Looking at life through a rear view mirror
by Bob on September 8, 2007
Looking at life through a rear view mirror. That's right. That's the image I wanted to think about.
It came to me in a van with a bunch of friends on our way somewhere and I was looking through the right window from the second seat in the middle. I saw this wide angle mirror on the right looking back at the world. So I was chatting with my friends in the big van but just for fun, I never looked ahead but only at the wide angle side rear mirror lens. It was an interesting view on life and the road we were on. Never to look ahead.
That's an interesting metaphor. Getting stuck looking through a rear view mirror at life itself. Never ahead. Only backwards. So we are then trapped in the past. That is a real problem in life. In the bible, Lot's wife looked back at the city being destroyed and was turned into a pillar of salt. People can get stuck in the past forever. That can be a blessing or a curse. It depends on what we want.
Of course, the past, present, and future are convenient inventions of mankind, actually in one theory is we go along with Lewis Carroll in his "Through the Looking Glass" or with Dr. Jung and his Synchronicity and collective subconscious. Lewis Carroll had the White Queen say to Alice that it's a poor sort of memory which only works backwards.
So, in principle, getting stuck anywhere in our seemingly imagined time-space isn't necessarily a bad thing. Look at H.G. Wells and his "Time Machine". After all, shamans from all over the world know that the dead and the living, time and space are conjoined in one big non-linear world. That's why, to a shaman, flying out of body, through time and space is not a big deal.
It's just hard to sell in the West. We need to have trains run on time, so we say "Distance = Rate x Time" as an agreed upon illusion and convenience. Einstein knew better with his theories. But he still sometimes took the train rather than a magic carpet ride. We need to measure the illusive concept of "progress". We need to show that someone worked forty hours this week and produced 200 widgets. The assembly line of life. The factory of being alive.
But higher spiritual beings know that this illusion is an illusion. They know that when we dream, whatever that means in relation to reality and being awake, we are in touch with all time and all space and all spirits, living and dead and perhaps if we take Lewis Carroll to an extreme, all spirits and souls yet to be born.
But, unless you are on a mountain top in the Himalayas, meditating, one must take the train to work. So we settle for the pragmatic aspect of the illusion, forgetting that it's likely or at least possibly an illusion. We allocate one hour to go sixty miles, and say that we'll be there in an hour, because we'll drive at 60 mph. Everything just works out tidily.
But as the figure of the Roman deity Janus teaches us in this matter, one is looking simulaneously at the past and the present, if not the future. Janus was the god of beginnings and endings, of new opportunities, and gateways, and also of doors. So we have derived in language, the month of January, named after Janus as the doorway and opportunity to the new year. And next time you see a janitor, he was named after Janus, for part of the janitor's responsibility is to open and close doors. And have the keys to the doors.
So, if we get stuck in the past, or in fact see present life through a rear view mirror, we are possibly doomed to not see what is coming or see where we are. And that is a problem in a world where progress is measured and considered essential. Some cultures are not philosophically believers in what we call progress, and they don't mind bending the concept of time a bit.
One, however, by looking at life through a rear view mirror make all future experiences be pre-destined by the past which is considered an unfortunate thing.
We live for new experiences in our modern world.
Except when we hit the time-space continuum slippage, "deja-vu". Then it's a slippery slope again.
Historians always seem to tell us that when we don't study the past, we are doomed to repeat it. The trouble is that the number of book volumes describing the past is so large that were we to read them all, we would never have time to use that wisdom in the present or future.
Well, I guess we could look through the front windshield of a car on a highway through a mirror in the read of the car. But I am not sure anyone but Einstein and Jung or Lewis Carroll would know what that meant. Pity that.