Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Time



Time: 
(8,002 words text only) 
by Prof.Barie Fez-Barringten: Global University
www.bariefez-barringten.com


                        Time is one of those concepts and measurements which are prone to a society that has a subconscious clicking time-bomb expectation of things happening in concert and possibly reaching some ends and having beginnings. It is symptom of our civil, cultural and social link. We can co-depently share time and its measures. It is the metaphor for life and our journey on this earth. We surrender our very identity being linked to time and its passage with labels as child, young, middle age, old, and by the years that we have lived. It even has status and it induces us to think that things are actually changing by the calibrations of the value of the measurement at any given intersection. The society I see around me seems to expect certain things to happen as borders and limits are reached. So, the FCC ordained radio and TV to identify stations at regular and predictable intervals and station have traditionally used the top of each hour to change programs with a surgical edge crossing over an invisible border from one to another hour.

                         Actually time is only measures of that which lives and is a measure of life. In fact life and time are comparative terms. I cannot imagine life without time and a sequence of dispensations by God and events. Conversely I can imagine the passage of events , God’s dispensations and natural phenomenon related to the life of the universe and our planet. The two terms tell something about each other. Yet a life of a person from when it began to its completion is a measure of its flesh and mortality while time is of little use when measuring our eternal life and the life of our soul. In our flesh we seek bench marks for the birth of Go, the universe and our soul in order to relate the man made constructs of scientific, philosophical and recorded time. We cannot perfect a beginning nor an end and try as we may frustrate our factual world with doubts, postulates, theorems and philosophies. All because  we cannot settle on time. Without a beginning and end time has little meaning. Without a beginning a beginning there is chaos. In fact this the definition of chaos. Chaos is an array without a beginning.

It seems then that mortal life with its clear beginning and certain end justifies time but or immortal and eternal live is infinite and without time. This story is about my mortal life but the references to my ancestors extend backward to edges of relations which may explain cultural influences near to the time in which I lived.

