Y2K: It's About Time

By David La Chapelle

Out of these walks, thoughts, and listenings, I offer the following piece.-David La Chapelle

As the arrow of time hits the target of January 1, 2000, the modern world will cast a concerned eye to discover how its computer systems weather the date change. For a Hopi elder atop a mesa watching the canopy of stars that map the skies of her homeland, the date will pass as a small whisper in a much larger story of creation. She will be considering the prophecy of her people and the epic story of their migrations through many worlds. The memory of the Hopi prophecies will be wrapped around her like a shawl, her place in time anchored by the unfolding of her people's wisdom.

For a manager of an automobile assembly line in Flint, Michigan, January 1, 2000, will roll over amidst increasing tension and concern about whether all the testing and remediation of software and embedded chips to make them compliant with the year 2000 date change will, in fact, achieve the goal of continuing business as usual.

For a Mayan shaman gazing out over the rising sun as it warms the waters of the Atlantic, the day will pass without undue notice. Instead, perhaps, his mind will be contemplating the approaching end of time, foretold by his ancestors, some twelve years in the future. Perhaps he will be wondering why the modern world is so fixated on the year 2000.

For a Yu'pik hunter alone upon the ice, the day will dawn after a night of unusual and dramatic northern lights. Though the peak of the solar sunspot cycle will still be a few months away, the energy streaming into the polar regions on the solar wind will be enough to transform the night sky.

In homes and businesses, government offices, banks, industrial plants, airports, telecommunication centers, and armed forces command centers around the world, billions of people will be waiting to see if the infrastructure of the modern world will shudder through the morning of January 1, 2000 without a significant degradation of its capacity to continue doing business as usual.

The year 2000 computer crisis, known as Y2K, is a collision with time unprecedented in human history. One of the most ironic aspects of the crisis is that the preoccupation with linear time and efficiency which is endemic in the Western psyche will literally hit a wall on January 1, 2000. For the first moment in known human history, a specific date and a specific time have the potential to bring a civilization to its knees. This moment is not caused by portentous planetary alignments or other cosmologically significant celestial events, but is simply the result of the imposition of human time onto the external environment in a manner so clumsily executed that the estimated price tag of "fixing" the problem is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Fundamental to understanding the challenge of Y2K is a discussion of time. For this crisis is literally a product of a certain way of using time. Specifically, the crisis is a product of a linear, one directional use of time.

Industrial Time vs. Sacred Time
Clocks and watches are not the only way to chronicle the passage of time. In fact a case can be made that using timepieces which are divorced from larger systems creates a kind of time schizophrenia which erodes the mental stability, quality of life, and environment of those unfortunates who utilize such a process.

Numerous observatories erected by earlier cultures, from Chaco Canyon, to Stonehenge, to the city plan for Teotihuacan (in central Mexico), were remarkably accurate tools for gauging the movement of the heavenly bodies and predicting the passage of time. Entire cultures have been erected and maintained on an understanding of time which makes our Western linear model seem at best simplistic.

Without too much of an oversimplification, one could summarize the Western Industrial model of time with the well-known adage: time is money (or time is productivity). Try to find a word for deadline in any indigenous culture and I believe you will come up short.

We are now witnessing a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week mechanized world where time is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold. The irony of this increasingly voracious appetite for time by the industrial and commercial sectors of our society is that fewer and fewer people have any time left.

Many cultures throughout history have lived within and experienced time not as money, but as something sacred. The flow of time was intimately linked to the unfolding story of their people. Their relationship to the entire universe was seen as an unfolding of time. In Meso-America the understanding of time was so profound that they were able to map activities ranging from courtship to planting of food within a cosmological grid. This mapping gave something which our modern Daytimers and computers cannot give us: meaning.

The unfolding of time was so accurately understood that the ancient calendar-makers of Meso-America were even able to predict the current acceleration and possible breakdown of modern society.

From the Chinese in eastern Asia to the Maya of Meso-America, time was understood to flow in a spiral. The forward motion of time was seen as a spiral of cyclic growth with alternating rhythms of activity and rest: the same structure which encodes our genetic information and organizes galaxies. The very movement of our solar system through the galaxy traces a graceful spiral, with each planet circling the sun, but always entering a new place in space and time because of the motion of the entire system relative to the galactic center.

