Jaguar time

 There are indigenous for whom a mountain is ancient time, and a jaguar is the mystery of time. There are images of mystical quality that appear in the periphery of consciousness. My dead brother whispers a secret in my ear with a form of communication that comes before words, and even before the idea that comes before words. I turn to listen, I try to remember, but it slips away. He travels from the underworld that is not another world, not in another place, but in this world, before this world is the only world. And yet is another reality embedded in this reality. A jaguar roams through the shadows of the jungle, imperceptible unless it chooses to be, even then it will never stay long enough to be percieved. It is not hunted by time, it hunts time, stalks it, slips between its folds. My brothers soul lives in a place with no time, he is after death and before birth. The jaguar leaps from eternal time, to percieved time. It is not time that flows linearly downstream, it is consciousness that flows, it is time that watches us pass. Time spends us, waits for us, pauses us, loses us, finds us. Time does not move. We are the ones who move. Time watches, observes, remembers. Time is alive, time is the consciousness that our perception awakes to at death or in dreams and falls asleep at birth.

The values of survival require time to be linear. We die after we are born, we hunt and eat after we are hungry, not before. Linearity does not come from time but from the values of survival which dominate the human experience. Linear time is like a helmet we wear for protection but limit our line of sight. We cannot see all around us at once, we do not see the stars while we watch the road. 

Souls are reborn but we do not know how long they spend in the other world between lives. Death is the place with no time. A soul comes into the world, with its characteristics and pain and joy and it creates gravity around its entry to the world. When I was reborn with healing abilities I was born into a family who needed healing the most. But they also shaped me into a being who must heal to survive. Both is true. The soul magnetized the experiences the personality will need in order to reveal its true qualities. I must forgive those who used me to heal. They could not help themselves. Their pain was too great.

It’s possible to think of time as different things to other people. It seems so personal. The western empire does a good job at unifying all diversity into one medium. The empire is good when it is a good conduit and communicator. But sometimes on its way to create universal culture it gets lost. It creates universal language. Not only English but currency, and time zones and the scientific method. It tries always to unify things. Capitalism tries to unify and quantify things to make them exchangeable. It grows awkwardly. It tries to commodify human life or sexual encounters. Then it awkwardly steps away from its errors. Searching for the correct abstraction of dignity that is more universal and accurate than before. 

Western society wants to ridicule the worship of corn. The worship of the natural cycles of seasons. But the many societies that worship nature were abundant in them and European societies without corn, without tea and squash and spices, want to ridicule the reverence for these things, ridicules our gratitude for our abundance of these things. Instead it does the opposite of revere. It commodifies. It puts a sticker on a pineapple grown with chemical nutrients instead of real soil. No other society ridicules another for a worship of this or that. An andean society would not look down on the Maasai warriors for listening to their dreams to guide a hunt. It’s only western society that shames the worship of anything other than its greed, which is another name for its starving and fear. . 

We think time is so universal. But it’s hard to know if others are having the same experience of time. It is so hard to coordinate events with others. Meetings, to be on time. Some have adhd time deficiencies. Some like to wear watches with no numbers.