When Time Cracks Open
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For more than seven decades, a wide-ranging group of scientists have been using a clock to convey the level of risk we all face from things like nuclear weapons, international conflicts, and climate change. It’s not an actual clock, but a symbolic timepiece known as the doomsday clock that features only the last quarter of a clock’s circular face. The hands of this clock of doom serve as a metaphor for how close we are to destroying our own world. The hands were last moved on January 27, 2026 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to just 85 seconds away from the stroke of midnight, the closest it has ever been to the symbolic time of Apocalypse on Earth.
Times of radical change and great uncertainty can produce strange bedfellows. And in this case, scientific theories and religious beliefs, so often at odds, seem to echo each other, as both statistics and scriptures predict apocalyptic scenarios, and doomsday on Earth. Science and Religion, so long divided and seemingly opposed, finally find agreement with each other at the point of Doomsday, and in the face of Earth’s seemingly imminent annihilation.
Many voices may be saying beware the end is coming, yet in many ways, we have passed the turning point and have been in a kind of slow Apocalypse for many decades. By now, our common fate places us in the winding down of some great cycle, and it is increasingly unclear where we might end up. Call it the end times, or the dark times, or the great turning. Or better yet, consider it in the terms of the archetype of apocalypse, when everything seems to happen at once, and nothing remains in place, as both time and place become increasingly uncertain, and we feel increasingly at risk.
If we turn back to the symbolic doomsday clock, all that can be seen is the last quarter of what had been the full circle of time. In other words, the worldview that is represented by the Doomsday Clock already displays a great loss of time, and symbolically represents a loss of the sense of the whole. If time is simply seen as linear and literal, it can also be seen as coming to an end. But if time is seen as it was by the indigenous people all around the world, as a circle, it can be seen to come to an end and start again.
The time that people cannot find these days is the timeless moment, the eternal connection through which time itself renews.
Actually, that’s what the clock face is about. The hands of the clock go round, at first, indicating the beginning of a day, and then indicating the end of that day, which becomes the beginning of the next day. And of course, circles are archetypal symbols of the whole, the source of the continuance of life, not simply the end of it. The circular clock face, which can still be the symbol of time as it is on a wristwatch, reflects the origin of timekeeping on Earth, in the form of ancient sundials, where the word dial comes from dialysis, which means day.
Unfortunately, the modern world has fallen heavily under the spell of time, being nothing but a process of loss, each passing moment falling or fading away and further emptying the hourglass of the world and diminishing the presence of life in the process. The time that people cannot find these days is the timeless moment, the eternal connection through which time itself renews.
In mythical terms, each crisis in the world is also a crisis of imagination. And each moment can be the critical instant in which we awaken and change the direction of life and shift the weight of fate. That is a frequent message in fairy tales, for instance, where the clocks are always about to strike midnight, and everything is about to either turn to stone or else be lost altogether. Then, just before the fateful hour strikes, the hero or heroine suddenly awakens, having received an inspiration that saves the day. And it all happens in the last moment and just in the nick of time, for eternity hides near the ends of time, only appearing in revelations of the last possible minute after all hope seems lost, and time has simply run out.
The nick of time was another old way to measure the time passing from minute to minute. Each nick cut into a stick could also be seen as a crack in the procession of time. The nick in the stick could break open time’s mortal march, allowing the redeeming energy of Eternity to pour into the world through the crack in time and the crack between the worlds. Time, so often considered to be exact and precisely limiting, could crack open and reveal both the past, the ancient living on in the present and the threads of the future being woven before the inner eyes of the soul. In the open moments, when time cracks, we can feel the touch of eternity and allow timelessness to flow back into the world and into ourselves. In place of the march of time, a mythic regeneration occurs, a re-actualization of the potentials that were there at the beginning and the renewal of the forms of life.
We may be at the end of an era, but in mythological terms we are not at the end of time or the end of the world. Rather, we are in an in-between, open time in which we can become inspired and empowered by the archetypes of the soul.
If we stay in the realm of ancient ideas, and images and symbols, we can find distinctions between linear time and greater orders and understandings of time as eternal. The ancient Greeks had the idea of Chronos, or chronological time, which is quantitative, measurable time, the time that marches on and waits for no one. But they also had the notion of Kairos, a different order of time, a time that cannot be scheduled or planned for, for the Kairos moment arrives when the time is right, when things are ripe for change. Kairos time becomes the opportune time, but also the betwixt in-between moment of indeterminate length, that arrives as a break in time, but also as a crack in the world through which the eternal enters the time bound realm.
The essence of the Kairos moment is a transition of archetypes, or it used to be called the shifting of the gods. We are in one of those shifting times, a time in which the archetypes below life shift. That deep shift, which happens in the human unconscious, as well as in unseen levels of the world, is what redeems time and redeems history and can be a redemptive experience in each individual life.
To be human means to live in two worlds, the timeless and the time-bound, with the heart within our heart being the place where the two realms, the two worlds, the two essences meet.
Archetypal images and understandings can loosen the grip of literal time and reverse the fatalistic sense of life that has come to dominate science as well as religion. We may be at the end of an era, but in mythological terms we are not at the end of time or the end of the world. Rather, we are in an in-between, open time in which we can become inspired and empowered by the archetypes of the soul. In such a time as this time, the deeper self within us turns out to include capacities for creativity and instincts for survival that have been part of the inheritance of the soul of humanity itself, from the beginning, throughout time, trying to become conscious and known again in the nick of time, which turns out to be any moment in which we awaken and allow time to open and reveal both ancient wisdom that seemed to be lost, and unifying visions waiting to be found.
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Free Online Event Next Week
Join Michael on June 18 for a free online event that explores how Kairos refers to a different order of time altogether, an alteration of time in which impossible things become momentarily possible and we can awaken to a greater sense of the world and our place in it.
Thursday, June 18 :: 6:00 pm (PDT)
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