In yesterday’s DM, we invoked Mayan scientist José Argüelles, who points us to the power of creativity, art and synchronicity that follows on surrendering the Western Gregorian Time Calendar.
The Mayan sense of Time includes the cycles of the different life forms, the rotation of the seasons, the oceanic times, and the waxing and waning of the moon, the sun with its binary sunspot cycles, the various planets in their orbits, the stars, constellations, and galaxies all form one universal synchronization of innumerable celestial bodies bound together by a common order in time, the synchronic order.
The Mayan Law of Time maintains everything in synchronous relation to everything….This moment-to moment synchronicity is like a focalized telepathic thought beam radiating instantly in every direction faster than the speed of light. Thought “is of the same instantaneous nature as time—faster than the speed of light.”*
As a spiritual theologian, I find José Argüelles’ thinking on a new (and more ancient) understanding of time significant. First, it reminds us that pre-modern mystics like Hildegard, Francis, Aquinas, Eckhart, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich and Nicolas of Cusa all lived before mechanistic time dominated.
Their view of time was not rigidly mechanistic as Pope Gregory rendered it in 1582. “Two devices establish the artificial time: the Gregorian calendar and the mechanical clock.” Both were “firmly in place as the bedrock of the European worldview” by 1618. This perception of time keeps the noosphere in the unconscious, subjected to a value system that emphasizes monetary power (time is money), individual self-interest, competitive struggle, war, nationalism, and the pursuit of novelty and capricious whims (video games, better iPhones, etc). And one might add, billionaires who provide such gadgets and then buy politicians with their earnings.
Secondly, by naming synchronization as central to the time of noosphere, Argüelles is emphasizing the important role of mysticism. Our deep, unitive and mystical experiences occur in a synchronistic sense of time. If it’s true that we are all mystics, then with synchronism arriving more fully, a mystical or unitive view of the universe is at hand on a large scale.
Thirdly, as Argüelles makes explicit, to move beyond mechanistic time is to challenge capitalism. For in modern, capitalistic times we are taught very early that “time means money.” But for Arguelles, the new shift is this: “Time means art.”
Implications are profound for education, religion, politics, economics, art, community building and an increase of joy and happiness. And for the art of arts—ritual. “Without ritual there is no community” teaches indigenous African ritualist, Malidoma Somé.
Argüelles is pointing to an explosion of ritual or ceremony in the coming era of the Noosphere. The Cosmic Mass is primed and ready to go for that moment.
Let us make more art and less money.
Years ago, when I was teaching in Australia, an aboriginal woman said to me: “In our culture, we work four hours a day and the rest of the day we make things.” “What things do you make?” I asked. “Ritual,” she said. “We decorate our bodies to be as beautiful as the snakes and birds we live with. We practice music, instruct the children and prepare the feast that follows.”
Is this not the new work for the future? In ritual we celebrate our common joy and gratitude; our silence and common grief; our creativity, communion and eating together; our bringing in the ancestors to assist us in becoming spiritual warriors ready for the hard work of justice and transformation.
bell hooks wrote that the next revolution will be a revolution in aesthetics. Moving from “time means money” to “time means art” seems to be integral to that non-violent revolution.
*Jose Arguelles, Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness, pp.55f., 66.
“The Cosmic Mass: Reinventing Worship and Religion,” in Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest, pp. 363-383.
Banner image: “Stone version of the Maya 260 calendar at the Smithsonian. Image by Matthew Bisanz. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What does moving from “Time means money” to “Time means art” mean to you? And what would it mean to our culture and our survival as a species? And to other species as well?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint For Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Order of the Sacred Earth:An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action, by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, and Jennifer Listug
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
9 thoughts on “From ‘Time Means Money’ to ‘Time Means Art’: A Mayan Perspective on Time”
Not much….at this moment in TIME….when more urgent problems exist…..and I bet your trip to Australia would have been a lot more inconvenient without a standard arrival and departure time system. Personally, I have a hard enough time adjusting from Standard to Daylight Savings time…….and at my stage of life can allow myself to flow with the sun for rising and sleeping. My daughters, on the other hand, need to be ON TIME for their students. I think you might be getting a bit ridiculous here. Different cultures sometimes have a looser view of time which can be frustrating to westerners, but also can be a valuable lesson. As always, we have much to teach each-other.
