Proceedings of the International Conference ISIDA, April 6 - 8, 2000 Time and ManagementTHE CREATIVE CORE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SIMULTANEITY How the human mind can ride the wild horse we call TIME Fons Elders. In this article I wish to clarify the relationship between the principle of simultaneity and the functioning of creative consciousness. There is an intimate correlation between: a) the principle of simultaneity, creativity and the art of management; b) causality, simultaneity and their respective spaces; c) the experience of ‘now’ and ontological awareness; d) the ‘loss’ of past and future time and the aesthetic experience; e) the problem of Carl Jung and the answer of David Bohm, or simultaneity and creative imagination. Understanding the logical connection between the principle of simultaneity and creative imagination might contribute to creative management. Introduction Room 7 of the Hotel Gran Bretagna, Via Savoia n. 21, in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, is famous among travellers for a large fresco on its ceiling. ‘The fresco shows two flying maidens on a light-blue ceiling. The maidens are surrounded by a moon with eyes, nose and mouth, many shining stars, in the company of happily flying deep-blue birds, yellow bees and two doves with a branch in their mouth. The girls carry together, each with one hand, a long banner with the words: BUON APPETITO, while a horn of abundance opens from their belly and breasts out of which countless colourful flowers stream into the open air. This painted ceiling in a former dining room tells a cosmological story of a sky, full of life and earthly happiness. It honours the here-and-now, and may serve as a painted example of the intention of this article, namely to argue how powerful and enjoyable the vision is of a simultaneous presence of various kinds of reality. Description of some time concepts With Paul Ricoeur, we distinguish in the history of philosophy two strategies with regard to the answers on time, by everyone experienced as a riddle of life. The two main strategies follow the same path as the ancient 251philosophical discussions on the question of how body and mind relate to each other, or how matter and mind interact. In the realm of epistemology, we can trace this debate via a radical materialist conception on the one hand, and a radical idealist interpretation on the other hand. With regard to the question of what the nature of time is, we distinguish a similar difference, viz. between cosmological time and psychological time. The cosmological time notions derive time from the physical reality or give time itself an ontological status by defining it as an autonomous reality. Parallel and often in opposition to the cosmological approach of time, time is understood as a mind phenomenon. Some statements about time will manifest the difference between the two approaches. Time has been understood as an inherent quality and therefore as a consequence of the movements of the heavenly bodies (Aristotle). Time has been understood as temporal succession, leading to the notion of causality (David Hume). Time has been understood as: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external and by another name called ‘duration’” (Newton).! Time has been understood as being relative to the position of the observer (Einstein). Time has been understood as an a priori (innate) form of human perception (Kant: reine Anschauungsform). Time has been understood as a stream of consciousness that cannot be grasped or fixated in past, present and future (Augustine, James Joyce). Time has been understood as belonging to God’s creation: everything is present in God’s mind, forever. Temporality belongs to humans; eternity to God. Time has been understood as existing only in the here-and-now, in whatever is moving and growing. “Fixity is always momentary” (Octavio Paz). There are uncountable manifestations of time, and uncountable interpretations. Simultaneity, creativity and the art of management The relationship between time and reality proves to be so intimate that we hardly know whether we have to approach reality first in order to grasp the meaning of time, or vice versa. After all, the riddles of time seem to be no k complex than the riddles of reality. I opt for an approach through time, arguing that independent of the intimate connection between cosmology and time, the 1) Scholion to Definition viii. 252cosmological time of Aristotle, we also experience night and day the dominant power of ‘mental’ time, i.e. the time order that we perceive and organise both in public life and in our inner world. The distinction between ‘Greenwich- time’, and the time of our thought-process ceases to exist in those (rare) moments when our perception becomes so sharp and open that we get in touch with what the old Japanese Zen-masters have expressed in the saying that “everything has/is its own time”. The difference between the words ‘has’ and ‘is’ is of course the difference between an approach from the outside, in which being and time are different categories, and an approach from within, in which this distinction falls away. The distinction between time and reality is the result of ‘our mental intervention in the process of realities. Management depends on the distinction between time and the reality of production and markets. This distinction is the first step in a process of understanding and control. For, after all, management is the art of guiding and inspiring different people with different responsibilities and different timetables into an effective, productive whole. In order to realise an overall coordination, a manager must be able to think simultaneously in short-, middle- and long-term planning, while adjusting the different tasks to the various timetables, meanwhile inspiring the various strata of the organisation. A guiding idea in my analysis of the relationship between time and creative management is that the principle of simultaneity is a creative principle par excellence.’ This principle digs deeper into reality than the law of causality Simultaneity implies that events happen at the ‘same’ time, while causality implies that events happen one after another.’ I use the term ‘simultaneity’ within the order of human perception and human experience, not within the order of physical reality. In a chapter on ‘Einstein and Simultaneity’, Julian Barbour (1999) explains: “Einstein showed that simultaneity was nota property of the world but a reflection of the way we describe it” (p. 129). Einstein’s remark raises the question of how to relate both visions on time, the causal one and the simultaneous one, in a creative, fruitful manner. It may be clear that managers who lack a simultaneous approach to the challenges of their organisation will sooner or later fail in their guiding task 2) 1am using the term ‘principle’ in the sense described by Barbour (1999) in the next quotation, i.e. as a basic idea with profound explanatory power in the description of mental activiti “During the nineteenth century, mainly through the development of thermodynamic: began to distinguish between, on the one hand, theories of the world in terms of truly basic laws and constituents (e.g. atoms and fields) and, on the other hand, so called principle theories. In the latter no attempt would be made to give an ultimate theory of things. Instead, the idea was to seek principles that seemed to hold with great generality and include them in the foundations of the description of phenomena” (p. 134). 3) [place the word ‘same’ between *...”, because every information or transmission is subjected to the specd of light, 300.000 km/s. Only in Newton’s world view, due to his notion of absolute time, can there be an identical ‘now’, ‘before’ and ‘after’ (see Novikov 1998), 253The reason for their failure follows from the use of different timetables which are insufficiently interconnected, or by using one timetable, overlooking parallel movements of varying timetables. The entanglement of the various activities in a company or institution tends often to become so dense that, using a metaphor, the trees in the forest obscure our perspective on the forest as a whole. But when the entanglement of the various activities changes from a disconnected, complicated state into a state of complexity, so characteristic for the processes in living nature, then we will discover the benign effects of the simultaneous approach of the challenges we are confronted with. Simultaneity, causality and their respective spaces My hypothesis about the superiority of the principle of simultaneity with regard to the principle of causality rests on the assumption that the law of causality functions within the borders of the principle of simultaneity, not the other way around. Let me briefly visualise what I am trying to convey. If I transfer the notion of simultaneity and the notion of linear time to their respective spaces, then two distinct kinds of space appear. Let’s first try to imagine a large, gigantic space in which we are able to see - as if we are God’s eye - whatever happens in that space. In a space of cosmic proportions, we will discover that all the events which take place in their successive sequences take place simultaneously. Cosmic space proves to be large enough to comprise the various timetables, including birth and death of humans. Space appears to be the womb of time. Let’s subsequently imagine space through a linear notion of time, in which the succession of moments determines our experience. Space tends now to shrink to the size of a tunnel, more or less transparent, in which we experience and visualise life as a series of events that follow upon each other. This way of perceiving reality, including our own existence, is determined by a linear, causal vision on time, in which space is of a secondary nature and importance. Time appears to be the womb of space, just opposite to our earlier experience, in which space is the womb of time. The experience of ‘now’ and ontological awareness Isaac Barrow, the master of Isaac Newton, describes time as a unilinear, homogeneous, mathematical line which stretches itself out into an infinite fu- ture. This straight line can be divided into infinitely small identical moments. The design of our digital watches visualises this concept of time. It looks as if 254time is nothing else than infinite brief identical moments. Or to quote Igor Novikov (1998) about Newton’s time concept: “ ... Newton’s theory gave no reason for raising a question about any special properties or structure of time. Time is a