Note Details
- Stage: seed 🌱
- Type: document
- Topics: consciousness, time, calendar
- Source: Daniel Pinchbeck’s Substack
Daniel Pinchbeck reflects on humanity’s dysfunctional relationship to time, drawing on Jose Arguelles and Jean Gebser to explore how calendar systems and structures of consciousness shape our experience of temporality.
Birthday Thoughts on Time - Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter
Pinchbeck’s ideas around time and the calendar were particularly influenced by two thinkers: Jose Arguelles and Jean Gebser.
On Arguelles and the Gregorian Calendar
In Time and the Technosphere and other works, Arguelles proposed that the Gregorian Calendar combined with our precise calibration of hours and minutes (the 12:60 frequency) created a dysfunctional relationship to time. This means our entire civilization is unconsciously programmed for chaos and disharmony. Arguelles described it as building a tower, higher and higher, on a totally insecure foundation, so that the tower becomes more unstable as it rises until finally it must collapse.
On Gebser and Structures of Consciousness
In The Ever-Present Origin, Gebser described the evolution of human consciousness through different “structures” which were based on different realizations, ways of understanding and apprehending time and space. Gebser defined the “archaic-aboriginal,” “magical-tribal,” “mythical-cyclical,” and “mental-rational” structures of consciousness, each one having a distinct relationship to time.
Aboriginal people live in the “ever-present origin” without history or any concept of progress; their rituals and ceremonies support intrinsic harmonic balance. A bit of “time consciousness” becomes available in the magical-tribal structure, where magic operations can influence future events.
The emerging structure Gebser identified — the integral-aperspectival — is characterized by a holistic, multidimensional realization of time and consciousness.
On MesoAmerican Conceptions of Time
MesoAmerican cultures like the Aztecs and Maya had a different conception of time that is actually more helpful, envisioning it as a vast harmonic “loom” of synchronicity and resonance.