Chapter Two
THE RIVER

1. Free at Last
2. Beyond the Time Flow
3. Time Unmasked
4. The Myth of Time
5. Spun from the Timestream
6. Transcend the Wild Flow
7. Love - The Bridge
8. Truth - The Wayshower
9. A Child of Time

The massive flow wears an urgent aura of unsettling disquietude hanging like a curling mist--communication, clamoring to be heard. To perceive the riverine message, I must become fluid, my thoughts resonant to change . . . . velocity . . . acceleration. 

The river nestles in the unity of the land, impossible of isolation from shore, hill, or overspreading sky. Is not human choosing, also, embedded in a larger design? It, and the river, can lose significance when isolated. 

Choice is defined by a matrix of circumstance. Its power is to modify the circumstance, causing itself thus to be redefined by new detail. The kaleidoscopic streaming of metamorphosing situation is the playing board on which the checkers of decision are positioned by human will. 

The river surges into my sight upstream, out of the blue-cloaked mystery of origins. Like the river of terrestrial life, I think to myself. 

Somewhere, three billion years up the life stream, a trickle of microorganisms wove matlike stromatolites in the mud of an infant world. The trickle swelled and gathered. Hesitatingly at first, then enthusiastically, the hand of evolution experimented with organic enstructuration. Smooth-segmented trilobites swarmed onto steaming Cambrian plains. Jurassic sauropods rose up, followed by creeping reptiles and birds and later by a tumbling stream of dogs, beavers, rabbits, and peccaries. 

Here, at the straightaway where I stand, humanity has arrived. Life has climbed out of the narrow well of the instant into consciousness that has the ability to be free of the bonds of programmed response. At last, the ribbon of unreeling time has endowed life with the power consciously to select values as the basis of action. 

To be devoid of a navigational sense of the torrent of temporality is to be captive to each circumstance, grasping at blurred goals as they bounce by, like a wandering child of Hamlin, bedazzled by tunes from an unseen Piper. 

Shall I follow the drumbeat of educational endeavor banging at the windows of my soul? Or stride in cadence to the windy trumpet-call of professional aspiration? Empty gains may lie in those directions, poor substitutes for the fullness of the love of family and friends. 

Should I choose a different current in the complex event stream, exalt a close circle of personal relationships, perhaps, above all else? A warm glow might ensue--but also, all too possibly, creeping awareness of a life narrowly distributed and an existence lacking in greater meaning. 

Promising, but dimly understood, goals reach out slippery hands to me from within the swift waters. Patriotic undertakings. Group projects. Public service. But beyond the first comforting surge of relevance, how often hides the chilling reality of other, more sweet satisfactions, lost? 

Always another decisional juncture. Shearing influences and pressures brought by other persons. Execute a purely rational decision and face charges of icy emotions. Give in to compassionate solicitude and gaze past at the lightless pit of emotionalism. Pleas and threats pound at the citadel of the will, squirming for entry. Like viruses intent on injecting their living patterns into the reproductive apparatus of protoplasmic cells, they attempt to force one to decide in ways not of one's own choosing, to supplant will with tendencies. 

Never, I see now, never--if I guide myself solely within the reference frame of the roiling stream--can I transcend the wild flow and its confusing, shifting tensions. No choice-affixing formula could anticipate the factors of body, mind, and heart that uniquely imbue each situation. 

Rocks lurk in the roaring temporal stream, rocks capable of smashing dreams. Short-lived and localized values are frail craft. As a man who contravened deep personal values on behalf of a political administration once mused when facing prison, 

"Even empires fade" . . . . 

From the stillness of the shore, I contemplate the coursing water. One can navigate a river by observing features on the land or in the heavens. 

Can I steer through the river of time by looking beyond it toward timeless realities? 

Suddenly I see the obvious, which for so long has eluded me. Lasting fulfillment can only come from setting goals that do not lose their luster with time. I must perceive and select changeless values to serve as the basis for my personal goals. 

It is in the barren seasons when tales are told. The featureless river, emboldened by the temporary plainness of the land, waxes talkative, endlessly lapping at the shore's ear with accounts of the life history of each fish it has spawned and the circumstances of the numerous creatures in its murky depths. 

Narratives relating to the great custodians who tend the world mechanism have always thrilled me. Once I listened with wide, youthful eyes to descriptions of Jack Frost, pixie painter of the world's brilliant autumn leaves. Trudging to and from school, I sometimes half-expected to see him in the foliage, palette in one hand and brush in the other, working his chromatic magic. 