                             When we change times from daylight savings to eastern standard, we learn how time is a social and man made standard synchronizing social and human activities in to relationship. It can be calibrated to nature but is an accord of man about his links and connections to others.
                     The contemporary atheist french philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy says that an intellect lives in his own time relating to timeless ideas, literary characters and for me the word of God, the bible and the characters of the bible.
In fact my life has been about the difference between being of this age while part of eternity as an immortal being. My secular life and involvements have breathed through my body while the world’s clock ticked off seconds, minutes, hour’s days, weeks, months, years and decades. Yet I have lived in immortal and spiritual reality seeking God’s mind and will.
                       The arts of my time were dramatically of this age (secular) trying not to be transitional and timeless. The music was no different. The music exuded and defined the secular worldly love and not the Eros. It applauded commercial and industrial accomplishments and represented them as idols. Music’s words and titles reminded you to pay attention to your flesh and its context particularly emphasizing emotion, feelings, passion and sensorial experiences. Media, entertainment and recreation blossomed eclipsing spiritual, religious and timeless classics. The moment and this age became a compulsive social preoccupation with every one looking to see the latest and momentary “hits of the day”; fashion and rage of the time. All of this was at the sacrifice of church, classical music, literature and values. America led the rest in a cataclysmic charge to destroy and reinvent itself in the moment and by the moment. It was a kind of existential nihilism replacing power with roughhouses. The music was peacefully preparing the social psychic for a preoccupation with mortal, momentary use of it s capital. To spend and consume and not mercenary care for either eternal life for the future. Planners noted and rung their hands on how we are spending now the fortune of our future generations.
                        To some Indian tribes (One such is the Hopi Indians) time is free flowing without a beginning, middle or end; but, instead is expressed in the present. In other words, there is only the present time, the time in which we are living and it has no barriers or structure. It is the present in which things are happening. In addition, we are present with those things. I have experienced this time when staying awake for forty days and forty nights while a student at both Pratt and Yale working on various design projects involving drawing and listening to music. Time would be continuous and only punctuated by the light and changes in light. People waking and sleeping, but all the while I was in the creative process and felt only exhilaration over life, ideas, visions sand the work before me.
                     As a child attending grade school breaks metered the year and added to the differences between seasons. Summer, semester and weekend breaks were never long enough. While they happened there was a freedom form regularity and metering and I became aware of the difference between structured and unstructured living. There was a looming dread of the regularity and conformity yet to come. Of course seeing my fellow classmates, space and building after a long break disclosed taller, fuller and stronger bodies.
The girls got prettier and I got taller. I was no longer the tiny kid so easy to push over. I was also too handsome for many young girls to feel safe, and they were right! When I was young I would do anything no matter how long it took. I’d play, walk, travel, romance, read, and sing with the only limit of tiring and/or falling asleep.
                     Time will pass irrespective of our perceptions of its passing whether it be one ore incrementally measured however I believe if we are very patient and did less thinking we would observe more of the moment and what seemed to go and come without our notice would be remembered and the experiences we had the landmarks of the earth’s season, the natural ebb and tide of our context and our deteriorating bodies.
                      As a child I could not understand how a radio broadcast would not continue where it left off when we shut the radio because my concept of time revolved around me and the sequence of my own actions. Like wise as a child in  the forties when we traveled through time zones from east to west or west to east of the United states how programs just finishing would start again  as though they had not begun. I had and eerie sense of time travel.
An Indians perception and consequence of time is exemplified when in 1997 Howard and Jackie James and I escorted Randy and Zed Park (an American Indian) to their final exit-only departure from Dhahran Airport. Christina and I often wait at the hotel, which is about 100 feet from the departure area of the airport. This time we all decided to get there earlier and have the buffet, which occurred ON this night.  We deposited their two cats, boxes and luggage at the counter and went to have our dinner. Keep in mind I have known the Parks for nearly twelve years and the James couple knew them well for over five years. We were very good friends, who loved to prey, chat and laugh together. I keep reminding Zed of the time and the asking him to check his ticket. He assured me repeatedly that we had plenty of time.
                    Finally, the Parks decided it was time and after paying the check went directly to the departure counter only to be told that the plane had departed. It waited and when the Parks did not board (they already had there boarding pass) they had to unload all there luggage so it was quit some time that that we were late.
                        Because of visas, and no where to stay and having all their money shipped they were stranded. Fortunately the James had a guestroom for them and it took nearly six months for one of them and nearly another year for the second to be able to leave to go back to the USA.
Cheryl Patrick is also of Indian decent and so is Linda Ramsey’s husband. He is Chipawah. I remember from a song in Good News the possible location of the Chipawah tribe.
                    In my own life, I am gifted with a built in alarm clock. I can sleep at any time and ask god to wake me at a certain time of number of minutes or hours. I also can estimate the duration of jobs and tasks to within a fraction of one percent. I am an early riser and tire in the afternoon needing a brief rest to start the send part of the day. When I work I am very fast and concentrate fully on my work. Time goes rapidly.


                  In her wonderful book called “Alchemy of Mind” Dianne Ackerman says: “The interaction of the brain's 100 billion neurons, she tells us, is like "rush hour on the jammed streets of Manhattan”. People are "sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move." Memories are "the shoals of a life." All true, all vivid. The Guru, Santkeshvedas refers to the flitting of the mind as to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.
                     It is an apt technique, because the brain is at its essence a metaphor machine. We look for similarities, patterns, and generalities because they point to evolutionary survival strategies. Language itself is metaphor. "Pupil," Ackerman explains, derives from the Latin word for "little doll," because we see ourselves reflected in one another's eyes. "Windows" comes from the Norse "wind's eye," which is what they called the ventilation holes in their roofs. "Each word is a small story," she writes. William J. Gordon uses these metaphors in the creative process. I used them in creating works of architecture.

                        The human being is nothing if a learner, particularly in the first years. We even learn things that are not true. Hence the false memory. If you tell a small child often enough that he has been sexually molested, he will believe it, and pass any lie detector test. ”It is this mind in the continuos free flowing time that the metaphors of the mind leap and become realities. I understood who I was. I knew the mind of the moment and the one of this context of creation.  In that mind I lived. By repeating the memories I recalled as a small child, the memories I had could be separated from the many stories my mother told me of my childhood.

