The Owl of Minerva
Finding meaning in the three dimensions of time
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.” - Hegel
Happy Sunday, everyone, and welcome to new subscribers.
Over the last month, I’ve been very active with my consulting and coaching clients, and with my Zen students. I can honestly say that I love them all. I learn a lot from them, and they help me bring alive whatever insight or wisdom I might have gleaned over my years of life and practice.
Last week I wrapped up a three-month phase of my Manjushri Men’s Group. It’s a form I developed for men to meet in authentic connection to bring wisdom and compassion alive in our lives. I’ll begin a new phase next month. If you are in the Boulder-Denver area and interested in exploring this group, send me a note at paul@zenatwork.org. We meet bi-monthly.
Yesterday I led a Zen retreat for beginners at our retreat center outside of Boulder. I remember the first half-day Zen intro I did in Los Angeles in 1990. It was a day that changed my life. I aspire to offer the opportunity for others to have that same experience: a big “aha” when you find a practice and body of teachings that might just help you make sense of this crazy human realm we find ourselves in.
Our Enter Here retreats are only in-person, but we are just a few weeks away from launching an “online-first” Zen platform we call the One Body Sangha. I’ll put out more details when we launch, but you can jump on the notification list now.
Today in the newsletter I want to share some introductory thoughts on the “three dimensions of time.” I’ve been working on these thoughts for a while, and integrating them into my coaching programs. They are naturally integrated in formal Zen practice.
I’ll develop these thoughts more in the weeks ahead and flesh out the practical considerations of honoring all three dimensions of time and not getting them twisted up, which we often do.
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To the newsletter ….
The Owl of Minerva
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.”
I first heard the philosopher Hegel’s famous statement while in grad school in my twenties. I am pretty sure that, to the extent I understood it, I disagreed.
The “owl of Minerva” represents wisdom, and Hegel was saying it is only at — or towards — the end of things that their meaning is revealed. The end of the day, the end of an era, the end of a life. As a young person, I was not inclined to wait for the end of my life for its meaning to be revealed!
Almost forty years later, I appreciate Hegel’s insight, which respects some aspect of time that our modern mental mindset seems to have lost: its womb-like power to nurture seeds of potential. Its quality as a field of revelation, and unfolding.
Our clock-bound minds homogenize time and diminish our deeper dimensions of being. The notches on the clock are evenly spaced. The blocks on the calendar are the same size.
This mind is beholden to the linear dimension of time, also called the “chronological” dimension, after the Greek work chronos.
In the linear dimension, we “move forward” through time, doing things and having experiences. Things “happen at a certain time” and then they stop happening. Then the next things happen. We do something that takes a certain amount of time, then we stop doing it and do something else.
The past is what happened, the future is what is to come, and the present is merely the place where they meet.
Chronos values information over experience and intelligence over wisdom.
In our technology-driven culture, the linear time dimension holds sway. As my good friend and colleague Russ Fein points out in his excellent newsletter The Quantum Leap, ever more precise measurements of linear time (in the arbitrary unit of the “second”) yield vast increases in information “throughput” which allow for both remarkable synchronization across distances as well as massive opportunities to monetize information flows.
In terms of our psychologies, we develop felt senses of “time running out,” “not having enough time,” “losing time,” as well as various narratives of beginnings, middles and ends, of progress and decay, which we internalize into our own biographies as success, failure, achievement, and setback.
All of this is fine, and even necessary. It has become an accepted truth that “we are a storytelling species,” deriving meaning from the narratives we tell of ourselves.
Yes, and …..
If we allow ourselves to be primarily defined by our “timeline stories”, we will never fully experience the intrinsic gift of our human life, which is our birthright. When we truly honor the other two dimensions of time, it completely changes our experience of ourselves as defined by our biographical life story. And it makes life much, much, much more interesting.
A deeper dimension of time we call “experiential time.” Experiential time unfolds on an axis, not of seconds and years, but of depth. At any given moment our quality of presence may be deep or shallow. Our connection to our world may be open to others or self-obsessed.
In experiential time, the present is not merely the place where the past and future meet, it is the only dimension of linear time that exists. Past and future are experienced as aspects of the present moment.
In experiential time, meaning arises not through the sequence of events, but the depth of experience. The deeper your quality of presence, the more meaningful. The Greek term kairos gets at this dimension of time. Denoting the “right time” or the “critical” time,” it brings our awareness to the vast constellation of conditions that are present in the moment. The clock is irrelevant.
Meditation is the primary way that humans have developed to access and deepen experiential time. Deep meditative experiences (and often psychedelic experiences, or other “peak” experiences) provide an intrinsic meaning related to one’s experience of oneself as a living co-creating part of the universe.
This dimension of time is infinitely deep. Being in a “flow state” is a relatively common experience of deep kairos. Mindfulness practices deepen kairos nicely. Practiced meditators go way, way deeper.
The third dimension of time is “cyclical time” or what the Greeks called eonic time. It’s the dimension of time created by the cyclicity of things: orbits, rotations, days and seasons in the physical world; ritual and ceremony in the human realm.
Eonic time can be visualized as a circle traced around the point of the present moment. As the point of the present moment moves “forward” in linear time the circle of eons traces a spiral from past to future.
Eonic time is the dimension of karma. It is the dimension of intention and consequence, of atonement and vow. It’s where things that we did in the past are actually present, in the consequences of those actions, and where our intentions now continue to live in the future.
Karma is often understood only in the context of linear time, as in “positive actions create positive results.” This is true, but it’s not the whole story. In eonic time the past action has returned to the present in the same way the sun returns to the sky each day.
Understanding and experiencing eonic time in your life is different from both chronological and experiential time. Meaning is created through your full participation as an active agent in the universe. You can actually “change the past” (understood chronologically) because the past is present eonically.
Hegel’s famous statement that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk” speaks to the primacy of eonic time for meaning-making. The Owl of Minerva represents wisdom. The overt meaning of the maxim is that it is only “at the end” (dusk) when we can look back at the past and make sense of it.
But dusk is not just “the end of the story” understood in linear terms. If it were, then this maxim collapses to a relativistic view of meaning, that we can tell any story we want about the past. At this level, the observation that “history belongs to victors” holds sway. Those with the power at any given time can re-write history to support their truth and legitimacy claims. Every empire, institution and power system throughout the ages have done this and continue to do this, including our current imperium.
But history in this sense, as deep as it may be, is not wisdom. Wisdom arises at “dusk”, which marks an approaching inflection point in the cyclical dimension.
By now, readers may have caught on that these three dimensions of time map neatly on to the three sacred contracts (with Self, Other and Work), which themselves map to the dimensions of Being, Relating and Doing.
So, the map looks like this:
Being Dimension: Experiential Time, Kairos, Contract with Self. Meaning is intrinsic to experience.
Relating Dimension: Cyclical Time, Eon, Contract with Other. Meaning derives from vows and karmic atonement.
Doing Dimension: Linear Time, Chronos, Contract with Work. Meaning derives from accomplishment and growth.
For me, nothing of this is dryly abstract or philosophical. It is possible and I believe important, to recognize and honor these dimensions in our every day lives.
The main problem that most of us have, since it is our cultural affliction, is too much attention paid to the Doing dimension and its related mindsets, contracts, and ways of being. When we start with quality attention to the Being dimension, and extend that into our Relating, our Doing activity unfolds quite naturally.
I’ll be fleshing out these dimensions more in the weeks ahead, and offering practices to connect with each. If you would like personalized support for deepening in your own life and work, reach out for a call.
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (User:Jastrow), 2009-02-28, CC BY 2.5,