Changing time

We saw an old star trek episode the other day, in which a star-ship fell through a rift in time and thereby altered the timeline of the Enterprise and everyone in it. Instead of having been at peace, they now had been at war for twenty-two years. One of the crew was able, faintly, to perceive that something had changed and was now not right, and based on her urgings, they sent the other star-ship back through the time rift, and things returned to how they had been.

I found myself thinking about this later. There wasn’t any need, after they returned to the “true” timeline, for them to rehabilitate their thought, to get used to the different way of thinking about things entailed in a peaceful mission. Only the one character, a mystical sort, had any inkling that things had ever been otherwise. I thought, this is often the way it is when healing takes place in human experience. It isn’t just a shift of experience within a timeline to something more favorable. Such a shift might hardly be called healing, since memory of the bad past and fear of its return would be the context of the present. On the other hand, a shift of the whole timeline would remove the bad past, the present flavor of it, and the sense that it is in the realm of proven possibility, and could happen again. I think it’s true that real healing moves not just the bad thing but the whole line of possibility that claimed to justify its presence.

For example, one time when I had an immediate healing of tonsillitis (after quite a time of suffering) it came with the flooding thought: “you can’t be incompetent - you’re a perfect child of Christ!” The healing of the physical condition didn’t involve the diagnosis of the tonsillitis as an outgrowth of feeling incompetent and a regime to try to change that thought and thus relieve the pain. It was much more like a shift in the whole timeline - I couldn’t be incompetent because my source held me in perfection, and I had never been otherwise, either in thought or in body. With that realization the whole condition changed - my body became well and my sense of myself was improved at the same time.

I was recently praying about addiction. I contemplated how all desire belongs to God - that we can’t be made to desire something that’s not good for us, and that our being is perfect, unfallen, innocent. I repudiated the notion of a fallen man, or one whose timeline included, in a past however distant or apocryphal, an ancester tempted to do something that wasn’t good for her. There never was a timeline (or set of conditions) in which anyone could become separated from the pure leadings of what’s good, which are part of our rightful connection with God.

When I woke up the next morning, it felt like the world had shifted a little. The sweet innocence I had perceived in my prayers seemed to have sifted into everything. It was as if, at least a little bit, the timeline had changed. Not that things had become more innocent, but that they were found to have always been so. Even in myself I felt free of the compulsion to grab my computer and check my email first thing. I thought of how the whole notion of addiction, regardless of particular substance, regardless of how pervasive it may seem to be, really didn’t make sense for the possessors of the one Mind.

It occurs to me that many such shifts have happened in my lifetime. I think we parent better - people understand positive discipline more, and the behaviorist, punitive model that I grew up with is not assumed to be the only way of looking at things. I think we work together better - there is an understanding, at least in some places, of the benefits of cooperation and mutual appreciation over competition and jealousy. So I think it’s possible for the world to continue to change in this way - not through revolution but through quiet leavening of thought; not by taking a major turn of behavior but by having the whole timeline - the whole set of assumptions of what always has been - shift underneath us.