                           According to Ms. Ackerman of Cornell University, we define consciousness; we have many minds and identify.  Each of the identities is related to some context and reality we encounter in time. Much of Ackerman's book explores how the brain works in daily life to enact memory, personality, imagination, consciousness and creativity. Inspired by various forms of nourishment, and shaped by culture and individual experience as well as by genetic legacy, the brain's activities and interactions enable the "mind" to be "an experience, not an entity. ... An essence, not just a substance." Perhaps even a participant in the mind of the universe.
It is in these times that Ackerman’s concepts loom real to me. Barbara Allen enjoyed my poems and pronouncements during these periods. Roseanne recalls my lucidity and discipline. It was a different time with out sleep and the mind changed and coupled with a universal creative soul and spirit.
About our social life, he ads that many of the dead is alive, while many of the living are dead.
                    This confirms the bible, which separates the living from the dead by their status as saved persons. Saved persons are spiritually alive while unsaved are spiritually dead. In addition, for the saved, time is eternal and this life a mere small point of time on an eternal life with Christ.  To a saved person time has a different meaning and life a different significance than to an atheist. An atheist sees time relative to his mortal life span while the saved person sees life in relation ship to eternity.  It is inverted. This mortal life to a saved person is a fraction of an eternity while for an unsaved person this life is huge and very large. Quantitatively the atheist’s mortal life counts for a great deal while the quantity of the saved person it is differently measured.

                   About time the bible says:
ps90:4 For a thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
2pet3 8But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day
                   The only grasp I had on the fact and concept of time was that it was running out, dynamic, changing, and relative from one to another person and it was limited.
John12:56
                 “You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don't know how to interpret this present time? “

It also seems to be subject to forces well beyond my being and in a context I could not comprehend. I did not even have a vocabulary to neither put it in perspective nor reconcile it with events happening day by day. I was like a fish on the bottom of a very deep ocean dealing within  my world  without even knowing that I was in an ocean. It all was revealed ever so slowly.
My mother tells the story of how when I was about three and her father visited us on Home Street and he entered our apartment that the first question I asked him was when he was leaving. She found it amusing and told this to everyone.  I never saw in it any thing funny because I really wanted to know how much time I had to spend with him.  It was my way of building an agenda and seeing what I we could do in the allotted time.  Even today, I remember it clearly.  I was not trying to be rude or suggest he leave, quite the contrary, i was so glad he visited because his visits were so rare and I had so many things, questions and things going on in my little head. He was a dear man and very kind.  I also realized that then that our time on the earth was limited and we had little time to spend and with each other.  I daily dreaded that my mother and father would die before me and I was very upset by this fact. I also lived in expectation of potential accidents and health problems that could end their lives. Then I would be alone and my world would end.  In anomie I could not imagine a world without my parents until I got older and one of my teachers at school taught us to prepare for that event by taking our lives into our own hands by being responsible and caring. That was a change of time for me; one season ended and another began.


                    We can recognize all of eternity by what God dispenses and creates.  We subdivide and segregate times by landmark events to measure using continuous and repetitive events such as the seasons, movements of stars and planets. It is not the ticking of a man made clock at subdivisions related to the turnings of planets and the beginning and ending of shadows and lights on our planet.
               Yet, our lives, and, the changes that God creates vary despite the planets and the universe; a relatively consistent metronome.
Like its companion, life, time is eternal, ongoing and independent.
As it is eternal and continuous so are we. 
It reminds us that there is more to life than the present or this one time in which we live. 
                     We instinctively realize that there was a past and will be a future and that the future may be different than the present and it may or may not include our physical presence to be authentic or experienced.  We on the other hand may be experiencing time away from the time society regards as time but part of another kind of spiritual and eternal time.  In either case time is a reality or we are part of either depending on our faith, priorities, and choices.  As we can choose life, we can also choose time.  I neither case they continue nor eternal.
I have come to know the different ages and dispensations of God's dealings with men through the work of Finis Jennings Dake.

                  I am an avid “Dakes” bible reader and use most of Dakes references.
I was introduced to Dakes in Saudi Arabia by Ver Corres and I have clung to it ever since.
                    God has spoken at "sundry times" as well as "in divers manners" (Hebrews 1:1). The time when He spoke to "the fathers" is distinguished from the time in which He has "spoken to us". The time in which "He spake by the prophets" stands in contrast with the time in which He spake by (His) "Son". In addition, the "time past" is obviously distinguished from "these last days" (Hebrews 1:2). To "rightly divide the word of truth" (2Timothy 2:15) it is essential to regard the times in which the words were spoken, as well as the times to which they refer.

