WHITECROW BORDERLAND
GÖDEL, Einstein, and
Eurocentric Struggles to Find the Past. (
Kurt Godel (the “o”
requires an umlaut but I’m going to omit it hereafter) has been credited with a
temporal theory derived in part from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that some people claim has “killed”
time. I recently read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (December
17, 2004, B9-B10) in which the author, Palle Yourgrau, reports that Godel
produced calculations proving that it was possible to fly a spaceship into any
region of time (past, present, future) if only the proper velocity were
achieved and maintained. Godel, according to the author, “was quick to point out
that if we can revisit the past, then it never really ‘passed.’ But a time that fails to ‘pass’ is no time at
all” (B10). The only conclusion one can
draw from this, then, if Godel’s calculations are
real, is that time “turned out in the end to be the world’s greatest illusion”
(Yourgrau, B10).
Why anyone would be inclined to make much of this is difficult to
comprehend since Kant said essentially the same thing (“Transcendental
Aesthetics,” Critique of Pure Reason)
150 years earlier. Kant had no
mathematical “calculations” to support his perception so maybe that is the
cause of the attention Godel has received for his
theory. Actually, according to Yourgrau, Godel’s theory was met
with decades of silence from the scientific community, even to the point of
creating a conspiracy to suppress it, because its truth (if it has any)
overturns everything we thought we knew about the nature of reality. The “we” here is limited to European
perceptions of reality.
Native Americans, of course, as I have said many
times and in numerous pages of this document, simply wonder at the profound
lack of knowledge displayed by anyone who does not already know that time
travel is something human beings have been doing now for about 40,000 years. Time is not the illusion here—Godel demonstrates that European perceptions of time, prior
to his “calculations,” were delusional. The
great contradiction in European civilization is that “they” believe their ideas
change reality, not perception of reality, but when it comes to traveling time
they insist on taking their bodies with them.
Going back or forward in time only counts if it’s physical. Why?
Apparently because Europeans know deep in their hearts that their mental
abilities are so limited that only body matters. Travel in mind is not travel at all. Communicating with the vast storehouse of
knowledge represented by the native American ancestral past, knowing what they
knew, now, is meaningless to Europeans because their ancestors were even more
stupid than they are. Apparently. Go back and return with King Arthur’s crown. It was golden, right: be worth something in
the antiquity’s market. But who would go
back to talk to him? He was a barbaric
fool. “Kill many bad mens.” Hell, we have George W. Bush to say that to
us. Why travel time for that? But the golden crown of King Arthur—that
would be something!
The past still exists. Europeans, since Aristotle (?), have seen
only the present moment as real, as existing.
The past is annihilated, does not exist anymore, as soon as the present
moment ends. The future does not exist
either because it has not happened yet. Godel’s theory challenges this perception of time and
suggests it is an illusion. So
what? The past still exists. It has not and does not “pass” into
annihilation. It does not “pass” out of
existence. Accepting that fact, as native Americans always have, does not render time an
illusion—it renders Eurocentric perceptions of time delusional.
So, what happens to the people who lived in the past
if the past still exists. Nothing happens to them. They die.
They become spirit. They live as
spirit in the past they occupied while they were alive. What do they do there? They do what they did when they were alive,
only they do it as spirit not as body.
They have no body. They travel time
just like I do, just like any of us do, have been doing for 40,000 years. We talk.
We play. We sing. We dance.
We hunt. We gather. We think.
We plan. We invent. We create.
We change the past.