A continuation from “Relational Power: Ethics and Agency in a Becoming World”
I. Time is Not a Line
We were taught to see time as a ruler:
Segmented. Straight. Immutable.
But in the relational cosmos,
time is not a container.
It is a mode of unfolding.
It does not pass.
It does not flow.
It arises from the very processes it measures—
time is the name we give to becoming.
II. The Spiral as Symbol
Where the old myth saw time as a track,
the new myth sees a spiral.
Recursive. Patterned. Layered.
Not looping back to sameness—
but folding forward into difference.
Evolution. Memory. Culture. Consciousness.
All are spiralling actualisations of potential.
Every moment is not a point on a line—
it is a cross-section of resonance.
III. Duration, Not Division
The tick of the clock gives us precision.
But the world does not tick.
It pulses. Emerges. Fluctuates.
To live as a process is to feel time not as measurement,
but as texture.
Not as when—but as how.
This is duration—Bergson’s insight.
Not time as a sequence of isolated moments,
but as a living flow of qualitative change.
In this mode, we do not move through time.
We are moved by it, as dancers are moved by music.
IV. Recursion and the Memory of Form
If the cosmos learns,
if it remembers through structure,
then recursion is its grammar.
Patterns return, but transformed.
Mythic cycles. Biological rhythms. Cultural archetypes.
Each is a spiralling of becoming:
meaning instantiated, forgotten, and re-enacted in new form.
We call this memory.
We call it tradition.
We call it growth.
We are not linear creatures.
We are recursive ones.
V. The Meaner as Temporal Participant
The meaner does not simply observe time—
the meaner enacts it.
Every act of construal is temporal:
to symbolise is to stretch the now,
to draw threads of before and after into resonance.
We actualise temporal coherence
in every utterance, ritual, and relation.
Without us, there is no past to remember,
no future to imagine.
Only present processes,
unconstrued.
Time, in this view,
is not something we experience.
It is something we make—in relation.
VI. The End of the Line
The myth of linear time gave us many things:
Progress. History. Destiny. Deadlines.
But it also cut us off from the cyclic, the sacred, the situated.
It made us rush.
It made us forget to spiral.
To return to the grammar of time is to re-weave ourselves
into the music of emergence.
To ask, not what time is it?
But what is becoming, here, now—through us?
Final Image
Time is not the line on which our lives are strung.
It is the harmony in which they resound.
It is the relational field in which the cosmos dances,
and we, as patterns of its meaning,
join the rhythm.
Next Spiral
With time reframed,
a deeper spiral calls.
Let us return to the source of pattern itself:
the sacred.
Next:
“The Sacred as Pattern: Symbol, Resonance, and the Deep Logic of the Real”
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