uniform ‘river’ without beginning or end, without ‘source’ or ‘sink’, and all events are ‘carried’ by the river’s flow. Time had no other properties but the property of always being of the same duration. The ‘absolute time’ is identical throughout the Universe” (p. 31). Novikov uses the metaphor of the river to express a mathematical conceived time concept. By doing so, he destroys the metaphorical meaning of the river as the embodiment of an ongoing, fluid movement with and without identity at the same time. The river is alive; the mathematical time-line an abstraction without any identity. It is this mathematical time-line that still dominates our sense of time, in opposition to other time orders in our past culture as well as in other ones. The Newtonian concept of absolute time became the foundation of the Jaw of universal causality, from which one hundred years later Immanuel Kant drew the conclusion about the inevitability of all physical events in any possible future. Kant’s philosophy of nature had to bow for an all embracing determinism. That is to say that everything in nature falls under the physical law of cause and effect. We may believe that we are free but nature tells us a different story. Newtonian physics was followed by the Big Bang discovery and its subsequent cosmological evolution, including life. An evolutionary paradigm determines in our days the parameters of human existence, which proves to be composed of the same matter as the stars and the ants. We may negate from time to time the cosmic origin of our physical existence but we fall under the reign of cosmological time, i.e. where there is a beginning, there is an end, as an old Zen-saying tells us. Our death is the ultimate proof of the universal law of cause and effect, and therefore of our bondage to the physical environment. From this perspective, my statement about the primacy of the principle of simultaneity looks untenable. Is there a way out of the riddle? Posing the question the way Newton did is asking for a negative answer. But what happens when we dissolve the notion of an independent, absolute, linear time in favour of the notion of an ongoing ‘now’ that is not defined by past and future? As we saw, past and future depend for their existence on the mind of human beings. The phrase of Thomas Aquinas that the intellect is everything in a certain way - “intellectus est quodammodo omnia” - shows us a way out. The human mind realises its mortality, because it is able to think in terms of infinite and finite numbers, and therefore in infinite and finite time. Whatever the reality may be outside the human mind, the most intense experience of reality is an experience without any notion of time. It is only after the disappearance of such an experience that time becomes once more the veil between our immediate experience of being, and the reality out there. Reflecting on the time dimension of an ecstatic experience, anyone will realise afterwards 255that any notion of time was absent during the experience: the ‘now’ carries the fullest satisfaction. Therefore, the ‘now’ does not know about itself: it is just there as now, while the ‘moment’ is linked to a succession that dominates our time consciousness. Only if time disappears - for the time being - out of human consciousness, reality will manifest itself as pure existence. The ‘loss’ of past and future time and the aesthetic experience Augustine writes in Confessions about his attempt to grasp the meaning of time. He observes that it is impossible to catch the present moment, because if it happens it has passed already. When we do not think about time, time seems a sequence of events and as such the most normal experience, but as soon as we try to understand what time really is, it evades our intellectual attempt. If we try to understand the implication of Augustine’s interesting observation, viz. the deep rooted tension between the intellectual grasp of time and the immediate experience of time, a new perspective about time manifests itself. I described in the previous chapters this perspective as the discovery that both the conscious experience of time as well as the existential experience of time lead to only one conclusion: only the ‘now’ exists. Past and future are projections of a mental activity which posits the actual experience, be it a desire, a plan or an explanation, in the past or in the future. While doing so, we construct another ‘present’, forgetting or not realising that the ‘present’ in past or future depends fully on the actual activity of the human mind. To formulate it bluntly: if I feel hurt by an offence or terrible loss, I myself continue the feeling of being hurt, while linking this feeling of being hurt to an event in the near or distant past. The principle of causality lets us cling to our traumas. The emotional wound may be so intense that it fills our mind in all directions, with other words: including past, present and future. Therefore we tend to oversee the apparent fact that our brain and mind keep the wound fresh and open from moment to moment. What has happened in our past, is happening again and again in the here-and-now. Our so-called memory deceives us into believing that it exists independently of our actual mental acts. But not only our body needs drinks and food, also our memory needs to be kept alive. The process of keeping our memories alive is a process in the physical here-and-now, not in the past or in the future. The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even a stubborn one (Albert Einstein). Julian Barbour (1999) concludes his chapter on ‘Einstein and Simultaneity’ as follows: “However, the important thing is to get away from the idea that time is something. Time does not exist. All that exists are things that change. What we call time is - in classical physics at least - simply a complex of rules that govern the change” (p. 137). 