I have learned from the Jack Frost story and a host of other traditions. Narratives about Odin and the Gods of the North and their Rainbow Bridge into Valhalla. About the fateful encounter of Paris, royal shepherd boy, with the Olympian goddesses Aphrodite and Minerva and later with the besieging hordes of Agamemnon. About fiery tongues descending on the Apostles at Pentecost two thousand years ago. 

There is freedom in being able to evaluate segments of a claim on individual merits without compulsion to accept or reject the thesis as a total. The annual coloration of the land can be accepted whatever the cause, pixie or temperature. So, also, the concept of a variegated inner light of intellectuality and spirituality (like a rainbow bridge) leading one to an exalted state of being. Or appreciation of the profound discord that can ensue when one presumes to deal with divinity divided--a paradoxical contradiction in terms and an impossibility. 

I can appreciate the excitement of the Apostles' preaching on the day of their visitation, whether the fiery tongues were figurative or literal. 

Now I face a tradition about something called time, flowing invisibly, impalpably, metamorphosing what IS into what WILL BE. How can I hope to transcend a reality so vaguely defined? 

In the river before me, vortices spin themselves into conical forms. They whisk about, then unwind themselves into nonexistence. Cyclical motion is a creator of illusion. An electron flashes around a circular route, spinning into being a hollow ball thousands of times its own size. A rotating fan blade weaves into existence a hazy disk of motion that can be touched. 

Objects, I see, are balloons blown up into the world of form by internal motion. This line of thought, stimulated by the motions of the river, seems to be putting me on the trail of some kind of an understanding of time. It all has to do with motion . . . . 

Suppose the motions constituting my life processes were to be slowed down by several orders of magnitude. In such a condition, my breathing would come incredibly slowly and my words would drip from peculiarly unquivering lips like beads of molasses. Movement seeming slow to my associates would streak me by too fast for perception. To those around me, my life span would seem lengthened. 

I, however, would see the world and everyone else speed up. I would see time accelerated. 

Suppose my bodily processes had instead been miraculously halted for a thousand years as measured by a clock laid beside me in a secret cavern. Generations and empires might rise and pass as I lay in the hidden vault. The motions of time would grind my clothes into dust as minerals suspended in groundwater, dripping from the cathedral ceiling, erected calcareous icicles above and below me. 

With the return of consciousness, I would feel as if no time had passed. But the clock beside me would belie my feelings. 

Would time have been altered by this hypothetical manipulation of motion in my bodily processes--or only my perception of time? 

Imagine an icy sphere of absolute zero temperature enclosing one-half of the universe, stopping all motion in it for a thousand years as observed by the other half of creation. If the frozen half of the cosmos could then be reconstituted and re-imbued with motion, the universe would subsequently be divided in opinion over the matter of the current time, each half considering the other to be in error in the amount of one millennium. 

Time would apparently have gone on as usual in the warmer half of the universe; therefore, maybe only time perception in the colder climes would have been altered, and not time itself. 

But what if the icy sphere were in concept to be drawn around the whole creation? 

No clock would tick, no water droplet fall to the ground in all the hovering worlds. No grain of sand would shift. Throughout the vast, lightless galaxies, no wind would stir. 

Were motion then to be resumed--or even were it not--would time have passed during the period of motionlessness? Would there have been a period of motionlessness? If so, how much? A second? A billion years? 

Motion would have been stopped; and as a consequence, time--according to all possible tests and observations--would have ceased to be. 

It seems that time is just a word for motion. 

Once this professor returned to me a problem that he had graded as incorrect though the answer matched the one he had written on the blackboard. I inquired. Yes, he replied, my approach and answer were valid. But he stood by the grade. No credit. 

Then this teacher gave me a personal lecture--a learning experience that has remained with me ever since. I had made one mistake, he said, committed one unacceptable error in judgement. I had chosen abstraction when more direct approaches were available. 

And I had thought that abstract reasoning was desirable in science. 

Not so, he said, not so. One should not willingly pursue theories beyond the bounds of clear visualization. Then, in earnest tones, he told me about some disasters encountered by scientists succumbing to the lures of abstraction. An upper atmospheric ion density calculation yielding ridiculous numbers because of an invalid assumption. An orbital calculation meant to use the gravity of a nearby planetary satellite for a whipping motion but that would have directed a spacecraft to within centimeters of the lunar body's center. 