Time Unhinged
In the Western psyche, time became unhinged from its circularity and became a one directional arrow pointing towards the future. The name of time's movement in one direction was simple: progress. This crucial paradigm shift was catalyzed by the single most revered moment in Western culture: the death and resurrection of Christ. In order to understand the Western preoccupation with linear time, it is useful to consider some of the events and cultural gestalt surrounding his death.

Around 96 AD, on the Island of Patmos, a smallish island off the coast of Asia Minor, a man was to put ink to parchment and describe a vision that he had just been shown by an angel of the Lord. This man had been banished to the island for his revolutionary activities involving the spread of the early church. The island of Patmos is small, five miles wide by eleven miles long, and certainly must have contributed to his sense of containment and imprisonment. The document he wrote was to do as much to catalyze the modern computer crisis as any written since then.

When St. John finished the final line of the Book of Revelation and put down his pen, the waves of the sea were still peacefully lapping at the rock of the island upon which he stood, and they would continue to do so for nearly two thousand more years. But the waves of reckoning which he was to unleash in the Western psyche were far more tumultuous.

There is considerable debate about just who was this man on Patmos. Some argue that he was one of the four evangelists, a statement that is hard to support, given that he would have had to have been somewhere near 120 years old. His identity is not crucial to the time shift he launched, but the issue does leave us curious.

The document he wrote was very much a product of his age. The genre of apocalyptic writing had already been maturing for nearly two hundred years. The apocalyptic convention included the use of obscure numerological formulations, strong allegorical imagery and the presence of a guiding angel. All these are found in the Book of Revelation.

Visions are essentially subjective experiences which are numinous gifts from an unseen realm. But when one of them becomes a defining document of Western culture and appears structurally mapped in a style which had been developing for several hundred years, one has to prudently ask questions.

How much of his apocalyptic vision was a result of unconscious programming from literary devices of St. John's time? How much was his way of wrestling some degree of personal power from a situation of imprisonment and banishment? How much was driven by the revolutionary status of the early church, fighting as it was for its very life against a large oligarchy?

We cannot of course, ever answer these questions conclusively, but the asking of them is useful in examining the effect of this document.

Revolutionaries tend to be driven by the polarization of their position into dogmatic, black-and-white worlds with little ambiguity or compromise. The Book of Revelation could easily be read as a book of revolution. The strident tone, the ultimate battle of good and evil, and the end of time are all elements of any radical group trying to subvert the power of a dominant paradigm.

Revelation's Legacy
Whatever the source of St. John's vision and writing, what is compellingly true is how succinctly and accurately it summarized what was to become the legacy of the Christian era in regards to time.

Time, from the perspective of this worldview, is a finite process with a definite termination date. Events are expected to escalate as the forces of good and evil seek to do battle near the "end times." Finally after a titanic battle which lays waste to most of the world, Christ appears in the Second Coming, and all of those who are saved will be lifted above the carnal battlefield of polar opposites into a new heaven and will be shown a new earth.

Within this worldview the following attitudes can be found: Time, and matter, are prisons from which the holy person longs to be freed. Time is an onerous burden, calling for patience and forbearance. There is always a final judgment in which time is annihilated. The preoccupation with being saved at some future time gives one the right to abuse other humans beings and destroy the earth. It is always better to live for the end result than to pay too much attention to the means. (The modern translation of this is "progress at any price.")

Time as a Political Tool
One of the first recorded uses of time as a conscious political tool was in the Roman Empire where various authorities would arbitrarily adjust the calendar to prolong their stay in elected positions. Julius Caesar attempted to put an end to this practice by standardizing the calendar. The Julian calendar was widely used by European countries until the Catholic Church, the leading power in the world at the time, decided to augment its own calendar.

Pope Gregory, drawing on the work of a 6th century monk named Brother Bede, instituted the Gregorian calendar in the late 1500s. This calendar, which is the one most commonly in use now, was an outgrowth of Babylonian observation, modified by the Egyptians, given a philosophical underpinning and direction by the early Christians, and brought onto the world stage by the vast bureaucracy of the Catholic Church.

Further time confusion was added when the British, emerging as a world power, joined the Catholic Church and decided in 1752 that they would abide by the Gregorian calendar. To do this, they decreed that 1752 should end with December 31st and not be carried on through the next March 25th (which was the traditional new year of the Julian calendar). Furthermore, to harmonize the calendars, they decreed that the arrival of September 2, 1752 should be called September 14, 1752.

At the convenience of the political will of the British, more than a quarter of 1752 was banished from the records. This cavalier attitude towards time betrays the Western philosophical position towards this intrinsic aspect of nature.

