Astonishing Transformations and the Change to Come

Amar Murray, Researcher

An immense clamor rises everywhere. Extraordinary upheavals sweep the world. We all see and watch the scale of the changes taking place around us, in thought, society, psychology and religion, and consequently in politics.

This is the moment when a new world begins to emerge, a world unlike anything we have known. Its assumptions are overturned and made open to discussion and rejection. Ideas cross every red line, until red ceases to mark the limits of permissible thought.

It is what I have always called a window in time: an opening that appears once in an era and gives rise to a world different, by every measure, from the one we knew. New assumptions take hold. The once-sacred past becomes an object of ridicule. New states, policies and rules of the game begin to appear. Leading this transformation are the strong and tenacious, those with the resolve to confront the fiercest storms until they can shape the new world through their ideas and become its new point of reference.

History tells the stories of each new emergence made possible by a great opening in time.

To understand this better, let us imagine boarding a time machine and returning to the past. We shall stop at several destinations, each in a different place and time.

Let us begin with the first.

Paris, 1779. We open the door of the time machine to a scene of beautiful tranquillity and splendid countryside. Ordinary peasants work hard and methodically. An ornate horse-drawn carriage passes along the road, evidently belonging to someone important. It stops suddenly, and a man and woman step out in sumptuous clothes. People and guards form a line, and the peasants stand respectfully. Their overseer approaches the owner of the carriage, bows and says:

“Our respects, my lord Count. Welcome to your land. We are honored to be your servants. What a great moment it is to see you.”

The count, a member of the French nobility, smiles in acknowledgment and proceeds with the same grandeur in which he arrived.

Before returning to work, two peasants exchange a few words.

“Did you see? What a great man the count is!”

“Indeed. How kind he is to give up his precious time to visit us. Truly, these are the manners of the nobility.”

We travel a little further to a neighboring village and find a wedding. A young woman is to be married that night. The festivities end, but the bride does not leave with her husband. She is first taken to the noble count’s house, supposedly honored to lose her virginity at his hands. Only then does she return to her husband, who does not even question what has happened, as though it were divine destiny and an unquestionable fact of life.

We have seen enough for today. We board the time machine and set it in motion. A vast window in time opens and returns us to the same place, eleven years later.

Uproar fills the air. The once-docile people are in revolt. They curse the man formerly regarded as their benefactor and set his property ablaze. A cleric close to the count is led in chains to the guillotine.

Another man stands addressing the crowd in words entirely new to the vocabulary of the age. He cries: “Equality! Justice! Liberty! Retribution! Death to the king!” The crowd repeats his words in a dramatic scene of complete reversal.

Let us pause our story here and explore it further in another article.

What we have witnessed is an immense change, an earthquake in thought, psychology and society. It has transformed everything that had prevailed and been held sacred for hundreds of years, opening a new historical period and an enduring point of rupture. An entirely new life has emerged through a window in time with its own objective conditions and scientifically explicable causes. Universal patterns break through time and bring about astonishing transformations.

According to the patterns discernible in history, these windows and great changes arrive in successive waves. Each wave selects an aspect or field upon which to work with its remarkable instruments of transformation. Such is their force that they may extinguish a living language, strike down great values once held sacred, and dissolve relationships and social forms that the public had considered beyond question. They may even end religions in which peoples placed their faith for many centuries. Where, for example, are the religions of the Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, which endured for thousands of years?

Change is a permanent, active and enduring principle governing the lives of nations. In civilizational life there is no place for stability understood as immobility. Movement is unceasing and change continuous, sometimes sweeping all before it. As the philosophers of old said, change resembles the flow of water in a river: while it moves, it remains pure; when it ceases to move, it stagnates, decays and gives off a foul smell. Change is the law of existence. Immobility is death and non-being.

What were the earlier windows in time? What immense transformations occurred to bring about such far-reaching change? I mean civilizational transformation, accompanied by geopolitical shifts and a complete reconfiguration of thought and psychology: new philosophies altering social relationships and moral systems, upon which entirely new social, economic and legal concepts and rules are then built.

Answering this momentous question requires deep, patient study and the methods of scientific inquiry. It may be the most important issue we can work on at this dangerous time.

We must be ready to act as participants in the world’s civilizational development. That requires understanding the window in time and the social conditions it demands, and preparing ourselves fully through sustained work and a comprehensive intellectual and cultural undertaking.

Perhaps we shall explore this subject in greater detail, traveling in the time machine on each occasion to another place and period, watching the window open and entering it. We shall venture into history and, at times, sail toward the future, drawing on its laws and patterns to anticipate what might occur.

Until we meet again, if God grants us life.

Amar Murray, Researcher