256If preoccupation with past or future time has priority over the experience of time in the here-and-now, an illusional cosmological time will control the human consciousness. Realisation of the now as the only real presence, both physical and mental, manifests itself as ontological awareness. Ontological awareness is a direct experience of reality, without conceptual screens or a priori mental categories. However, is such an ontological awareness possible for an adult person? I think only in rare cases. During a ride with Michel Foucault through a typical Dutch landscape in 1971, asked him if he liked the landscape. He answered: “I do. I see it through the eyes of the Dutch seventeenth century landscape painters.” I replied that we always see the environment through certain frames or eyes. Foucault answered: “Not in the desert.” I did not discuss the question further because I had never been in a desert. Two years later, I travelled for six weeks with my family through the Sahara. Foucault was right. After a week, I felt that every reference or frame of perception had left me, as if one becomes blank space, not so different from the desert of sand and rocks, silence, heat and cold. There was no hold or frame left in my mind. Since the Sahara experience, I knew that such an awareness is also present in the aesthetic experience. For what is the source of an aesthetic experience? It is the contact with the experience that tells us: it is what it is. The aesthetic experience opens the door of the usually hidden ontological awareness. Ontological awareness is always open-ended. Ontological awareness is unbounded or free in the sense that it implies multiple perspectives. It creates a catharsis through which we can change our perspective(s) on present, past and future events via the same mental acts through which we keep our traumas alive. This shows that an aesthetic experience does not depend on the physical presence of a work of art. It is a way of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, grasping, understanding, always in the here-and-now. For that reason everything that exists is a potential source for an aesthetic experience, because everything that exists is here-and-now, as we have argued before. The only condition that needs to be fulfilled is to experience the ontological dimension, ic. the here-and-now of a person, crowd, landscape, desert or urban situation, in its raw and pure existence. Just the fact that it exists makes it pleasurable or painful. If it is a work of art, the artist created in his work the beauty or tension of just-to-be, without moralising. The fact that drama and tragedy belong to the highest forms of art is an indication that the confrontation with suffering, injustice, violence and stupidity may cause a catharsis due to the fact that the spectator is seduced, if not ‘forced’, to see the opposite sides of the coin. Aesthetic experiences and art might change our perspective(s), because they evoke and demonstrate that the present realities are open to other assumptions, interpretations and valorisations than the fixated ones. Human consciousness is able to free itself from the experience and the notion of time as an unavoidable, deterministic sequence of events. To the degree that this is not only a logical possibility but also a psychological reality, the human mind can ride the wild horse we call TIME instead of being run by it. 287‘The problem of Carl Jung and the answer of David Bohm, or simultaneity and creative consciousness Carl G. Jung defines synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle. ‘The question is which facts the principle has to cover from Jung’s point of view. “As its etymology shows, this term has something to do with time or, to be more accurate, with a kind of simultaneity. Instead of simultaneity we could also use the concept of a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something else than the probability of chance is involved” (Jung 1973, p. 104). Jung tried his whole life to reconcile the principle of synchronicity, that he used for the first time in 1930, with physical time concepts, dominated by the law of causality. His problem was that the common interpretation of time through the law of causality made his interpretations of a “meaningful coincidence” of psychic and physical events impossible. He wrestled with this problem for many years, convinced as he was that meaningful coincidences occurred. In fact, it looks as if one needs a magic, animistic world view in order to explain what Jung wanted to understand. “It seems more likely that scientific explanation will have to begin with a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other. As I have said, it