An Ongoing Struggle
The clash between Western linear time and sacred circular time of many indigenous people is epitomized in the five hundred years of struggle between the Natives of this continent and the European invaders. This struggle continues right into modern time.

One example of this can currently be found in the mountains of Arizona. The Vatican, in an attempt to build an observatory, has pitted itself against the Apache tribe. The Vatican wants to build the observatory on a peak sacred to the Apache. The stated reason for building the observatory is that the Vatican wants to be able to determine if there are any alien life forms in the universe. The Vatican wants to know so that it can send forth emissaries to "convert" these aliens. The unstated reason is that the Vatican is still in reaction to being caught by its geocentricism during the false imprisonment of Galileo. It was acutely embarrassing for a major religion to be significantly out of synch with the true facts of the natural world, and to help forestall such embarrassment again, the Vatican has decided to build their observatory in the heart of the Apache world.

In a calculated use of Western time, the Vatican was able to railroad their agenda by acting in a more "timely" manner than the Apache on several occasions during the lengthy permitting process. The Apache, who have essentially been a culture in hiding since the time of internment camps, were reluctant to speak out. Furthermore, they were simply more accustomed to deliberations calibrated by the movement of natural time.

The land has been cleared and bulldozed for the observatory. The same institution which imprisoned one of the founders of modern scientific method has now taken hostage a mountain of ancestral remembrance and an altar by which the Apache establish the meaning of their world.

Circular Time and Apocalypse
Talk to a Chinese sage in the mountains of his homeland about progress and he will only smile. Climb the mesas of Arizona and speak to a Hopi elder in her native tongue and you will find that she does not even have a verb tense for past or future. Life is experienced as an unfolding of presence in which numinous beings operate and interpenetrate our waking world.

If you break the hoop of time and create a movement which has no renewal or return, then you condemn yourself to a life which cannot possibly reach its fullness in "time." The logical extension of such a movement is to postulate the fundamental limitation of this earthly realm, create a heaven to strive for after death, and long for the resurrection which will lift you from the tedium and misery of a world caught in a one-way movement of time. Not only do you strive to transcend time through death, you also deny the sacredness of the earth around you because the arrow of time is relentlessly pointing towards an apocalypse and a second coming.

During Reagan's presidency, Secretary of the Interior James Watt was asked why he had such draconian policies in terms of the environment. He replied that it made no sense to try to save what was going to be destroyed by the coming Apocalypse. Apparently the fact that the end times were near was openly discussed amongst Reagan's cabinet.

Return a culture to a sense of sacred time and you will find that you can then live within a world which renews itself, which returns again to where it begins, and you are released from the compelling need to accomplish everything tomorrow. Interestingly, the most astute inner technologies of spiritual change on the planet were all developed in cultures of circular time. If the world has no possibility of renewal, and time is a one-way arrow, then the burden of solving life's dilemmas becomes onerous. The contemplative practices are best undertaken in a framework of circular return.

When the first of the Dalai Lama's main meditation teachers began going to the West, they brought back many reports of the misery of Western psyches. It is reported that the Dalai Lama was in disbelief that any class of humans could have so much internal misery. He apparently wanted to know why Westerners where so unhappy. A significant answer to his question can be found in how Westerners negotiate time.

If there is no return, there can be no rest. And if you want to examine a cultural experiment based on this mind set, you only have to look around you at the modern world. Constant expansion at any cost through globalized markets and a pernicious interior sense of "not having enough" both find their source in a culture that literally does not have enough time. The cult of eternal youth which finds its display in modern advertising and consumerism is a vain attempt to arrest the arrow of Western time from disappearing into oblivion.

A Time for Retreat
As a major portion of my life work, I have taken people into the wilderness for spiritual retreats. I have witnessed first-hand the tyranny of Western time and the enormous psychological damage of living in a world which does not have the opportunity to renew itself. I remember vividly one woman who was working overtime trying to put a business together that would "succeed" in the "real" world. She was wound as tight as a timepiece. At the end of a short hike in which the natural world was a constant source of irritation and annoyance to her, she slammed her pack down on the ground and stormed off. We managed to set her tent up for her and she withdrew into its relative security for several days. When she emerged she was a different person. The tension that had been driving her was visibly absent. I remember watching her see the aspen trees around her for the first time. There was an innocence and hopefulness in her face that I had never seen before. She had managed to disconnect from the relentless driving force of economic performance and business speed long enough to return to a modest amount of what I call "natural" time.

