Today marks the halfway point of Lent. Twenty-three days gone, another 23 to Easter Sunday. Time to reflect on the passage of time, and what time brings along with it – change. My 68 years on earth have seen change – technological and social – happening at a pace that sometimes is frightening.
My earliest memories were of a drab suburban world, childhood spent in front of a black-and-white, 405-line TV set that seemed miraculous to my parents' generation. I was born on the day space travel began (with the launch of Sputnik I), a week before and a week after the two largest nuclear accidents up to that time. There were few cars in the streets (eight times fewer than on UK roads today). There were 12 pennies to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound; food (and sweets) were sold in pounds and ounces. Clothing was drab. Things were of poor quality, pieces of wood or gaspipe held together with Jubilee clips, splints in your hands. In the skies over West London, piston-engined propeller airlines flew into London Airport (as Heathrow as known then).
Change, Hanwell London W7, 1960 and today, as visualised by Google Gemini's Nano Banana
Change came in leaps. I remember sometime in the mid-60s my father bringing home an analogue calculator (ANITA) and the glow of the red diodes. It filled a quarter of the dining-room table. This was the future! Fifteen years later, my father had an Amstrad computer (MS DOS) and was working on spreadsheets, I could not yet see the sense. In 1990, at work, I initiated a project to introduce desk-top publishing to the magazine I edited back then. Apple Macs, black-and-white screens the size of large TVs that cost as much as a family car. This was the future! Then came the Internet (with a capital I back then), linking computers into a global network through dial-up modems. This was around the time we moved to Poland.
Oh, the changes taking place here! Cash machines, mobile telephones, hypermarkets, joining NATO and the EU – everything changing for the better, and at pace. Life is becoming more convenient for people – online banking, online government services, social-media connectivity 24/7. And now, we are rapidly entering the age of AI. And the Polish economy has been one of the fast-growing in the world, what's not to like?
Adapting to the change that's happening all around us is a an important skill. The maladapted become disorientated, frustrated, and prone to poor choices at the ballot box.
Maybe we should look at the downsides of change? In the UK, a general sense of stasis, marasm; urban decay, perceptions of 'uncontrolled migration'. But in Poland? The threat of Russia, mainly. And climate change. The economy, meanwhile, is growing nicely... A golden age in Polish history?
The change that I've been describing is all in the physical realm. But what of consciousness? Does this change?
Many qualia experiences and qualia memories are coloured by the Spirit of the Age; the music, the art, the fashions; nostalgic longings for the once-familiar are predicated by change. Our digital age means we can reproduce or even synthesise many aspects of the past on demand. A piece of music or some TV show that conjures up my childhood? There it is on YouTube. Or groups discussing bygone Ealing on Facebook. I can scratch that long-felt itch for life in mid-century America online with ease.
But strip away the markers of the passage of time. Qualia that come from timeless experiences; walking along a shoreline, toes in the waves; is this the 21st century or three thousand years ago? A cloudless night sky with full moon from a hilltop far from any town or city. Is that what it would have felt like to the earliest hominids?
The role of consciousness is to observe; to witness the unfolding at its own scale. The ant sees the Cosmos as its scale, we see that same Cosmos at our scale. The ant is subjectively at the epicentre of its own Universe, as is each one of us. The ant also observes change – day changing to night, that twig that wasn't there yesterday, the rivulets of water pouring into its nest during a summer thunderstorm.
Imagine a Consciousness scaled up as ours is scaled up from that of an ant. Imagine perceiving change on a scale of galaxies over billions of years.
Matter breaks down (entropy), but consciousness abides (syntropy). Adaptation to change is a biological necessity. Awareness of change as a flow, as a characteristic of the unfolding Universe, is crucial to spiritual evolution. Live a spiritually conscious life, and the change that affects the physical world ceases to be a bother to you.
Tomorrow: living in hope, or living in alignment with the flow?
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