                    A dispensation, administration, or arrangement, during a portion of chronos may, or may not, be equal to kairos, according as the context determines.
According to Dakes, the Bible consists of seven distinct administrations where each has its own beginning and ending; each is characterized by certain distinctive principles of God's dealings; and, each ends in a crisis or judgment peculiar to itself, save No. 7, which is without end.
Dakes tabulated the following:
1.     The Edenic state of innocence.
End - the expulsion from Eden.
2.     The period "without law" (the times of ignorance, Acts 17:30).
End - The Flood, and the judgment on Babel.
3.     The era under law.
End - The rejection of Israel.
4.     The period of grace.
End - The "day of the Lord".
5.     The epoch of judgment.
End - The destruction of Antichrist.
6.     The millennial age.
End - The destruction of Satan, and the judgment of the great white throne.
7.     The eternal state of glory.
No End.
               "And to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which for ages hath been hid in God who created all things."—Ephesians 3:9
Time has always been an important element in God’s plan for man. Such biblical phrases as "in due time" and "at the time appointed" indicate that God is a precise God and punctual. True, his concept of time may differ from ours, for a day with the Lord is "as a thousand years" (2 Peter 3:8).
We are now living in the Sixth Probationary Period called the
Age of grace: An age made very obvious by the lives we lead in an age where we are forgiven and lead the resurrected life. It is a very different period than before.
                   The Dispensation of Grace: The Length of this Period is from the First to the second advent of Christ and the binding of Satan in the abyss at the end of this age. It has already lasted over 1900 years.
                    The Rapture, the completion of the first Resurrection, the Judgment of the Saints, the Judgment of Nations, and the Tribulation of Daniel's 70th week take place at the end of this age. Mat. 4:1; Rev. 19:21; John. 1:17;
The second great epoch, from the flood to the establishment of the kingdom of God, is under the limited control of Satan, "the prince of this world," and is therefore called "This Present Evil World." Gal. 1:4; 2 Pet. 3:7
                  The Present Age sometimes called Parenthetical Dispensation because it occurs as an aside while the more dominant dispensation takes place. The purpose of this Dispensation is to gather out a
"People for His Name" (Acts 15:14), called The Church.
The "Fullness of the Gentiles," with some Jews, makes up a "New Body," the CHURCH.
This "New Body" is not under Law but Grace (Romans 6:14). When Christ took His seat upon the "Father's Throne" He changed it from a "Throne of Justice" to a "Throne of Grace," and God's attitude in this Dispensation is one of favor and "longsuffering" toward wicked men and nations (2 Peter 3:9).
This Dispensation we are foretold will end in Apostasy, for Christ Himself said that when He came back He would not find FAITH (the Faith) on the earth (Luke 18:8).

                  Time’s relativity is no better demonstrated as when we grow past 20; a 20-year period seems relatively near relative with other 20-year periods than when we are less than 20 years old.  Then they seem ancient or futuristic.
As a boy between 1937 and 1947, until I was ten, it seemed that the roaring twenties and the depression were amongst the events of a distant past.  Not the mere twenty years that had gone before.
Silent movies, radio, automobile was only just invented and being developed as I grew. 
                 The longer we live the smaller the relationship of any one event, period, age, or generation is to our overall life. So too with issues, we tend to understand things in proportion to the re overall sum of what it is we are viewing in relationship to other things.
As a child My Uncle Murray told me how it is for an insect to see the time in which he lives compared to how we see the time because of its life span.  His is at high speed to us and yet it is normal to him and actually in slow motion of our way of thinking being that he lives in two days what is sixty years for us and to him he sees us moving at a pace in such slow motion as to almost be inanimate. It may explain why insects getaway for m us before we can catch them. They are moving at a different time then we.
                 I lived before the oil industry proliferated and highways, air transport flourished.  Time and space were perceived differently. Foreign trade, Travel and immigration were at a small scale compared to today.  Communication lapses were part of the tempo of thinking and considering where things were located and access to them.
                       There were fewer people and the institutions to serve and support them.
These chronicles are vignettes of the times and period God gave me to build my faith and belief in him.  To prepare me for eternity and hopefully win others to do likewise. These are not Egypt’s ancient pyramids nor Pulitzer Prize writings but merely a testament to the glory of God and his gift of life. 
As an infant until now I can sleep very little, always curious and ready to explore and use the little time God has gifted to live, grow and enjoy his contexts, resources and blessings. My youth was spent trying to remember and not forget faces, places, names and emotions i had.  Even today, I measure most events based on worthy to remember or forget. In addition, god gives us the ability to forget as well as the blessing to recall when he wills.
The bible gives us another view of time; it is eternity, with time being an infinitely small part of an infinitely endless time line. In the spirit, we live with God on the eternity line while in the flesh we live in time. The flesh has “time life”, while the spirit has “eternal life”
                    I learned about dispensations from Finis Jennings Dake (1902-87) who was a Pentecostal pastor, teacher, and author whose most influential work is the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. This study Bible, containing notes on the entire Old and New Testaments, was first published in 1963.

