Transcript
MY TIME PARADOX BY JACOB JILLS I recently experienced the six year anniversary of my self-surrender in the Middle East. America's for profit prison industrial complex has been my "host" ever since. The past six years I've spent incarcerated is the longest period of time I've lived in one place for over 30 years. Unless the laws change, or I can eventually afford a competent attorney who can challenge my sentence all the way to the Supreme Court, I may never have another residence anywhere else ever again. It boggles my mind how fast time flies by in prison. No longer are there seven days in a week, sixty seconds in a minute, four weeks in a month. Life, and time, behind bars is one long, continuous existance. One hour it's Friday. The following hour tit's next month. A few hours more it's next year! Paradoxically it's a strange, encouraging and comforting, y t disheartening and melancholy encounter realizing how time is truly relative... and absolutely meaningless. Prison is like being trapped inside a hermetically sealed bubble with an alien atmosphere where time does not exist at all. A transparent sphere I can peer through and literally observe time as the illusion manifested in the minds of free-worlders who have enslaved themselves by encapsulating their psyches behind bars cast in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks months, years: tic tic tic tic tic... Albert Einstein proved long ago those in motion age slower than those who remian still. Perha s this is an explanation to my paradox? We bar'd-worlderes move around a lot less and at slower speeds than your free-worlders. I spent years alone in a cell twenty-three hours a day where I didn't move much at all. My time was spent sitting, laying, pacing six paces door to wall then back again. I was amazed how quickly time seemed to pass all alone in a small cage with not much to do. I spent hours upon hours contemplating time... One night I had a dream. I was a scientist who had invented a material that did not absorb the rays of light (I spent a lot of time pondering light, too). In this dream I theorized that since light waves move it should be possible to capture and store these waves. And if something is caught and stored then logically you could compress this something. If it moves it can be captured. If it can be captured it can be stored. And if it can be stored it can be compressed. If it can be compressed it can be used to creat thrust. I have no doubts this technolodgy is out there waiting to be discovered ... But this is a different story for another time. I used to think of time as something calculated and kept track of by watches and clocks. Time was elementry, unvaraying and constant: past, present, future . My past set in stone. My present a consequence of my past. My future? Well, nothing but cold steel prison bars. But wait! If time is truly variable for different objects at varying ; speeds and altitudes given their proximity to large masses of matter, does that mean time, like the wave lenghts of light in my dream, is a physically moving, stretching, bending entity? I've read time is its own demension. Time speeds up for some, slows for others. Time moves! If it moves why can't time be captured, stored and com pressed to be released at varying amounts of ... pressure? ... like the waves of light in my dream? What if this time compressor could be the human brain! Why not? Man!, the implications: time travel? Time manipulation? Time vengence? I learned time was an intricate smorgasbord of layers in lego-like structures. And like your kid's Legos, why couldn't time be deconstructed then reconstructed with another shape, color'd block to suit your needs: this layer removed, that layer snapped into place here, a new layer added there. All with in the human mind! I began to understand that we humans and our "knowledge" of time as a single tic of a second within our devices is wholly innacurate and mistaken based on approximations of our assumptions of the obvious. What our primitive brains conceive as "obvious" anyway... When I was a young boy one of my favorite things to do was play Lego wars! My older (by three years) step brother and I used to construct Lego cars as sturdy and strong as our imaginations would allow, configuring different vehicles in ways we, respectively, believed would hold up better than the other's in a head on collision. Ten feet or so apart we faced each other on our knees and at the count of, "THREE!", pushed our Legomobiles as hard as we could across the smooth surface of the kitchen floor. As the two cars slammed into one another blocks broke free and shrapnel'd in different directions like a mini Lego-explosion. The one that could still roll at the push of a hand won. In the course of our first Lego battles both cars shattered, breaking the small axel'd wheels free. Hours were spent reinforcing axels, thickening the nose, overlapping the center with crossed beams. My brother began winning every head-on smash! Then one day, I supposed due to my visible frustration, my eldest brother whispered into my ear that my apponents Lego car was glued together. Glued together? Reminiscing in my lonely cell one night it slapped me hard across the psyche! What if the "glue" that holds the layers of time together, that defines time as we humans know it, assume it to be, is our very ignorance of the true nature of time itself? From the indignant confines of a prison cell I imagined time really only exists, from a human perspective, inside our minds. The only place a single time exists for any any particular location is in the human brain. Outside earth, on distant planets and galaxies far, far away without gravity, wouldn't intelligent life out there have a different perspective when it comes to their time versus our time? "Real time", some say "proper time", is dependant on where you are, how close you are to large objects (planets, suns) and at what speed you are moving. All this being said, the only place time "tics" away unmolested in its true structured form would be interplanetary space free from the slowing, expanding, bending, contorting effects of things within time's proximity., Therefore, where on earth can "proper time" truly exist in its inter planetary birthday suit form? I could think of only one place: within the human mind! A mind utterly and completely free of everything in deep meditation ... And where better to learn, master the science of Olympic Gold Medal meditation than solitary confinement deep within the bowels of an American prison? I suppose then, time is far from meaningless. Time is everything! Sitting here writing these words with nothing but time, I haven't yet decided which is more haunting ... All this adds a whole new meaning to the old convict Maxim: Do time. Don't allow time to do you... THE END
