A train (or the thought of the industrial revolution i.e., progress/decline, profit/loss) is restricted to its tracks; when it needs to change, all it can do is go faster or slower on those tracks. If transformation is called for, the best it can do is go faster more urgently. It interprets this urgency as being behind time or running out of time. To transform, it must give up its “train nature” and become a new temporal being. The tracks then become irrelevant…
We all are familiar with the stress of not having enough time in our lives, along with its pervasive mood of accelerating urgency. It is much more difficult to understand this common, even ubiquitous feeling, as a culturally informed, materialistic interpretation of a great mystery of transformation. This essay traces a forty year path of refining my interpretations of this mystery. This path was once described in terms of the refining fires of suffering and hell. An equivalent phenomenology is still available to us in our contemporary imaginative descriptions of entering a black hole, for example. My essay shows how our materialistic consciousness can be refined i.e., “go under” in order to “rise up” to the psychological level from which the mystery of transformation is now beckoning us.
Refinement in the fires of hell can lead us from a terrified, apotropaic stance towards the unknown future to a gesture of submission to and welcoming the new being. Accordingly time itself will transform from its present painful and stress-producing acceleration to another kind of temporal existence altogether. At this moment in history we can only gather hints of such an existence through the efforts of individuals willing to undergo the fires of hell. All my essays, including this one, are one man’s attempt to gather such hints.