It is my bible and the one I have bought and distributed throughout Saudi Arabia. The Dake Bible is considered the top "Pentecostal Study Bible" by many. In fact, the Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements says, "His ‘notes’ became the ‘bread and butter’ of many prominent preachers and the ‘staple’ of Pentecostal congregations."

Dake is very important within Pentecostal/Charismatic circles.

                       As for time, God abides in eternity, which is omnipresent and infinite while time is limited and tiny. Abraham George once reminded me that while we complain of God’s acting in the last minute, it is He who is on time and we who are not synchronized to His time. It is God’s will we find timeliness.
                          Isiah57
15 For this is what the high and lofty One says-
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
"I live in a high and holy place,
but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite.
God’s grace has rescued us from time into eternity when we are receptive and surrender to His gift.
However, this book is “historically responsible” in that it contributes to the history of it s period from 1937 to 2000.  It gives the period perspective and identifies the landmarks of the times.

                           Parts of my life related to the character of history and were concerned with events in history. As example:
¨     Earth Day
¨     Project management
¨     Architecture as the making of Metaphors
¨     Christianity in the Moslem world
One of the landmarks of this time is Leaders of Nations and even the Nations themselves:
·        Adolph Hitler;
·        Bin Laden;
·        Chawchesque
·        Heineker, Eric (East Germany)
·        King Khalid
·        Marcos; Mousalinni;
·        Pol Pot
·        Slotaban Melosavitch; Sadam Hussein

History

            History gives my identity legitimacy. Discovering Europe was discovering my identity. Each place I have visited and learned I found a tidbit of my self and its antecedent.  I can see that I am part of a worldwide humanity.
This is my cosmopolitan mind; seeing my self in the context of the world places, peoples and customs.
Periods are characterized by dominant technologies, wars, crisis weather systems, etc. contexts are the settings in which we play out our lives.  Taken together periods and contexts are the external, which provides the imputs and perceptions of the world around us. We tend to identify life with these two.
All life has lived in one or another period and context. My life has been spent in time when one part of the world has become enabled by an overabundance and access to energy, electricity, power, credit, food, resources, transportation, communication and information. Morally, it has degenerated to accept worldwide violence and immorality. The metaphors follow accordingly and the so do contexts and periods landmarks.
My family’s contexts, my city, borough, blocks and streets.  The schools and teachers. The women and the cars. The places I’ve e visited and the people I’ve met. All of these form the landmarks of the period and mark the time.  The music, movies and fashion give the time away.  The cartoons in the newspaper such as Archie and Tinker’s trolley. Wolds Fairs and wars, etc.
For example, I find parallels between the economy of 1972 and 2004 and the challenges to people that are 35 years of age.  I look and see what they do and compare it to my behavior at t the time.