Thank you Matthew for today’s beautiful DM on the Sacredness of the Present Moment as experienced by the mystics and Indigenous Spirituality to remind all of us that we all have a unique mystical sacred identity within us capable of living more meaningfully and creatively in Loving Diverse Oneness with-in All of Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Her graceful essential abundance, and All of ongoing Eternal Co-Creation/Evolution of Our Sacred multidimensional/multiverse Cosmos….
It’s a good thing that the realistic Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the present was urgently important to the beaten man whom the Samaritan rescued. The realm of God is present now, calling us to help, reconcile before offering our gifts in the temple, not waiting for the Sabbath to end so that we can pull our ox from the hole. It is not for us simply to trust the future to solve the crises of the day, but to do God’s will today in the person and name of Christ, who did not send the thousands away to elsewhere for food, but told the disciples to feed them at once with the little they had. As Richard Crashaw wrote in *Carmen Deo Nostro*, the Incarnation of the infinite Son of God was/is “eternity shut in a span,/ . . . Heaven in earth and God in man.” Seen this way, the gritty present is the dreamy future. But there is no waiting.
Salutations !
I have been following your input for a couple of months and think you are usually right target.
However what I question is the paradox of encouraging us to live and “Be” in/withNature and still yourself promoting such an online presence , especially offering a retreat that reads like a wellness excursion only for those who can afford it. I challenge you to offer a retreat that truly is ecologically and financially ethical. This reminds me of a conversation I had with the now deceased Willigis Jäger (pioneer in mysticism and modern Spirituality here in Germany). he had just revived as a gift a run down former Benedictine Monastery and was developing the plans for its renovation and use as spiritual center.
I asked him how he would structure it for guests so that there would financial and otherwise equality. He was interested in pursuing that, but the people with money behind the project were not. So we now have Benedictinehof with a very precise hierarchy and atmosphere of wellness -Zen- spirituality. I guess I am just too idealistic . Thank you giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts,Judith
If the statement “Time means money” is a cliché in a world dominated by greed, “Time means art” is more difficult to decipher as it may, for instance, refer to the primary creative experience of the artist or to the secondary experience of the aesthete (or both). I would rather say that “Art means timelessness,” i.e. liberation from time slavery. At any rate, statements starting with “time means. . .” bypass a key question that still divides scientific circles: “What is time?” Nobody really knows and many assume that it is an illusion. Among the latter, Albert Einstein wrote in 1955: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Illusion or not, humans have always tried to keep track of a changing universe by “anchoring” the changes they observe and their interactions with their environment. They did it first with tick marks carved in bones, and later with the tick-tock of clocks that lock us in time-driven lifestyles. Real or not, time makes us tick, oblivious of another dimension called Kairos, “time not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell, a time older than the time of chronometers.”[T. S. Eliot].
Understanding the meaning of time is, however, not a prerequisite to heed today’s invitation to “make more art and less money.”
Looking at time humorously, I can say this. As someone in my seventh decade, I could swear that time has sped up. Lol. Every week when I set up my Monday through Sunday box of daily pills, it seems like I just did that yesterday! Humor aside, I think it’s very interesting to look at time as flexible. Perhaps in the Western world we have been fooled into thinking that time is a set concept, that it moves only forward, and that 24 hours today is exactly the same as 24 hours when I was four-years-old or twenty or when I reach 90, if I do.
I once had an experience during college when, terribly sad and needing to be alone with God, I walked into the woods and cried out to God for what appeared to be three or four hours. When I walked back to campus, I found I had only been gone for about 15 minutes. So, who knows. Freeing our minds to a different possibility seems like a good idea, especially since we need to think differently. Our modern concepts have not brought us to a very good place.
Here’s an interesting article. (Science Focus is a publication of the BBC. https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/the-closer-we-look-at-time-the-stranger-it-gets
I believe art in all of its forms to be a celebration of God, Man and Nature. It is most fitting that we should lean toward these things.
The beginning of my 6 page poem from yesteryear:
COSMO/GENESIS
What time is it?
Is it then? Is it now
How are we in the here and now?
Does it connect with then and there?’
Should we ask where or when?
If we miss it will it come again?
Is this the beginning or is this the end or
do they just roll over again and again?
I recall that the incredible art of the Native Peoples of the Pacific Northwest (think Chief Seattle) was only possible because of all the salmon which made feeding your family easy allowing time for creating art.