On Celestial Negentropy and Spiritual Metabolism

If you're a sports fan, you know that broadcasts usually feature a play-by-play announcer accompanied by a "color commentator." The latter is often a former player who provides analysis and insights into plays as they happen and strategy as it unfolds. So, I guess that makes Schuon and Dávila my primary color commentators.

With that in mind, I wonder if Schuon has anything else to say about the subject of time? 

Yes, although it means that I will have to provide some additional commentary on his commentary, because the metacosmic game we are playing is more like five-dimensional chess:

Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable. 

I think I get it: seems to me that concrete time is the usual cause-and-effect that unfolds down here in four dimensions, while abstract duration is something more universal (or even meta-universal). 

This will require some additional explanation as we proceed, but let's just say this universal duration, so to speak, touches on the kind of "changeless change" that must take place in the Godhead and which is projected from up- and in-there to down- and out-here.

Here's a passage from the same article (Structure and Universality of the Conditions of Existence, in From the Divine to the Human): 

Objective time is so to speak a spiroidal movement comprising four phases, and this movement is qualitatively ascending or descending.... 

As for subjective time..., it is divided into present, past, and future: what we are, what we were, and what we will be, and in addition, what our surroundings are, were, and will be.

So time is a four-phase ascending or descending movement divided by three. Was that helpful? We'll have to think about it. Meanwhile, let's ponder something a little more earthy, courtesy of Dávila:

The day is composed of its moments of silence. The rest is lost time.

That checks out: contemplation and dissipation, respectively; or, positive and negative entropy, which gets to the heart of the matter.

Some additional color commentary by Ross before we get back to emergence per se:

time is a dimension or realm in which cause-and-effect phenomena occur, with effects always following their causes.... apart from time, cause-and-effect phenomena anywhere in the universe cannot occur. In other words, time is integral to the operation of cause and effect (Why the Universe is the Way It Is).

But also,

Time appears to be strongly linked with, or defined by, the second law of thermodynamics (the law of continuously increasing entropy or decay). 

Now we can go back to Schuon's commentary about the four-phases of time, by which he means such humanly understandable cycles as spring, summer, autumn, winter; or morning, day, evening, night; or childhood, youth, maturity, old age.

In these experience-near categories, it seems to me that maximum negentropy (positive entropy, as in the winding of a clock) must be associated with spring, day, and maturity, while maximum entropy must be winter (in which nothing grows), the dead of night (where all cows are black), and the mind of Brandon, for in each case there is "no information," AKA total equilibrium. The battery is dead. Extending the sports analogy, game over.

Thanks to entropy, time cuts both ways:

Entropy, the measure of disorder in a system, now becomes a creative principle by which systems reorganize themselves to face the future.

For example, you -- you there -- how do you maintain your order in the face of a relentlessly entropic cosmos? Correct: you assimilate negentropy from the environment (mainly by eating and inhaling) while dissipating entropy into it (by exhaling and excreting).  

Now, the moment I understood this principle, I wondered how it applied to the developing mind. Then, after solving that conundrum, I began wondering how it applies to the realm of spirit, i.e., to "spiritual growth." Exactly what is it, and how is it possible? Is there some parallel to the entropy and negentropy of biological systems, AKA dissipative structures?

Yes there is, although I've come to believe it's the other way around: that dissipative structures are the way they are because the Godhead is the way it is.

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things (Dávila).

To be continued...