In 1972 NYC was nearly bankrupt, there was massive unemployment and we had to change venues and careers to get on with our lives; eventually we left New York and working for an Insurance Company.
The times are always hard, challenging and changing.  It is what you do despite the circumstance.  Do you surrender, give up, and yield to make some thing happen?
At 35, I did what seemed like a way toward a better future, a solution to serving and they’re fore a way to engage society. I remember being concerned about being relevant, significant and engaged in the reality, rather than the ideals of my imagination.
Henry Classon, in preparing LME'’ prospectus drew this point: that no one wanted to finance idealist but people who were actively doing some thing to make a difference and change. I had yet another agenda, which was to reify my self into the professional I had spent years training.  This is what I did at 35.
These times have included a society being taught immorality and recreational sex, consumption, eating, smoking, driving, traveling, recreation, etc. by the media including television, radio, magazines, newspapers, etc. These times have desensitized and trivialized the good, moral, character, and lovely thing. The beauty of the good old days is not just being torn down and by scorn, derision, shame but ignored, forgotten eclipsed by badness, madness and budiness. Baudy, vulgarity and mediocrity reign where elegance, excellence and quality once were valued. For example, it easier than ever for anyone for practically any reason to capture the attention of the media a rise to meteoric fame over night.  Such fame often results in writing and publishing a book, movie, etc.
There were times when the “underdog” came up and was held in high esteem because the underdog succeeded against all odds. He may or may not have become famous but he would be governing the chance.  Today, it is scandal, shock and awe which succeeds, not accomplishment. Of course, the are still the Nobel Peace Prize, Oscars, etc.
In 1938, it was the “Sea biscuit”, the long shot that made Pimlico and Santa Anita; racetracks, horses, and horse people permeated the news.
Joe DiMaggio in Baseball; Joe Lewis in boxing; and Gorgeous George in Wrestling.  I recall seeing him with my dad and his family at the Miami coliseum.  Wow! After seeing him so many times on late night television is was so interesting to see him in person.
Time and timing is relative and my Uncle Murray once compared our undemanding of time to compare an insect’s perception to humans.  To an insect we move very slow and to us they very quickly.  We cannot catch a fly because the fly’s life is lived in such a short time relative to our own and they perceive us moving very slow as we might perceived a still rock or inanimate bolder.  When flying out of our reach they have examined us very carefully and anticipated our every move long before we very really reach them.  They perceive us in a different time.
Like wise we perceive other cultures, languages, behaviors, foods, artifacts, etc. in different times and perceptions. Others perceive us likewise. When a person dies who has been an integral part of our lives we are sad. Sad because there death marks passage of time and an end to a “time”, period, and age in a life. Part of the time of an life has passed. For example when someone dies who we have not been recently involved we may not morn. Mourning seems to be connected more to our own than the dead person’s passing. Many of the people whom I knew who died I mourned whose lives were woven with my own at the time of there death. Others who I had not seen for long while or whose lives had been on different tracks I did not mourn. Yet I often remember them and there person and our lovely time together. The death of my parents was like this. They had already separated themselves from me and I mourn that for all of my life. There death did not change what has already happened. On the other hand the Death of Pastor Bergin and June Donnelly both hit me hard as they died while we were involved in our relationship. I mourn all of them in general but at the passing of time with the ones currently involved. Some thing has ended.
It is only in God and His word is I able understand the resolution of these many differences and complexities. God is able to judge and know the differences. I can only live within His will and trust is His judgement as being the trueth.  I cannot, as atheists live outside of God’s perfect will.  I am imperfect, but God is perfect and so is His will. His time is perfect and I can only pray to expect his will in His, not time.
                   In one sense time is fixed and we are moving linearly along the time line in creating two dimensions as a point which is moved horizontally and creates a line; a line being a point moved horizontally, Yet it seems that we are fixed and time is moving past us at every moment as we notice the results of the turning planet and the changers in the position of the earth creating minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years and seasons.
                     I am convinced by the word of God that He wishes to keep us alert to His potential return, watching and ready because we are certain that He will come but uncertain as to the time. Therefore, while we are certain about events of the past and His promises of essential events of the future we are uncertain about the duration between essential events.  We can know the measurements of microseconds of our breakdown of these durations between full moons, seasons, sunrise and sunsets but not the subdivisions of God’s major events that will happen in the future. We live out our mortal lives along a one-dimensional point creating a line while our soul explores the cosmic past and future. Each soul that begins its life in mortal flesh begins to live on the point and move on the time line.  There are just so many variables for all souls in a body and individual time clocks for each of us.  Imagine our life without any consistent relation to the passage of day and night, winter or summer, and years. 
We would notice ourselves changing and the world around us changing and would measure events, dispositions, and decisions made by others and our selves.
In visiting ancient civilizations we are aware that they are living in a different period from us and also have a different concept of time, its length, and importance or for some even its existence.
                      Some cultures measure nature’s changes with reference to an ongoing line of consecutive, cumulative and relative time.  They are conscious only of moons, suns, stars, winds, leaves, growth of vegetation and there own bodies changes relative to the seasons and the sunrises, etc. but linear and independent scientific measurable time is foreign and alien to there culture. I experience these moments in prayer, daydreaming, and during fasting and sleep deprivation where I have stayed awake for forty days and forty nights. The world and time is a very different place.  Not measured mechanically but by nature and instinct.

