The Mason and his Consciousness of Time

Nobody can buy life, life is spent and the expense of life is time. As time goes by, life is spent.

To spend your life well, you must spend your time well, and spending your time well means making a good investment of it. If time is well spent, life will be well spent. As Dante Alighieri says: “He who knows the most is the one who most grieves over the loss of time.”

Spending life well means giving time a content, then time is well spent when time lived is given content.

To the extent that time is given a content, a meaning is given to life, to existence.

The meaning of life will be the content that is given to time.

The higher the level of consciousness of a person, the more productive and valuable will be the content that he will give to his time, thus rising towards the sublime and away from the vulgar.

So how do you give time content to give life a sublime meaning?

Such a question has as an answer: in the search for knowledge.

It is in the search for knowledge that the truths are found, those individual and particular truths that the Mason builds every day, his truths, and not that absolute truth by means of which dogma has indoctrinated humanity, worshiping ignorance, since to think that you have the absolute truth, would be to live in the most total and absolute ignorance, thus losing the path of reason.

There are truths, those true that are built every day through experience. The Mason is the fruit of his truths and not of the truth.

Therefore, it is in the search for knowledge that the truths that give content to time and meaning to life are built.

Time

Etymologically the word time comes from the Latin tempus, understood as the duration of the things that are subject to change.

Time in Greek mythology, for example, is symbolically represented by three gods: Chronos, Aion, and Kairos.

Chronos – Saturn for the Romans – is the god of linear and irreversible time that devours everything. It is the chronological time that inevitably passes leading us towards the future and closer to death. He is the god of death.

A reading woman tries in vain to stop Chronos as he passes by; representing the inexorable passing of time. Stipple engraving

IMAGE LINKED:  wellcome collection Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Aion is the god of circular time – a serpent that bites its own tail – is not born, always exists and does not eat anything. It is the time of life. He is the god of life.

Ouroborus – By AnonMoos – Own work, Public Domain

IMAGE LINKED:  wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Between the time of life – Aion – and the time of death – Chronos – there is a god of intermediate time called Kairos, god of human time. Kairos means: “right or opportune moment”.

Kairos 2008. Photo: Sergey Sosnovskiy. museum inscription to the sculpture. Additional information: http://arachne.uni-koeln.de

IMAGE LINKED:  Sergey Sosnovskiy Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Chronos, Aion and Kairos, are represented in the god Janus, lord of triple time, the past (which is no longer), the future (which is not yet), and the present (unavailable moment of space-time that is eternal) .

The human being lives in the intermediate time that is his eternal present in constant change. It is in the intervening time that the Mason formulates the triple question: What are we? Where we come from? Where are we going?

Everything that exists in the universe is conditioned by change, which is the most general form of being for all objects and phenomena. Change is a universal constant, it is movement and interaction.

The only constant and permanent thing in life is change, as Heraclitus said “there is nothing permanent, except change”. Time is change.

Man lacks all power over time because he cannot go back, stop or maintain an instant, or advance time.

Man can only, in a relative way, manage time, and depending on how he manages and invests time, the conditions under which he must live change will depend, which constitutes an authentic experience of time itself.

Man occupies a place in space, a place-space in which is his time, his reality, and the conditions and circumstances of his existence, there is only a mobile and very ephemeral present that inexorably changes towards the future.

So, in the wise and prudent investment of time, one of the main causes of the effects of change in life is found.

Flower of Life Image by Doreen Sawitza from

IMAGE LINKED:  Pixabay Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Life

Life is time, it is change.

Life is a rhythmic phenomenon that develops continuously through the existence of cycles or periods.

For Ilya Prigogine – physicist and chemist of Russian origin, winner of the 1977 Chemistry Prize – life is time that is inscribed in matter and irreversible phenomena are the origin of biological organization. All biological phenomena are irreversible. This irreversibility is a property common to the entire Universe, we all age in the same direction because there is an arrow of time.

Life is the intermediate state between birth and death, in which you struggle to maintain homeostasis in a preferential state.

Well, for this struggle to sustain homeostasis, paradoxically in the face of irreversible biological phenomena that lead to death, be a useful expenditure of energy in the universe, the human being must try to give content to this intermediate state called life.

In classical Greece, for example, for Platonism the meaning of life is found in the achievement of a superior form of knowledge, which is the idea (form) of the good, from which everything good and just obtains utility and value.

In contemporary philosophy, for Pragmatism that suggests that the practical and useful understanding of life is more important than the search for an impractical abstract truth about life, the meaning of life can only be discovered through experience.

In short, in the content that is given to life, there will be the meaning of life and my life.

Flammarian engraving – unknown artist – from Camille Flammarion, L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), pp. 163.

IMAGE LINKED:  Camille Flammarion Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

The content

It is in the mind that we give content to life, since the mind is the laboratory where the here and now are learned, unlearned and relearned, that space-time continuum in which everything that exists and that we call the cosmos takes place.

For Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is all that is, all that was and all that will be”.

It is in the mind that the recognition of our status as homo sapiens-demens in the cosmos develops.

It is in the condition of homo sapiens-demens, postulated by Edgar Morin, that we give content to life, since man is a mixture, a hybrid between reason and emotion, wisdom and madness: “Man is a crazy animal whose madness reason has invented.”

The content of the life of homo sapiens-demens is a function of what he has called “human principles and values”.

The so-called principles and values ​​created by homo sapiens-demens, are nothing other than survival strategies designed to preserve the life and continuity of the species, and maintain an apparent social order at its convenience.

The principles and values ​​of homo sapiens-demens, which have been created based on their achieved truths, are the inputs by virtue of which life is given content, since it is the content of the mind that defines the content of the life.

The higher the truths built by virtue of the knowledge acquired by experience, the more sublime, in a philosophical sense, will be the principles and values that as survival strategies will give content to life, since life must evolve and transcend.

In short, the content of life is in the search for knowledge that allows to improve life, the form of the life condition, to make it evolve and transcend. Here is the work, through individual and discreet work, of every Mason.

Thinking – Image by Gordon Johnson 

IMAGE LINKED:  Pixabay Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Thinking

It is in the equation of time, life and content, that homo sapiens-demens as a free thinker, and particularly in his condition as a Mason, learns and develops the art of living.

Living as a thinker, which differentiates it from the animal, or as Stephen Hawking would say:

“We are just an advanced race of primates on a planet smaller than an ordinary star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”

To think is to reign, Oswald Wirth will say, because the art of thinking – philosophy – allows the Mason to reign over the sense of time, to give a content and a meaning to life.

If the art of living is in thinking, then life is to be measured by intensity rather than duration.

In this sense Lord Chesterfield pointed out:

“Each lost moment is equivalent to a hundred lost qualities and advantages, while each moment well spent is time wisely placed at a very high interest.”

The Mason and his Consciousness of Time – Article inspired by the words of the President of Uruguay Pepe Mujica. UNASUR 2014.