is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP, or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy” (ibid. p. 19) Therefore, Jung continues to argue that synchronicity must be understood “ a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time” (ibid. p. 19). For that reason, he sought and found the solution by postulating the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. “Meaningful coincidences - which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance groupings - therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation, going back to our instincts” (ibid. p. 24). The endeavour of Jung to explain the kind of phenomena, usually indicated with ESP (extra sensory perception), shows the importance of the concepts of time; which principle has priority - the one of causality, or the one of simultaneity? The quantum physicist David Bohm writes in his introduction to Wholeness and the Implicate Order that “my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole” (Bohm 1980, ix). This is exactly the problem that Jung tried to solve during his long career as psychiatrist, researcher and author. In opposition to Jung who wrestles with a dualistic scientific paradigm, the approach by Bohm is holistic by postulating an implicate order out of which both mind and matter arise as an explicate order to dissolve and interact again through the implicate order. In the implicate order “movement is comprehended in terms of a series of inter-penetrating and intermingling elements in different degrees of enfoldment all present together” (ibid. p. 203). The notions of classic physics for the explicate order do not hold in the implicate order. Bohm argues 258that the key features of the quantum theory challenge the mechanistic theory because of the fact that movement is in general “discontinuous” in the sense that action is constituted of indivisible quanta; that entities, such as electrons, can show different properties ... depending on the environmental context within which they exist and are subject to observation, and that two entities, such as electrons, which initially combine to form a molecule and then separate, show a peculiar non-local relationship, which can best be described as a non-causal connection of elements that are far apart (ibid. p. 175). The conclusion that Bohm is drawing and which I consider as relevant for bridging the gap between the different notions of time, here under consideration, is his statement that “the sharp break between abstract logical thought and concrete immediate experience, that has pervaded our culture for so long, need no longer be maintained, Rather, the possibility is created for an unbroken flowing movement from immediate experience to logical thought and back, and thus for an ending to this kind of fragmentation” (ibid. p. 203). Creative imagination is the human faculty that responds to the requirements both of the immediate experience as well as logical reasoning. Creative imagination entails the active functioning of various layers of human consciousness. How more open and dynamic they interact, how richer the scientific and artistic results will be. The creative consciousness uses the faculty of intuition; the capacity of abstract and generalising discourse; the pragmatic, sensible comprehension; the instinctive knowledge, regulating physiological processes; the personal hidden knowledge that dreams sometimes reveal, and last but not least, the evolutionary processes, belonging to the collective unconscious, from which Carl Jung derives his archetypes. All these layers or dimensions are able to interact and to influence each other, on the condition that we understand and accept the different kinds of logic they entail. Reality from within and reality from without will be less estranged from each other when we are able to face matter and consciousness along similar patterns and perspectives. The riddles are the same. Perhaps also some of the answers. 259REFERENCES - BARBOUR, J. (1999) The End of Time. The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. - BOHM, D. (1980) Wholeness and The Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. - JUNG, C.G. (1973) Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle (Translation by R.F.C. Hull.). Bollingen Series. Princeton University Press. - NOVIKOV, Igor D. (1998) The River of Time. (Translation from the Russian by Vitaly Kisin). Cambridge University Press. 260BIER Vocal sre eM Yea Tert rococo AGIs Corel g Anthony, Anne L. Balazs, José M. Barreiro Fenandez, Alasdair Blair, Danielle Bouder-Pailler, Glen H. Brodowsky, Silvio M. Brondoni, lan Brooks, Reva rere i Teena eral oleic UW MUU MS La Nu elnaTe oA TaN CoP M. Luisa del Rio Araéjo, Fons Elders, Jean-Marc Ferrandi, Staffan Furusten, Christina Garsten, Maria Aparecida Gouvéa, David Grant, Laurids Hedaa, Luchien Karsten, Tom Keenoy, David Knights, Paul Sergius Koku, John Leopold, PM tote i ola Melis greg Pre toa i oie YR xe gr =LeW etgs Pamela Odih, Joseph L. Orsini, Cliff Oswick, Rosemary Robertson, Lino Nogueira Rodrigues Filho, Dominique Rouziés, Ida Sabelis, Phillip Samovel, Ble Celio amcor os Uae eam tS IGP ele Seu tTe LAAN Ae Mey ol UY ela na oA stele To LATOR oP Tool og re cM ene Me UMMC nC Clea ociey José A. Varela Gonzalez, M. Ven Venkatesan and Jane Walker. ISBN 88-86289-01-4