Industrial Age/Oil age and the Age of Barie

                      This section of my autobiography should have some different name having to do with something that affected everyone and of which I was only a part.  It should be wide enough in scope and impact on everyone’s life including my own and relevant to this autobiographical work. That one thing would have to be Industrialization and its subset specific to this time energy.
In 1937, the US government declared solar collectors as useless. Today the collector is so powerful it could replace every type of fossil fuel energy product (oil, coal and natural gas). As the world’s thirst and cravings for increasing power, consumption and control so did individuals. My attitude was different from my elders as I perceived the new potential of enormous scale and magnitude of a power beyond human scale. The sense and meaning of Buckminister fuller’s “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” resonated and proclaimed soaring rockets, endless highways, space and earth travel,, anonymity and technisms, jibe talk,   etc.
                      Oil was first found in Kuwait in 1928 after signing an agreement with Kuwait to explore for oil on December 23, 1934. Kuwait became Japan’s number one supplier of oil.  In Jubail there is an office of the Arabian Oil Company which is actually the Japanese Saudi oil company. When I was a manager at gulf John Carpenter who was an employee of Gulf decided to stay on with Kuwait bank and Kuwait Oil when the government of Kuwait nationalized the Gulf Oil Company in Kuwait. Later Ron Brocius who worked for me in Houston also went to work for the Kuwait Oil Company. 

During that period Paul Valerie visited and did survey work of the facilities and showed me pictures and his report of support facilities.  I was under the impression that they facilities were very primitive and low in quality.

                 Using the information from a report by the department of physics at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey about energy consumption and sources of renewable energy it diagrams how in 1900 at the dawn of the industrial age there were 1.6 billion populating the earth because fossil fuels spawned electricity use in industry, transport, food, and medicine and began to allow for now habitable areas to be settled. By W.W.II and 1950, there were 2.4 billion and the introduction of nuclear power and population spread through commercial air transport. The year of my birth, on May 6, 1937 Hindenberg crashed and burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey and initiatives were begun to both change sources of fuel and further develop fossil fuel and hydrogen toward developing a hydrogen economy.  In fact, the Industrial revolution had already begun in 1880, about a half-century earlier. However, this period was really cranking it up.
I was born in darkness and as I grew, the world got brighter and brighter.  Highways proliferated and so did the automobile and although much innovation had already occurred, new technology emerged based on the abundance and demand for energy and its efficient use. There was more of everything and it all went faster and was more accessible. Things started disappearing and soon impatience developed to rid of the old and make space for the new. Cataclysme was unleashed in government, corporations and planning. Education spoke of letting educational methodologies run amuck so that they well reveal there own faults and be replaced by new methods and technology. Communism and dictators had already replaced feudal regimes and the world knew how to control atomic energy and mass destruction. The world during this period has been a potpourri of combinations and types of social, economic and governments systems and ideologies. As varied in type as in size and access to wealth and resources. Varied in capability to govern and keep their pace. In addition, varied in ethnicity, religion and tolerance for others living with and skirting their borders.
                 
This segment of the secular energy age had to deal with new values and new concepts of what was right and agreeable to a very new demographically distributed society? Values, mores, ethics and what righteous ness and agreeable were different and were to become the centerpiece of the industrialised energetic technical world. No one could escape having to deal with anomie and change. Society had to face its hypocrisies and divisions. Irony of common sense became laughable as well as instructive. Energy and it bi-products such as fertilizer mad the planet’s increased population avoid the doomsday predictions of and earlier century of starvation and death due to over population. The prediction of the recreational society became true as the increased population and efficiency of productivity made labor obsolete in agriculture, industry and craft.
That the next century is very likely to be shaped as much by the move away from fossil fuels as the last century was by the development of a fossil fuel economy.

                   My period is really the post industrial revolution period called by some the Oil age with a steel age mentality, which included sub ages and mini periods. All of these depended on the industrial Revolution steel age and fossil fuel. The economy of the USA, western states and most of the world increasingly developed into hungry fossil fuel economies.
The world after the industrial age, which we are currently experiencing, will be remarkably different:

1929-1942: Great Depression
Magnetic Tape - 1931
Atomic Bomb - 1934
Nylon - 1934
Photocopier - 1938
1939-1945: W.W.II
Loran - W.W.II
Computer -1942
1945-1989: Cold War Era
Microwave - 1946
Compact Disc - 1960s
GPS - 1978
Pacemaker - 1950
1940- Present: Information Age
VCR - 1956
                      The period just proceeding the age of energy was the steel age which was dominated by the robber barons and characterized by corruption, ruthlessness and predatory proclivity and nurtured the twisted ideology of an imperial warfare-welfare state. All of this ran its course until I was born and W.W.II.
Today’s generation of human beings is acting as if it is the only generation of human beings – and indeed the only species – that matters. 
                      The world after the industrial age will be very different from the world of today. Today, there are “change managers.” Whose mission is to prevent the collapse of the industrial world and today’s large human population?
Highways, cities, villages because of energy, oil to power autos, and fertiliser to feed. The anomaly of these events persists today and affects my life as populations increased in size, demographics changed due to migrations, shifts of haves and have-nots globally.
Music, culture and life styles based on large populations, public and less private life and customizing of cloths, culture and food. More things are international and globally compatible.  Access is increased to what was formerly exotic and forbidden.
The characteristics of this age affected the values and gave license and opportunity for the growth of differing values and led my parents and community to deal with these conditions as they occurred. They affected our family, our self-esteem, our orientation to our family and cultural values, and shaped our decisions for dealing economically with our work and home.