My teacher's appeal transformed my thinking. Ever since, I have been guided by his admonishment, experiencing freedom, certitude, and a certain joy in its simple power. 

Now, contemplating the flow of the river, I evaluate the universally accepted story about the reality of time. I decide that I believe without believing. As a patron in a darkened theater enters an unfolding drama, remaining aware that it is fiction, I subscribe to the uncritically promulgated concept of time only conditionally. 

Time is like a woolen blanket. A blanket might be considered real, but it is a derivative reality--a form, a pattern, not real to as primal a degree as the thread containing its substance. 

Time is only relatively real, not to the same degree as space, mother of the motion summoning it into being. An instrument of artistic creation more dazzling than the magical brush of Jack Frost, time paints the universe in tones of hard and soft, large and small, planet and person. And I am a creation of its artistry, a drifting vortex, a pattern in its fluid substance as it burbles beside the motionless banks of eternity. 

But I have more to learn about time and timelessness. There is more to this story, I know. For my heart, though it, too, is a pattern cast in the motional fabric of time, tells me with undeniable conviction that I can choose to be more. 

I might appear to be the initiator and consummator of my basic life activities: breathing, eating, reproducing. But smaller hands than mine direct these pursuits. 

Do I really assimilate the oxygen, as it seems? No. I as organism only convey it into the hollow of my lungs. From there my living cells take it on, transporting it through subcutaneous canals to their waiting dependents, who unlock its energies within their protean forms. And when I exhale, I merely release an accumulation of cellular outbreathings that have been consigned to me for disposal. 

Thus I imitate, as an aggregate, the activities carried on by my small builders. 

In taking nourishment, the similitude continues. I masticate the food and dispatch it to my stomach, but my Lilliputian sponsors actually assimilate it. 

Even sexual union is presaged in archetypical cellular roots. The male cell, racing through organic veils and along membranous causeways, sets the masculine example by finding and penetrating the female. She, in awaiting and receiving him and gestating their intergenetic offspring, lays out the feminine plan. 

These thoughts illuminate my contemplation of the activities of life and time as the waters of the river stream past. A momentary breeze puffs my hair into a dancing, silken centipede which, its brief life spent, relaxes back into place. Rippling sounds flutter gently into my awareness as I consider the import of what the river is opening up to me. Facets of my humanness raise themselves up into my awareness from their shadowy, sheltered places and step forward, peeling off their disguises and standing revealed to me as echoes of a cellular universe. 

My very nature as a human of the male sex, I begin to see, drifts up from microscopic ante-entities. In procreation, it is the straining spermatozoon who leaps frantically ahead while the ovum coolly waits. These differential attributes of being rise from the dichotomous bits of gendered life and soar up organic ramparts of enstructuration to collective expression. With primeval power they infuse man with a fiery soul to wax restive and invest woman with a fluid spirit to stand calm, imparting identity to place and situation. 

Thus the drives of time construct me. 

My body cells are in turn activated to their pursuits from deeper levels, submicroscopic regions where nascent motion stirs and aggregates into whirring atomic particles. Where phantasmic spheroids encounter one another and embrace, weld themselves into vibrating molecules, pile up into sloshing chemicals. 

At each consolidation, newer realities are born. Compounds mechanistically patterned and kinetically vitalized strike living cells into being, endowing them with drives and reactions. Tissues develop. Organs. And a human being steps forth, crisscrossed at multiple levels with a net of behavior spun from time itself. 

Self-images of a lifetime are slipping from me as if they had never been. My precedents and primalities, my dependencies and sponsors, are at last becoming known. I am a creature of time spun out of the motions that comprise the timestream. 

But my teacher the ceaseless river instructs me otherwise. What I have received up to this point is only prerequisite to more things that I have not known. 

To my mind comes a picture of slippery water molecules sliding effortlessly past one another in fluid unattachment. Under the right conditions, these freest of molecules (except for those of gases) can abandon their footloose existence for crystalline pursuits. Becoming builders of frigid fairylands, they blow feathery fingers of rime ice and, where space tumbles in profusion, pile glacial ice up into colossal arctic mountains. 

Crystals embody motionlessness and hardness. Each elementary crystalline block of tetrahedral silicate comprises four atoms of oxygen hanging at the vertices of a diminutive pyramid and one silicon atom at its center. Internal motion manifest as intramolecular force binds these into a unit. Clusters of these submicroscopic prisms cling together, climb out of invisibility, become gleaming crystals--planes and angles reflecting the pyramidal arrangements of their invisible predecessors. 

