“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard
Lately I’ve been noticing the layers of preferences and how they appear to reflect rates at which I experience the flow of time. If a preference – the result of an earlier choice – is immediate, like what on your dinner plate you will eat first, the distance between the choice, the completion and the enjoyment are minimal and there is very little, if any, deliberate thinking going on. If the choice is that you’d like to change careers, it will take a while before you can enjoy the results.
The time between the initiation of the choice and its fruition is much longer. It will take planning, and a multitude of choices along the way. The result of each choice will have its own brief experience of fulfillment, if one takes the moment to enjoy them, but the end result will be enjoyed after transiting a vast number of choice/appreciation cycles (frequencies).
Now one of the results of long-term planning is that some choices will become automated along the way. That is, they will no longer require conscious thought since they are a single component that is in line with the long-term intent. If you are training for a new line of work, taking your books to class is not something you think about, you just do it. It is a choice that has become a habit and is just part of the process towards your goal. Your long-term pursuit is to have that new career and the fruit of that intent. Its enjoyment will be experienced when you land a job doing what you want to do. You may or may not take the time to experience the satisfaction of individual results along the way. That will depend on what you are focused on in the moment. The long-term goal’s satisfaction will be commensurate with the effort you’ve put into it, but you’ll have to wait until that goal is achieved.
My point is that we make choices at varying timescales – different rates of experiential time – like when to do your homework or planning your retirement. Each has a timeframe that determines when, or if – some may be lost “in time” – you will experience the “beauty” or “perfection” of the completion of that intent. So it seems to me that what is perceived as beautiful or perfect depends on the timescale at which you are viewing the results. There is satisfaction both in turning in a paper on time and landing the job that you’ve been striving for. Depending on what frame of reference we are experiencing from, we may be more or less conscious of each, but in this example those commitments, those choices, are part of a singular process – the energetic stream of one choice – all headed towards a particular goal, as well as the experience of pleasure that will result in its fulfillment.
I am coming to believe that we are a component of the Earth’s long-term intent – at least in this stellar locale – and our immediate choices with their resulting pleasures tend to mask the long-term plan that it – and us as parts of it – will enjoy should we become aware of the process at the Earth’s relative timeframe. As we look back at the choices which lie in our lineage – “understand it backwards” as Kierkegaard says – and see what it is that we are collectively committed to, we can take in a more and more of a global (Earth-like) view. Those intentions lie behind our current conscious choices and are thus the often the imperceptible impetus that steer both those conscious choices and which also corral the contours of what might be imagined.
So we are, in part, the automated choices of Earth heading towards its intent – “lived forwards” as quoted above. But we also represent the localized imagination of Earth’s potential, directly choosing, to a degree, what its intent might look like as expressed in our particular environment. To the degree that we can include contexts closer to its intent – by way of plumbing our own ancient choices – then the better we can manifest the perfection envisioned by its intent-stream. We are aspects of that stream, manifestations of past choices, downstream fulfillment mechanisms. I think that what is referred to as “psychological development” is a reflection of our particular capacity to span these depths. The closer we are to Earth’s intent, the better able we will be to imagine possibilities that are in line with it and to consciously choose to manifest that which best represents it. Access to that depth will also add layers to what we can enjoy as that manifestation is expressed in this world.
With all of that said, I think that we can alter the rate at which we experience time – from clock time to Earth-time to Universe-time – so to appreciate each and every experience at any temporal rate that we choose to (e.g. “time flies when your having fun” and “a watched pot never boils”). It’s all a matter of how narrow or wide we are opening our aperture of consciousness to any particular event. In a way it could be said that from an experiential perspective, the short can be made long and the long short. Another way to say it is that depending on our way of focusing, short and long experiences are a matter of choice. As Einstein said “Time is an illusion”.