Relativity Redux
I want to say more about the principle/law of special relativity. Special Relativity is analogous to gravity. For every living being on the earth, the pull toward the center always must be figured into one’s day to day living.
When hiking in the Cascades in an Oregon forest, do not venture too close to the edge of the trail. Someone else has, as his trail-side memorial cross bears testimony. It is a long way down, and just a body will be recovered.
In traffic, do not follow too close, too fast. If the energy of your momentum exceeds the coefficient of friction between the four patches of rubber on the asphalt pavement surface–a crash will follow.
There is always, always a dance. The dance involves matter and space and time and light. Strangely what you see is sometimes not what you get. Sometimes common sense does not help. Point of view, the pivot-point-of-perspective, the still-point is where the dance is. One is never, ever out of relation to everything else.
Sometimes I stop, linger momentarily just enough to recognize that I am the still point. With god-like shift of insight I “see” the movement, hear the unheard music. I know that I am the dance, and everything is as it must, is as it has to be. Time past, what might have been and what has been, is contained right here right now, in this moment. But this is too much reality. I cannot bear too much reality. For the most part its just movement, day in and day out, problem solving, immersed in the whirl of circumstances.
Over the years I have returned to the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Here are a few lines from Burnt Norton that reflect upon “the dance” this strange, multi-planed experience that we call “life.”
II
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
