CONSCIENCE, TIME, AND LIFE
A Perceiver object which is static is „dead.‟ In contrast, I suggest that a
Perceiver belief can be made „alive‟ by adding a sense of time. We see this
principle when we look at the rituals of religion. People may die, places
may change, civilizations may even rise and fall, but religious rituals seem
to live on. They are transferred endlessly from one person and one
generation to the next.
Like most aspects of religion, rituals contain the essential ingredients of
an internal world object: They are supported by Perceiver belief and they
claim to help a person navigate his way through the emotional stages of
living. Rituals, however, also include a sense of time—they connect
together experiences which occur one after another—and I suggest that it is
the addition of time which gives them life. Think, for example, of the ritual
of the Holy Eucharist. There is the breaking and the eating of bread, and
the lifting up and the drinking of wine. These experiences do not all occur
at once but rather occur one at a time. Perceiver strategy looks at this
succession of experiences, sees that they are always connected together
and concludes that this set of connections is a fact. Because this fact
includes time, it „lives.‟ A
A fact must include a sense of time to be compatible with life.
Static facts are, by nature, dead.I suggest that government provides another
example of the presence of time creating „life.‟ First
of all, government, like religion, is an internal world
structure: Governments establish laws—facts which
we are supposed to believe, they meddle constantly
in our personal lives, and they give us all sorts of
strong emotional reasons either to love or to hate
them. Now, let us suppose that a government was
only a spatial object. This would mean that I could
go to a certain building, point to the structure and
the people in it and say: “This is my government.
Here is the palace. And there is our leader, Frederick
the Conqueror. May he live forever.” History suggests that these types of
A By including time, I do not mean scheduling events according to the
clock. Rather, I am referring to the concept of sequence—one event
following another.