God is Time

By Ernie Stanley

An excerpt from Shamanic Voices, a collection of shamanic narratives,

"I knew and saw God: an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, and the happiness and the pain." - Maria Sabina

Maria Sabina, perhaps the most famous shaman within anthropology is describing an ecstatic experience where she has realized that God is time. God is a clock. This largely makes sense too, since what began existence, what begins everything? I could say time, despite the notion that many people have time is simply a measurement. However, how can time simply be a measurement if it has no barriers to quantify it? Our concept of time is very grounded in science, particularly that of the Earth's rotation. However, to quantify time is merely an abstraction and not very real. In reality, we markwith time from the beginning to the end of happenings. Thus it could be said that time is behind the beginning of all things, and also behind the end.

Time itself is timeless and infinite. As is our concept of God and the soul. Thus it is hard to draw the line between what is God and what is time.

Quine on Matters Ontological

by Ernie Stanley

Found within:
http://ejap.louisiana.edu/EJAP/1997.spring/gibson976.html

“Quine maintains that everything to which we concede existence is a posit”

“… a posit is a result of a linguistic process of reification: “The reification of bodies comes in stages in one's acquisition of language, each successive stage being more clearly and emphatically an affirmation of existence. The last stage is where the body is recognized as identical over time, despite long absences and interim modifications…” (Page 1)

Quine, an Anglo-American philosopher logically has deduced that existence is merely a series of hypothetical abstractions constructed within our minds and exist only in terms of language. That is, what we cannot describe in some manner, has no being, simply because it can not formulate itself within our mind.

This is a scientific based assertion of reality, and thus, as the religious scholar I question it. I do accept that I only perceive this world and do not truly realize it, not yet at least. However, to state that reality exists only in my mind strikes me as fairly reductionist and possibly nihilistic. It refuses any notion of a greater reality, while affirming at the same that God is everyone of us.

My main issue with such an idea is that it asserts itself above all other metaphysics (Quine himself does not agree with this), grounding the whole of existence within the mind. But what about the mind/body itself? Surely the mind cannot construct itself.