Time-Coulisse

Poet’s Cosmology

I’ll never know how it was I came to have a memory before time began.

Was there an irregularity in the singularity,

a hair in the ointment of the Big Bang?

That fiery night I felt each exquisite desire embody as a point of light.

Like drops of dew they appeared from nowhere

and spun off like tops to bifurcate and bifurcate again.

Time’s birth cry rocketed through the chambers of the universe

but it changed not

the rose petals of Love on the altar of the heart.

This inner compass, the longing for return, sailed through

the field of Becoming like a lark

heading towards Home.

Although this poem of mine seems fanciful and maybe even a little humorous I am quite serious about its content. If indeed there really was a Big Bang then there must have been some irregularity, some tiny difference in the initial conditions that allowed the bang to blow up and blossom into the wildly diverse universe we inhabit. This tiny fluctuation of initial conditions can be seen as a memory of what had come before the Big Crunch and it preceded the advent of time.

          The screens (coulisses) in the wings of a theater are the settings for various parts of a play. The shifting of these coulisses moves the story of the plot forward. Likewise the shuffling of time fragments in our mind streams is a time-coulisse. These fragments jostle one another moving from recent past to future to distant past in any number of variations in a time fluid mess. You will be quite familiar with this if you have ever attempted meditation. So although our logical mind tells us that time flows in only one direction the mind’s own activity tells a different story. This mix-up of time flow in our own minds surely opens the door to the possibility of memory before time.

          The possibility of backflow in time sequence makes an impact on storytelling and in understanding our own lives. Our lives apparently begin at birth. But what if they didn’t? What if reincarnation really exists? Then like the Big Crunch almost all memory of past lives is crunched out, forgotten. We begin anew with only a hidden fragment of a desire that propelled us into birth. This hidden desire will be guiding our steps and shaping our lives. This is a time-coulisse revealing the deeper hidden causes unapparent in our lives.

Causes are not just learned behaviors as psychology teaches us. They are that, yes, but the cause of causes is desire. Desire weaves the fabric of our lives, the stories we tell ourselves and others. Desire is a power of infinite strength spinning out stories endlessly. At last tired by the round of storytelling, I loosened my grasp on time, desire fell away and I found myself in the eternal present, a blissful state of timelessness where desire has never arisen.

This is the journey I have been on in this life.