Not when, but 'everywhen': Do aboriginal peoples experience time nonlinearly?

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations

This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cultures and mythologies too. An excessive preoccupation, in modern societies, with this “manufactured quantity” - along with an acute segmentation of time - can make us too obsessed with the moment. We begin to think in terms of drops and bucketsful of water rather than seeing the river itself.
 

A cardinal tenet of the mythology of the Australian aboriginals is “The Dreaming” also referred to as the Eternal Dream Time. This dreamtime is the sacred abode of the ancestors who taught humans the skills needed for life. Although the dreamtime has echoes of a past heroic age, it cannot be fixed in time. As anthropologist W.E.H. Skinner pointed out, “It was, and is, everywhen.” This mythology reflects an endless succession of events symbolised by the cycle of the seasons.

This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cultures and mythologies too. The British author and commentator on comparative religion, Karen Armstrong, notes how the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, also describes a similar ineffable event that happened during a “Sacred Time of ‘everywhen’ [echoing Skinner]”. This creation event was not a one-off event; the creation battle against chaos still goes on.

In Hinduism, time is divided into four yugas which add up to 12,000 divine years (one divine year being equal to 360 human years). At the end of this cycle of yugas, Kalki the next avatar of the gods will appear on Earth, vanquish evil and herald the return to a golden age.

Buddhism considers the circular nature of time from a more metaphysical perspective. Closely related to this is the concept of samsara, the (seemingly endless) cycle of birth and death and rebirth. We are unable to escape this pattern because of our ignorance. But a sure way to break this sequence is to follow the dharma wheel (another symbol of cyclicity)

Jokhang Dharma Wheel (credit: archer10 (Dennis)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)

and adhere to the eightfold path. We thus see a continuity of perceiving time as non-linear right from aboriginal myth to later belief systems.

There could be a number of reasons for this perception of time as circular. In the absence of other more “rational” explanations, this view provides hope and optimism when facing the ravages of the seasons or the despair and death of kin. As Armstrong explains it, “human beings needed an influx of the divine energies that held disorder and disaster at bay.” Hence the belief and hope that the good times will reassert themselves. Mircea Eliade thought that a subconscious “terror of history” impelled people to look for a Land Beyond Time. Mythologies that according to cultural historian Walter Ong convert events from the temporal to atemporal “disarm” time and provide relief from its apparent irreversibility. Biologically too, before the advent of clocks, the only way we could measure the passage of events was through the circadian rhythms within our bodies and natural phenomena like the appearance and disappearance of the sun. If at all we measured time, we used much longer intervals compared to today.

But science has since dramatically changed our perception of time: we now quantify time in smaller and smaller intervals. A major reason for this is with the rise of industrialisation, we have evolved a strong (egregious?) nexus between work and time. Modern science identified natural laws provided a strong impetus for such mechanisation. But, ironically, a central argument of classical physics is that natural events are time invariant. That is, an egg can unscramble itself… in theory. But we know that reality is different. The second law of thermodynamics and entropy later put an end to this contradiction by stressing the irreversibility of time. Such linearity of time does have its benefits, though. For instance, differentiating between past, present and future helps us maintain the narrative of a coherent self. But an excessive preoccupation with this “manufactured quantity” (as Australian cosmologist Hermann Bondi referred to it) - along with an acute segmentation of time - can make us too obsessed with the moment. We begin to think in terms of drops and bucketsful of water rather than seeing the river itself.

Herbert River, Qld, Australia (credit: Willem van Aken/CSIRO/CC BY 3.0)

(Heraclitus would, of course, tell us that it is not the same river every time we look at it. But we could argue also that at a more cosmic level it is the same river which flows into the ocean which the sun evaporates and converts to rain which in turn swells the rivers.)