Motion, therefore, as in the frozen water and angular tetrahedral silicate, sponsors stillness. 

And why not? asks my mind, in the vast assurance of afterthought. Does not every speeding orbit center around stillness? Does not substance contain atoms plus space? Motion, but stillness, too? 

As I ponder these things under a cobalt sky folding softly around my motion-bound being and embracing the curve of the spinning earth, I come to understand that motion alone does not comprise time, but the silver and onyx of motion and motionlessness bound together as one. 

Time and timelessness are my two primordialities, one creative of my being and the other consummative. My changeless sponsor, timelessness, is the wellspring of my aspiration to attain immutable values. My mutable forbear, time, who has produced me in this, my earlier phase, and to whom like a prodigal child I now have come, whispers tenderly to me in the surge and flow of the river, assuring me that with my multikinetic heritage, I can assuredly succeed. 

It would seem that there is no pushing the restless stream backward. But in formulating this thought, I am employing concepts. I should never forget this. Forward and backward are human inventions. Who knows the parameters that really constrain the world? 

Did I have the sense, many years ago, of a river, when I was old and at the close of my life? 

Yes, yes I think I did. Of being sped irresistibly forward. I had lived the years allotted to me. The fullness of my time had flown. I was old. Old. 

"But is it here already?" 

Astonishment in the realization. 

"It went so fast, my life." 

I had one minute left to live. It balanced on the cutting edge of time, so small, yet so significant. 

It shrank to a second. Then only a fraction of a second remained to me. 

The death swoon. Dark water pouring from a broken vase. Senses stilled. No world. Consciousness fading. 

Hanging suspended at the trailing tip of consciousness in the final microsecond, expanded in its intensity. 

A question echoing through my mind in the lucid tones of my inner voice. 

"Was there no purpose to my life?" 

Then, one half of my mind becoming transformed, becoming my own objective judge at the time of death. 

"What unselfish thing did you do when you were alive?" Emotionless. Commanding. 

"I've done unselfish things." 

"What things?" Demanding. 

But every apparently selfless act that my memory could summon up, I saw now, was tinged with self-interest. 

No reason to lie. Who to fool now? 

Intensely I searched my past. Replays flashing across my mind. 

And my cry in the darkness. 

"Oh, God, if I could only do it over!" 

Then . . . living consciousness. I feel my body, the softness of a bed. My memories--not those of an elderly person, but of a man in his thirties. 

Air fills my lungs and light frames the window. 

Beside me, breathing softly, my dear wife. 

I have been given a second chance. Never mind the details, never mind whether those forgiven years were dreamed or lived. The intensity and the truth are enormous. 

I know what life is for and shall not be found wanting again. 

For it is not one's perfection in expressing the desire to do to good to others, but that sublime desire itself, that links one to highest destiny. Such a desire is love. 

A sense within me speaks, telling me that love is the bridge from time to timelessness, from the finite to the infinite. Love is the unity of infinity perceived by finite personality. Love is the tone in true choice and the luminosity in timeless values. 

I shall develop a sensitivity to the diverse currents in the river of temporality which immerses me. They are my steppingstones. None is constant. Temporal understandings and situations change and vanish. But truth wafts from one to another, investing them briefly, lighting a succession of them in a transcendent path to the realities of the shore. 

My view of truth is necessarily distorted by the temporality that immerses me like a turbulent, shimmering river. But time, I now realize, is no enemy. Time is the womb that has conceived, and now matures, me. 

The river is my natural estate in this phase of my being, a dynamic world of opportunity, of metamorphosing potencies, where tadpoles become frogs. 

Changeless truth glimpsed through the coursing timestream appears to shift. Truth as related to time is relative. To navigate the timestream under the guidance of timeless values, I must remain pliant, must remind myself that goals, as I perceive them in my time-bound world, can be no more than flickering, inaccurate, unstable representations of changeless values. Dynamism must characterize my process of choice. No single current shall propel me to my destination, but a succession of them. 

And I must realize that self-centeredness is not true choice and does not lend for survival or even for meaning in the rushing river of time. In the metamorphosing rush of temporality, where neither constancy nor fixity exists, the idea of an absolute frame of reference centering in oneself is absurd. 

My basis of choice must be grounded in the concept of a consistency superior to myself, within which I am a small but significant element. I must be facile to select new goals as the flow of circumstance dictates. All must be projections of the timeless, underlying unity of which they are only my changing perceptions. 

