodie summarizes,

What we generally refer to as time, the standard time of the West, goes back to the industrial age. It represents a culturally and historically specific temporal system, and it serves poorly as a model for temporalities. Thus in the anthropology of time it is conventional to distinguish between time as the dominant form of representation of social rhythms in the West and temporality as social rhythms and their representation in general. With this in mind, it would be extraordinary for a non-Western society to have “time” as we know it prior to its contact with Europeans. After all, “time as we know it,” is effectively a variety of European temporality.

The west, in other words, has a remarkably weird notion of time, a notion that seems mechanical and monetary. We might call it industrialized time, or time 2.0, or manufactured time—and, given that it long predates modern science, we might think of our science as industrialized or manufactured and economized from the outset.

Granted, there are lots of ways to practice and realize temporality. Indeed, that’s part of the point here: On what basis will we practice and realize the experience of time, the experience of moment?

We can admit that a certain kind of what we want to call “knowledge” appears when we deal with clocks. But what is that knowledge really worth? What does it do for us? And do we thereby marginalize other sorts of experience?

Other cultures have a sense of temporality. But for us to think they have western “time” seems presumptuous, as does the assumption that they cannot experience timelessness. What their experience might be, of time or timelessness (or the interrelation of those) . . . that we would have to practice in order to realize.

The funny thing is that proper thinking demands unstructured time and a cultivated spaciousness, with proper material support for all citizens (which is a matter of ecology, not “economics”). Warren Buffet famously spends five or more hours a day just THINKING, and his schedule is notoriously spacious rather than being filled with meetings. Watson and Crick spent many hours in conversation at the local pub, and Richard Feynman attributed his Nobel Prize to throwing out all sense of agenda and just PLAYING.

And yet the dominant culture in general finds every way possible to overload and distract us. A playful and spiritual sense of temporality gets lost in all our agendas.

We are talking about something that goes quite deep. For instance, consider an example of the insanity of the dominant culture that may seem small at first: So-called daylight savings time. Daylight savings time . . . What a bizarre symptom. Daylight savings time is a declaration that we will live unnaturally. We will live apart from Nature. We will send people to the hospital with heart attacks if we must—in case you didn’t know it, the incidence of heart attacks spikes the Monday following the time shift.

We insist on time, rather than rhythm. We have appointments to keep. We have extraction operations to manage. We have ad campaigns to run.

Migrations? Cycles? Nature’s rhythms and curves? Bah! Humbug!

One of the problems we face in changing our way of knowing is that better ways of knowing go against the very tendency to have an agenda. In more limited terms: we don’t have time for philosophical practice, just as few ancient Athenians had any real time to speak with Socrates, who was only the conscience of their own soul.

In general, the more we need philosophical or spiritual practice, the more reasons we have for not practicing: Too tired . . . not today . . . maybe tomorrow . . . maybe a retreat next month . . . maybe if I didn’t have so many appointments, errands, and deadlines . . . it’s not my fault that I had to take that extra client, that extra project, that extra trip . . . .

We don’t really see the collusion, the way we and the craziness of the culture work together to keep us busy. It’s like a pattern of insanity. If we had leisure time, we might see the pattern of insanity for what it is, and we would have the time to disrupt it. As it stands, we have so many things to do. We need to stop doing. The clock encourages a doing orientation to life, and thus it limits our ways of knowing. How could we ever think we can do life?

Zhuangzi, one of the great philosophical sages of non-doing, tells of a massive bird who can fly 40,000 miles. He writes,

The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, “When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don’t make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go 40, 000 miles!”

Zuangzi continues:

If you go off to the green woods nearby, you can take along food for three meals and come back with your stomach as full as ever. If you are going a 50 miles, you must grind your grain the night before; and if you are going 500 miles, you must start getting the provisions together three months in advance. What do these two creatures understand? Little understanding cannot come up to great understanding . . .

The clock takes away the possibility for experiences that might appear laughable from within the confines of our scheduled lives and their many pressures. The clock takes our orientation out of the living world, placing it into human agendas that grope in every direction, conscious purposes that justify any means and ignore any unpleasant side-effects—cravings on the march, throughout the day and night, with no interruption, always at war with something, even ourselves. The clock invites invasion, makes space for the colonization of the Soul by the pattern of insanity. The clock is a mandala of madness—not the divine madness inherent in sacred sanity, but madness in the pejorative sense, one in which beliefs assert themselves against reality, dualistic delusions make an assault against the union of opposites that characterizes what we may poetically refer to as the sacred-creative ordering of life, the sacred-creative necessities and potentials of Nature. The word sacred here needn’t be thought of as religious. It signifies the intimate experience of wisdom, love, and beauty, the direct experience of the immanent wonder of life.

Can we at least entertain the possibility that the clock cuts us off from life, from each other? Can we entertain the possibility that the clock cuts us off from the moment?

