Roadkill in the Timescape

Paths are forged, by whom we do not know: etched into the collective psyche as thought grooves, as windows to perception, as perspectives necessary for experience.

The resulting landscape changes so slowly that we don’t notice much of it. We can’t see those paths, for they are what makes our being in time possible to begin with and are therefore transparent. Once in a while, however, they move somewhat to the forefront.

Suddenly, something touches us in this longing way that doesn’t make much sense to our usual faculties: because those are wound up in time and space, in localized causal networks. Whereas that-which-touches, that-which-reaches-out to our consciousness in this twilight zone of existence, has its roots beyond the conditions for our awareness apparatus in this realm.

While pure joy, love hailing from beyond the biochemical Great Flood, or watershed delights of destiny can occasionally do the trick, it is often the other direction that gets us close to the changing backdrop of our existence, the world of etched thought paths, the bird's-eye view of the timescape: downward movement. Decay. Loss. Dull, undefined pain.

Like that abandoned gas station in a village lost in a dream, conjuring up images of youth gangs once hanging around, talking cars and racing each other. Like that old factory, its windows shattered just like the memory of toil and hopes, of great and mediocre, saintly and devilish men leaving a fading stamp behind them, their actions now feeble etches in a forgotten corner of the thoughtscape. Like that big, defunct department store in the middle of the plaza, once hated by the critics of modernity and progressivism, that has sneakily impressed itself upon the timescape so that it is now those tapping into the same anti-modernity archetype who feel its loss the most. Like that insufferable fashion of some indeterminate past we hardly can put a date on anymore, which once heralded the dreaded age of consumerism, now one of those daydreams that gently kicks us out of our realm boundaries if we care to let it.

Out there paradox lies; out there paradox is resolved. Out there our perspective tentatively goes meta, a trip we better learn how to handle. Out there times and spaces disappear, essences waltz in the ballroom of the cosmic trickster, and what seems the most real to us dissolves into a deeply knowing, all-encompassing, all-carrying smile.

Decay and pain, turmoil in the timescape, can catapult us out of it: either towards death, or towards perception.

We can become roadkill of the cosmic driver putting pedal to metal, like that abandoned department store on that eerie plaza, or, if we care to listen to the faint roar of his approaching, which can bring the timescape into multi-perspective-focus, we may be taken for the ride of our lives: heralds of a new realm, one with more dynamic boundaries, more dynamic conditions for perception—not fixed and petrified by that mind-programming prison ray of yore, but modulated by the truly creative force now free to reach the background of our manifest being.