From time to time, regular commenter Formerly Amherst and I go a little off-topic from my usual politics commentary due to our shared interests in religion and folklore. Sometimes these conversations
get pretty deep in the esoteric, but I admit, for my part, I think there's educational value for anyone, spiritualist or not. In an earlier post,
the subject of time and evil came up. The topic of evil as such isn't out of place on a blog that occasionally deals with human miseries like war, murder, torture, and rape. The relationship of the moral concept of evil is entirely necessary in some ways to making sense of history. I think that different cultures have had different perspectives on the externality of the existence of evil versus the "devil within", but a common strand is causality: people beget actions that beget consequences that produce suffering.
This is a linear way of looking at the experience of time. Wrongs accumulate. Historically, we sit astride a mount of blame and are headed for a wall of guilt.
There's another way of looking at it, though. Satayana said those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it; Faulkner said that "the past is never dead--it's not even past." In some ways, the perception of linear time, both as an individual, and as to the accretions of history, aren't really valid. Humans seem to make the same mistakes over and over because our perceptions are very limited.
And our perception of linear time itself?