Let us speak to our own hearts for a moment. If we let go of our ordinary analysis, already corrupted by our narrow view of time, we can listen with the heart and soul. Don’t worry if much of this doesn’t quite make sense at first. We need time for philosophy, time to listen, to reflect, to contemplate. But we can at least allow the heart to hear first.

Listening with the heart and soul, does the following ring true? Time as we live it is the moment—not a line, not a grinding circle, not a “moving” “thing”. Time is existence, fleating and open. The clock pushes for closure against this openness. Openness swallows all attempts at closure. That is why the ego fears it, fears the openness we always are. The ego doesn’t even want to listen to some of these contemplations. And the clock helps keep us stuck.

The clock presents an argument, an analysis, a conceptual manner of relating. Time puts a grid over experience. Life itself . . . we live it, we feel it. We feel our life in living ways, beyond minutes and hours yet danced in rhythms, beyond words and ideas yet expressed as an inherent meaningfulness, a play of meanings.

Maybe we got hoodwinked into thinking there is something scientific about time, or maybe scientists got hoodwinked into thinking there is something scientific about time, even though time as we know it in the west seems inextricably bound with commerce and conquest.

Sadly, we rarely try to get in touch with rhythms we might sense in ourselves, in relation to Nature. But even if we did, we might not know how to look, since we would have to rebel against intense contemporary pressures, as well as centuries of social-psychological-political-and economic inertia that has become a busy-mindless habit.

Leaving the clock, we enter the moment. Renouncing the agenda, we receive our purpose. Forgetting the deadening hours and workdays, we remember the aliveness and aloveness of a working World, a functioning World in which we fulfill our function.

Must we not rebel against this so-called civilized time? Doesn’t it seem as though we must mutiny against Captain Clock and his constant colonial raiding of the soul and the living world? Captain Clock and his conquest of life must end.

The psychologist James Hillman got at the need to shift our way of life in a conversation with Michael Ventura. Referring to how he as a psychologist had to help his patients deal with the insanity of the world, he said, that part of what he found he had to do was treat people’s schedules. As a coach and consulting philosopher, I encounter the need to do that as well. And, like Hillman, I find that people can be incredibly resistant to treating their schedule. As a psychologist, Hillman found that this resistance seemed to cover over a deep sadness, maybe even a grief and a fear, and he felt it had to do with how we have degraded the world. The woods that we knew have become a fracking site, the meadow we took for granted became a shopping mall. We hear about species extinction and wide-spread pollution, and it freaks us out at a deep level. So we are all the more motivated to keep busy. Hillman said a lot of interesting things in this regard, and one of them was this, “We paint our national history rosy and white and paint our personal history gray. We’re so willing to admit that we’re trapped in our personal history, but we never hear that said of our national history. . . .”

We are, in this moment, questioning our culture, because we are questioning time. Even if we set aside the fact that we live in a culture of busyness and distraction, there remains the fundamental notion of time that is peculiar to the west, and may indeed go together with our busyness and distractedness.

Philosophy or LoveWisdom means discernment—and that entails the realization of the difference between encumbered relationships with time and unencumbered relationships with temporality, rhythm, and so on.

Right now, many of us are encumbered. Captain Clock weighs upon the heart and soul, cracks his whip at our mind and body, demanding that we carry his artificial ship onward.

But carry life forward, to realize a meaningful experience of life—what if we need to leave the clock and enter the moment? Entering the moment, we can make plans when needed. Living the moment, presencing what we might call the being-moment (existence as a moment, moment as living experience), does not mean living for “the moment,” which just means another kind of agenda, one of impulse and hedonism.

Again and again, Socrates, the icon of wisdom, shows us that a spiritual or philosophical life, a coherent, skillful, and truly successful life, demands we throw out the clock; wisdom-love-beauty will not abide by our agendas, our notions of time, our stuckness in the past and the future. Again and again, Socrates gives himself to the moment, he gifts himself to life, gifts himself to, with, through, as intimacy, with no fear of temporal pressures that “civilization” uses to control us, to tame us, to make us more stupid and stuck. Even on his way to his own indictment, on charges that carry the threat of the death penalty, Socrates stops to speak with Euthyphro, who seems nothing more than a bonehead, and yet Socrates is completely willing to keep the inquiry going, with a heart wide open to Euthyphro’s capacity for insight. But Euthyphro won’t allow his own foolish agenda to get interrupted by anything, including insight, and he tells Socrates he has no more time to contemplate righteousness, holiness, sacredness, and service to the divine. He must hurry off to have his own father killed. How many of us would have had time for Socrates if we met him? How many people had no time for Jesus? How many people had no time for Confucius, or Buddha, or countless other sages and saints who were right in front of them, living in their midst?