Geo-Political Changes currently in the making:
1.     Mid-east Israel and Palestine
2.     Arabian Gulf including Afghanistan, Iraq, Persia, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan especially noting the free elections in Afghanistan and Iraq.
3.     China: with an eye toward an alternative out of Saudi in 1985 while under contract with Arieb, I subscribed to an English language version of the People’s Republic of China news paper and to the US infomation service of the US govt. I discovered that china was building several mega Industrial cities throughout china employing million s of chines and foreign national coupling them on a ten to one basis for education and production. I also responded to want ads and did get an offer form an architectural firm in Beijing who offered me a high salary but I would have to barter my income by treading on the commodities market to receive my pay in the USA.

Trying times

With all of the impact of anomie, rifts in periods, ages and isms I have dealt day by day and made my way.
There are times in my life when I had trials; where I had to do something and I did something noble.
4.     I did not fire Garth but rather rehabilitated him
5.     I did help my fellow students to find a job
6.     I did not take drugs
7.     My father always did the “extra thing” in his work for his customers, children and drivers.
8.     Christian always helped me tell the trueth by correcting me by prodding or making remarks
9.     Father did not abandon my mother
10.                        Mother did not abandon her children
11.                        I learned not to love but to be “noble’
12.                        Balance the relationship between my parents; my father in his unhappiness and my mother in her grief.
10. I learned that there were people who had neither shame nor guilt and that I had both to one degree or another
11. I learned that there were people who had an extraordinary amount of shame and guilt.
There were movies that dealt with time:
¨     The Time Machine
¨     The Day The Earth Stood Still
¨     The Shape Of Things To Come
¨     Ground Hog Day
¨     The Times Of Our Life: Jimmy Stewart
¨     The Man Who Could Work Miracles
¨     Fred Mc Murray going back in time
¨     Wild West
                         
Einstein’s Special theory and theory of time and space and the speed of light being the maximum velocity has given some to call this peed Einstein’s speed. Christina concludes that it humans could reach this speed and we are at the speed of light then we will know God and at one with every ting that He has created because in that speed is life. Einstein explains that humans are essentially the same but living in an illusion, that each is different and distinguished when the reality is that we are all in the same structure and organizing principle. Our mind, perceptions and understandings tell us differently. We spend our lifetimes trying to realize our sameness. Many of the consequences of the Special Theory of Relativity are counter-intuitive and violate common sense. Einstein correctly defined common sense as those prejudices that we acquire at an early age. If life is light and light is the fastest velocity then there are no differences between one and another life
I learned to focus on time as I made tapes for radio and demos for disc jockey work. I learned to time my presentations by seconds and to beat my own time to meet electronic connections.
                       In Saudi for Westerners accustomed to the Gregorian method of tracking weeks and months  the Hidrah year of 1487 compared to 1992 brought comparisons and contrasts. The way of telling the beginning and the end of a month by the new moon seemed primitive and heathenistic. However the shift of starting the week on Saturday after the Friday Sabbath and the weekend celebrated on Thursday and Friday was the most unusual. For the expat Thursday became Saturday and Friday became Sunday. Catholics celebrated on Thursday evening  while Christians worshiped on Friday. For many over religious protestants they held there services on Sunday evenings. All of this was often the subject of comedy and jokes amongst Arabs and Westerners alike. Many of us  doing international business and communications would actually have a four day weekend or a seven day work week depending on your work and the time of year. On Ramadan where the Saudis celebrated with a all day fast expatriate non-Muslim made up the work by covering for the absent Saudi by working two shifts of the work day. So that the Saudi who came to work after sunset could have the expat there with him till past midnight to help him make up the work. For example at KFU we held many classes in the evening.