So according to Heraclitus, the universe is flux. He says it's fire, which doesn't seem terribly off the mark if we're talking in metaphor. All is matter and energy, matter is animate because it is energetic.
Time is the fourth dimension.
Consciousness is inherant to energetic matter, I think, because plants, animals, and we humans are conscious: it didn't come from no-where.
Where does spontaneity fit into this?
In Hindu thinking, Lila is 'cosmic play'; their way of 'ordering' the universe (We order the universe because we must have a container for understanding to take place within). In Tao-ist thinking, the cosmos is dancing. To me, dance is instinctual movement and abandon within the loose confines of beat-meter and step pattern.
I was driving home and I saw a dad and his little girl. I heard what sounded like my tire kicking out a pebble, and I wondered for a second if it had hit the little girl. I suddenly saw the paranoia of some parents, who make their kids wear helmets. Random accidents happen.
But what is 'random'?
The nature of history suggests to many thinkers that time is cyclical; that is, it is a process that repeats. This idea is substantiated by religious myth somewhat, in 'End-time' stories that describe the end of one age, which inevidably begins a new one. The Norse have a lovely one to counter-act the finality of the Judeo-Christian Rapture. The Hindu have Vishnu and his eye-blink, one blink contains universes created, thriving, then destroyed. How often do we blink? That makes a lot of universes if Vishnu blinks like us.
What about events, in time? What about the meaning of events? What about fate and happenstance? What I'm wondering, is if things happen for a reason, because the nature of reality is so quasi-dream-like, that really what each one of us is experiencing is the collapsing of quatrillions of possibilities into the 'now' by the choices we make.
People have to die. It's biological, time runs out. But when they die, is this the 'right time'? The deaths of those we love shape us; they wound, and we are not the same after. Their deaths shape our lives. What I'm wondering is: is the 'right time' already ordained? I'm not talking about YHWH as the knower of all, I'm talking about what the Greeks describe as the Wheel of Fate. The three Moirai are constantly weaving the lives of humans: spinning, weaving, and cutting that thread. This personification is the container for abstract universal forces. From the Moirai's perspective, there is a definite tapestry taking shape. They know the pattern to weave; or even, are able to weave spontaneously within the confines of the loom.
Sometimes, when a pattern is activated in my life, the things I need fall into my hands. Usually they are the right books; I am quite the reader, and the interface between book-knowledge-I is the fullest way for me to fill up on something I need to know. The force that moves me half conscious to my book shelf, or the force that moves a friend to hand me a particular book out of the blue, the force that drops a person across my path-who tells me a thing that helps me; this force Jung calls synchronicity. It is a harmonizing of time, which can therefore not be thought of as linear. Linear time does not allow paths to cross in any meaningful way. Linear time belongs to two-dimensional reality. Two dimensional reality belongs to Middle and High school algebra class, on graph paper. It is not indicative of Life.
Time is other than linear. It has a modicum of coherance, just as dance has. Dance, unaccompanied by drums or music, still has the the beat of breath and heart to guide. This movement is guided by life process.
My question is thus: do things happen for a reason? We are all dynamic, energetic material. If I get taken out of my place in time, it would send shock waves, in the form of emotion, through the sphere of my acquaintances. The same is so for many living; if a soul dies and no-one mourns, THEN WE ARE SICK. There is more than enough love in the human core to fill the world up, and over.
My question is, when someone dies, is it because they have to? This is a frightening question to me, but taken within the context that we: me, you, dust, dirt, butterflies, penguins, the moon-are all made of vibrating atoms, which are colored by quark-qualities, which are strung together by String (theory), which weaves a Membrane (M theory); we exist because we have to, make meaning because we must, and die because (and when) we do~
do they have to die for themselves, as well as for the rest of the 'web'?