Tick Tock goes the clock. It is supposed to tell us what time it is. But it goes round and round, and ends up in the same place just 12 hours later. Then it reaches the same place one day later. Just round and round it goes, and where it ends, nobody knows.
So does it really tell us what time it is?
Not really. But there's another clock, one humans didn't make, but the universe provides, and that is Planet Earth, and it goes round and round too. And as it goes round, the Sun that gives us life goes round and round once a day. Round and round it goes, and where it ends, nobody knows--- for sure, but astronomers estimate that it will stop going round about 4 billion years from now. But, by that time, who knows where we'll be.
When I was young, according to these clocks, I remember I was told I was just a boy, and yet I felt like anyone else. I told myself I was just like the adults. I may have been smaller, but I felt entitled to the same respect as anyone else. And now they tell me I'm older than most people, but again, I feel just like all the younger people. My interests and goals are just the same, even if I don't usually feel physically as good as I did many tick tocks ago.
So, did time really fly by, the way they say? Or, are we always in the same time as when we started? It depends on your point of view. It's whether you go by what people tell you, or by what you know for yourself. But, are other people living your life, or are you living your life? I feel that I am living my life. And one thing I notice is that life is always going tick tock, round and round, and always returning to where it was. I breathe in and out, too. And I walk in a rhythm with two feet. And after the big clock in the sky goes down, I go to sleep, and then it comes up again and, tick tock, I wake up again. And I'm just the same guy again anyway. And sometimes I make music with all these rhythms. I play notes on a page. The piece begins and then it ends, and if I want to, I can play it again. And I can even turn on a metronome to help me keep time, and it goes tick tock. And one part of the music is pretty only because I remember the earlier parts. And it flows together nicely.
The universe provides us with a metronome too, and if we remember parts of our lives, then they are pretty like music. And this universe is making this music too, and our lives are part of it too, especially if we remember, and keep time. And just where it ends, nobody really knows. People tell us it will run down, just like people tell me I'm older than most people now. But it depends on your point of view. Does the universe really fly by and run down the way they say? Or is the universe living its own life? Always going tick tock, and always making music? Yet always the same?
This essay was partly inspired by this excerpt from The Power of Myth, episode 6:
"BILL MOYERS: Your friend Jung, the great psychologist, says that the most powerful religious symbol is the circle. He says, "The circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind, that in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self." And I find you, in your own work throughout the course of your life, coming across the circle, whether it’s in the magical designs of the world over, whether it’s in the architecture both ancient and modern, whether it’s in the dome-shaped temples of India or the calendar stones of the Aztecs, or the ancient Chinese bronze shields, or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, whom you talk about, the wheel in the sky. You keep coming across this image.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, it’s an ever-present thing. It’s the center from which you’ve come, back to which you go. I remember reading in a book about the American Indians, called The Indian Book, by Natalie Curtis, it was published around 1904, her conversation with a chief. I think it was a chief of the Pawnee tribe. And among the things he said was, "When we pitch camp, we pitch the camp in a circle. When we looked at the horizon, the horizon was in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in circle." And then you read in Plato somewhere, the soul is a circle. I suppose the circle represents. totality. Within the circle is one thing, it is encircled, it’s enframed. That would be the spatial aspect, but the temporal aspect of the circle is, you leave, go somewhere and come back, the alpha and omega. God is the alpha and omega, the source and the end. Somehow the circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.
BILL MOYERS: No beginning, no end.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, round and round and round. The year, well, this is November again, you know, and we’re about to have Thanksgiving again. We’re about to have Christmas again. And then not only the year, but the month, the moon cycle, and the day cycle. And this is we’re reminded of this when we look on our watch and see the cycle of time, it’s the same hour, the same hour but another day, and all that sort of thing.
BILL MOYERS: Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, because it’s experienced all the time. You experience it in the day and the year, just as we’ve said, and you experience in leaving home, going on your adventure, hunting or whatever it may be, and coming back to home. And then there’s a deeper one also, that mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried it’s for rebirth, I mean, that’s the origin of the burial idea, you’re put back into the womb of Mother Earth for rebirth.
BILL MOYERS: And Jung kept returning to that theme of the circle as being the sort of universal symbol.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, Jung used it as a pedagogical device, actually, what he called the mandala. This was actually a Hindu term for a sacred circle.
BILL MOYERS: Here is one of the pictures.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s a very elaborate mandala. You have the deity at the center, with the power source, the illumination source, and these are the manifestations or aspects of its radiance. But in working out a mandala for oneself, what one does is draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems in your life, the different value systems in your life, and try then to compose them and find what the center is. It’s kind of discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, finding a center and ordering yourself to it. So you’re trying to coordinate your circle with the universal circle......
Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s; he says, "When you reach a certain age," and he wrote this when he was in his 60s or so, "and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order. It seems to have had been composed by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot." So he says, "Who composed this plot?" And he said, "And just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you." Then he says, "Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony," he says, "everything influencing and structuring everything else." And he said, "It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature." That’s a beautiful idea. It’s an idea that occurs in India, in the image of what’s called the "Nee of Indra" or the net of gems. Where it’s a net of gems where every gem reflects all the other ones. And they also have the idea of a spontaneous and simultaneous arising. Everything arises in relation to everything else, and so you can’t blame anybody for anything; it’s all working around. It’s a marvelous idea. It’s as though there were an intention behind it, and yet it all is by chance. None of us has lived the life that he intended."
The Power of Myth, Episode 6 transcript
Chirp Chirp the follow up to this essay
First Unitarian Church of San Jose, a church in the round