On the average, I have observed that it takes about three days for a person to step down from the speed of our modern world and enter into a more natural rhythm, one in which the cycles of the day, moods of the heart, and needs of the body are allowed to emerge and self-organize. This simple act of disconnecting from the tyranny of one-way time has enormous benefits.

I have seen people's dream lives suddenly switch on. I have seen people arrive at solutions to seemingly insoluble problems simply by having time, finally, to be. The many dimensions of stress in their lives are understood, integrated. I have watched worry drain from faces--and bodies begin to heal--all within the hoop of circular time which is offered by nature.

Disconnecting the Clocks
What if, as a culture, we were suddenly forced to phase out the deadlines and disconnect the clocks? What if our relationship to time was returned to the circular motion which all celestial bodies model?

What would we do? To answer this question, we can look to some roots in the Western experience and we can consider some lessons from other realms as well. Prior to the domination of the Mediterranean by the Roman military industrial complex, there was still a grounding of the Semitic people in natural time. Consider the following well-known verses:

All things have their season and in their times all things pass under heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to destroy, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time of love, and a time of hatred. A time of war, and a time of peace.
What hath man more of his labour?
I have seen the trouble, which God hath given the sons of men to be exercised in it.
He hath made all things good in their time, and hath delivered the world to their consideration, so that man cannot find out the work which God hath made from the beginning to the end.
-Ecclesiastes 3:1-12

Re-establishing Sacred Time
We are being called upon to re-establish a sense of sacred time in which everything has its place. This ordering of the world is not achieved by the flow chart of some corporate bottom line, but by the natural rhythm of rest and activity which is the signature of all natural systems.

One activity we can undertake to help usher in this change is very simple, but very hard to execute in our modern world: it is simply to slow the speed at which we move.

A very interesting study was done on the cross-cultural similarities between gifted and talented children. One of the most striking discoveries was that all of these children shared a common experience when growing up. Their parents let them "space out" for long periods of time. They were not interrupted in their need for "time out." As opposed to our educational paradigm which often sees inactivity as the work of the devil, anybody who has a working knowledge of neurological development knows that it is necessary for the brain to assimilate the changes which have taken place. Too much emphasis on productivity literally produces wounded human beings, and, by correlation, a wounded culture.

There is a simple technique used in Buddhist meditation retreats that is quite powerful. At any time during the day, whether during meals, during talks, or during meditation, a bell is rung. When it rings, you are invited to stop whatever you are doing and return to an awareness of your breath. The cultivation of mindfulness which this practice introduces is quite refreshing.

The capacity to stop the flow of Western linear time is the capacity to enter into a whole-brain state that can access the realms of consciousness from which our sense of fundamental meaning emerges.

If we will invite more time into our lives, invite more opportunities to stop the mad race of our minds, our bodies and our cultural demands, then we can stand at the doorway of a new heaven and a new earth here and now.

Making More Time
I am often asked what can be done in the face of the overwhelming changes that are on the horizon. A fundamental answer is to make more time in your life. Carve out the silence which allows you to be guided into the creative and spontaneous solutions which may be offered to the various dilemmas which face in our world.

If we can return to sacred time, then we will have done an enormous amount towards deflecting the catastrophe of the "end" of Western time.

This may seem a small and inconsequential act in the face of escalating world issues. But, like the Mississippi River, which begins as a few rivulets in northern Minnesota, the collective force of many people choosing to inhabit a mode of sacred time can and will have an effect.

I would urge the reader to carve out a few days of space from your busy schedule. Find a quiet retreat, or create one in your own home. Disconnect the phone, put away the computer, and learn to live within the rhythm of the day. Pay attention to the messages which come bubbling up, listen to the quiet voice of inspiration which has helped bring about the most astonishing changes in human history.

Take the time to leave time behind.

The solutions to the many problems which are being posited by Y2K and our changing world are not simple, nor are they likely to come from doing business as usual. If we are to be truly creative in the face of the challenges before us, then we need to restore our relationship with time.

David La Chapelle is an author, wilderness retreat guide, artist, and lecturer who lives with glaciers at his back in Juneau, Alaska. He has written six books including his newest, about to be released, Coming Home to Coherence: Navigating the Tides of Change, in which a longer version of this essay appears. People interested in his work or his book can contact him by e-mail at [email protected] or can check out his web site at http://www.tidesofchange.org

�1999 Talking Leaves
Winter 2000
Volume 9, Number 3
Human Time, Natural Time

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