These insights of the river wash through my consciousness, echoing the refrain that choice is not the act of impressing one's will upon others. We each travel our own complex currents. Sometimes, for a while, we journey together. Then we diverge again to our own destinies. 

Is it cowardly to employ flexibility in goal setting? Weak-willed to revise immediate goals as the tides change? Self-abnegating to give preference when possible to the choice of others? No. All of these personality movements are based on values that lie behind the fleeting moment. 

Perception of the nature of choice evolves in each life. One person might render allegiance to its most rudimentary conception: materialistic dominance. Another might pursue its highest temporal interpretation: high principles. 

But beyond even principles, which are formulations of conduct couched in terms of temporal realities, hovers the way of timeless values--uncapturable, ever manifest through new sequences of principles and situations. This way is an invisible path, for it is transcendent truth, forever unformulatable. 

But it can be lived. 

Riding the waves of time promises to be an invigorating adventure. I am somewhat inept now, a new traveler. But skill will develop. With experience, I shall become a long-legged water strider of time, skimming naturally and gracefully over the surface of the rushing event stream. 

Is the water glass half full or half empty? Does reality lurk fiercely, or does it watch benevolently, from behind the temporal curtain? My answer to this directs my destiny. 

I feel my relationship with reality suggested in Claude Monet's painting, "Childhood Garden." A child on a flowing path. Dapplings of light and shade. Towering sunflowers. A friend nearby. Discreetly behind, a watching adult form. The natal home receding in the background. Overhead, bright blue space and fleecy white clouds. 

I am a child. It is good if I take myself only so seriously. Worldly dignity is a postured thing. It stiffens one so that the river, instead of transporting, batters. 

To draw timeless values from the event stream in the living of life is high art. Values pattern the soul. They shine in personal actions which, like reflected light, reveal the contours of one's being. 

In my study resides a copy of "Diatonic Major and Minor Scales" for the classical guitar. It was written by Andres Segovia. In the introduction, he writes: 

"Thanks to the independence and elasticity which the fingers develop through the study of scales, the student will soon acquire a quality which is very difficult to gain later; physical beauty of sound. I say physical, because sonority and its infinite shadings are not the result of stubborn will power but spring from the innate excellence of the spirit." 

Sometimes I used to ponder his meaning. Then I saw it live. I was seated in a room with the man who had published these particular scales, a music publisher and instructor of the classical guitar. A staff member entered. Someone was in the store, he said (the publisher also sold guitars), and wished to see him. Ushered in, a young man related that he was expected to play at a party but, being a visitor to the city, had not brought his guitar. 

Without a pause, the teacher said to his assistant, "Get the Tatay." 

When it had been carried in, he placed the graceful instrument, trimmed with gleaming silver, into the visitor's hands and said quietly, "Play." Leaning back, he gazed up at the ceiling, nodding as the youth's hands drew out melodious streams of the compositions of Carcassi, Villa Lobos, and Beethoven. 

As the last crystal note hung over us, the teacher spoke to his assistant, "Let him take it," and turned back to me. 

I wondered about the connection in that extraordinary teacher's mind, and in the mind of the maestro whom he so revered, between musical beauty and human character. Even in my puzzlement I was moved at the event and its quiet elegance, knowing that something had happened for which I had not had the eyes. 

I know now that it was not the skill of the visitor to which my teacher had listened, but truly the person's spirit. For one cannot disguise the product of one's heart. 

In that simple act he was a greater teacher than I understood. 

A friend once confided to me about visiting a police station to attend to a traffic ticket. Surrounded by policemen and bustling activity, he had felt a surge of gratitude that they were faithfully carrying out their function. Not as officers, but in obedience to some higher mandate of being. 

Everyday living is not meaningless. A gift may be temporal, but not necessarily the giving. It depends in large part on the intent of the giver. Innate drives, though they are but brush marks of time, can be used to express timeless values. They are the vessels of the soul's expression. 

Time streams through the ages, raising up worlds and races. Its passage in the lives that it creates brings forth a song. Comprehending the tune, one can sing it sweetly, even evoke joyous recognition in others. 

The breeze is beginning to turn cooler. With a start, I realize that my contemplation of the river has ended. Under the tutelage of the river, I have found a second element of the inner landscape of choice. At the foot of the mountain of high perspective, I have found the river of transcendent becoming.