I am not Socrates or Buddha, but we are asking if we can turn to their wisdom, the wisdom they claimed was inside of us. Don’t we often behave as if we have no time for Wisdom, Love, and Beauty? Don’t we behave as if we have no time to stop the pattern of insanity that has us in its grips? Why do we think we need to hurry off to do things that leave us unfulfilled, that make our families sick, that make species extinct, that make a very small number of people obscenely wealthy and powerful, in a narrow material sense? Who has time for the soul, for the sacred, for dispelling the pattern of insanity? Even the wealthy and powerful long to care for their own souls, and they feel as fundamentally unsatisfied as the average citizen. Indeed, I am not at all villainizing the wealthy and powerful. They are just like the rest of us. We all want to be happy, and we all do a basically crooked job of it. Our relationship to time makes our happiness fundamentally more difficult to realize.

Keep in mind, we are talking about a deep sense of joy, peace, love, and meaning, not the capacity to entertain ourselves or feel contentment for a while when we take a trip to Bali or distract ourselves with running our children or grandchildren around, or participating in church functions or charity events. We are talking about the center of gravity of our being, and whether in practice that is located in the soul.

Consider this abstract story: Once upon a time there were people who made clocks. A clock is made of components. A clock is bits and pieces that mechanically fit together. They saw the universe as a giant clock. They thought humans could be manipulated like clockwork. They figured that, if there are components in anything, there are atomized parts and pieces, isolated individuals. Components means something “functional” in a rationalistic sense, and that asked themselves questions like, “Are we using our resources rationally?” (but rarely asked, “Are we using our resources relationally?”) Isn’t that our abstract story? Doesn’t our culture function rationally instead of relationally? Haven’t we used the clock to reinforce narrow views of ourselves and the world, and used narrow views of ourselves and our world to reinforce time, clocks, agendas, manipulations and control?

We are not talking about a choice between being rational and being irrational. We are talking about a fragmented notion of thinking, a fragmented notion of time, which then gives us a rationality that must itself be fragmented and fragmenting.

What is this rationality that burns the candle of the soul at both ends? Why do we feel tired? Why are we so busy? Why can our workaday world reach us at any hour? Why can we stay up all night and binge-watch distracting nonsense, taking in endless streams of entertaining noise? Maybe we have a bits-and-pieces vision of ourselves and the world, which goes altogether with a bits-and-pieces vision of time. Maybe all of this goes together with a vision competitiveness, a vision of lack, a need to defend a certain territory, a feeling of disconnection, a loss of meaning.

What if time is relation? Not a “thing” “in which” objects move and interact (the way we think “things” “unfold” “in time,” and other conceptions), instead of that, what if time is being itself—our being-together.

Relationality cannot mean “isolated parts interacting.” Relationality is the whole-working. Each moment is whole-working, holism working. Each moment presences the circulation of life, as if we are all integrated as a single body, an interwoven openness, luminous and knowing.

Once we recognize or at least entertain the possibility of relational-dynamism, we may see that we can draw no strict boundaries, including any strict boundary of where thinking “takes place,” where mind arises. In such a way of visioning, mind and time have to do with relationality, and we see mind as nonlocal

In such a way of visioning, we may sense how the clock that comes altogether with borders and barriers that must make us unwell or even insane. We may sense how “localizing” minds, bodies, and times does not mean finding our place, but becoming unrooted.

If we let ourselves become cogs in the machinery of civilized insanity, we lose the relations of the soul. We no longer relate to life and to each other. We no longer dance—as the dance. Instead, we merely “interact”.

Philosophy, or LoveWisdom, has to do with the shift from doing our lives to dancing them. Wisdom-based life coaching is actually wisdom-based DANCE coaching. By means of LoveWisdom, we create a hiatus from time, we liberate ourselves from the clutches of Captain Clock, even if we still have places to go and appointments to keep. No matter what we have scheduled, each situation in our lives has its own rhythms, its own TEMPORALITY, which, as we can recall, is not the same thing as time.

Philosophical practice immediately helps us to slow down, to FEEL less hurried, even while we get things done. It allows us to enter the moment, and discover new possibilities. In the absence of concrete practices and clear philosophical sensibilities, the idea of entering the moment and discovering new possibilities is just another catchy slogan, just another bunch of self-help jive. But, if we begin to integrate the means for making the empty slogan into an overflowing reality, each step we take can feel like dancing.

What do you think? Do we need to mutiny against Captain Clock? Do we need to find ways to take back our sense of temporal spaciousness? Why is it that we have gotten more powerful tools than ever, and yet many of us are as busy as the days before unions?

This was only part of the story of time in our culture, but if you have reflections or questions about today’s contemplation, send them in, at dangerouswisdom.org, and we’ll address some of them in a future episode.

Until then, this is nikos patedakis reminding you that your Soul and the Soul of the World are not two things. Take good care of them.