On this episode of Living Myth, Michael Meade addresses the paradox of time and timelessness in response to the latest Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The annual bulletin uses a Doomsday Clock to measure the proximity of worldwide catastrophe on earth. For the first time, scientists report that we have reached a point just 90 seconds away from the stroke of midnight, the closest we have ever been to the time of Apocalypse on Earth.
The doomsday clock is not a computer-driven report, but a symbolic statement from scientists about the urgent risks we all face. It shows only the last quarter of an oversized clock, indicating how much time has already been lost and how near we are to the supposed end of time. Yet, the clock as symbol goes far back to ancient traditions where the circle of time represents the wholeness of life. When time is only counted as linear and literal, it can be seen to come to a final end. Yet, the circle of time involves a greater imagination that includes the eternal source from which all of life and time originate. In that view, time repeatedly comes to an end, only to start over again.
We may well be close to the end of an era and suffering the demise of a world view; but in mythological terms we are not simply at the end of time. Over the course of time the sense of “apocalypse” has been literalized and now popularized to the point where it characterizes our darkest fears and fantasies. Yet, as an archetypal image apocalypse presents a time of great extremes and a tension of opposites that includes both end and beginning, both collapse and renewal.
The time that people cannot find these days must be sought in moments of timelessness through which time itself renews. It is in such moments that ancient wisdom can be found and new world views can appear. For, it is not simply a better world that we urgently need, but also a better world view.
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