Worlds Within Meaning: philosophy

Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

24 September 2025

Unfolding Myths: Living With Time After Its End

1 The End of Time, The Return of Myth

"When time dissolves into unfolding, only story remains. And it is in story that the world is cut again — not into clocks, but into meanings."

We are now living beyond time.

This is not a claim about physics, calendars, or cultural decay. It is a semiotic claim — a recognition that time as we have inherited it was never a neutral backdrop, but a symbolic infrastructure: a grammar of unfolding that served a particular worldview. That grammar is crumbling. And in its place, something older — and perhaps more enduring — is beginning to stir.

We ended the Phasecraft series by dissolving time into perspectival unfolding: not a line, but a field of processes, each undergoing its own mode of becoming. In that move, we displaced time as a container and recast it as an effect of how we phase the world — how we cut it into perceptible, nameable, shareable processes.

But when those cuts become unstable — when phasing fails to deliver the world as coherent or navigable — what then? What orients us, when the temporal scaffolding collapses?

This is where mythos returns.

Not as fantasy. Not as superstition. But as symbolic orientation to the open.

As the story through which a world becomes phaseable again.

As the deeper grammar beneath all our surface grammars.

Time as Myth

The modern notion of time — linear, uniform, divisible, external — is a myth. Not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of being a total symbolic cut: a story that orders experience, anchors causality, and locates the self within a broader unfolding. It is a myth that came to dominate others, installing itself as the background condition for science, economy, and governance. And like all myths, it shaped what could be said, thought, and felt.

But its authority is waning. Climate crisis, planetary computation, cultural unmooring — these have ruptured the coherence of linear time. We no longer move confidently toward “the future.” We no longer believe in progress as unfolding inevitability. We no longer trust that time’s arrow points anywhere in particular.

We are left, instead, with unfolding: plural, perspectival, processual.

Mythos as the Grammar of Meaningful Unfolding

If phasecraft is our method for cutting the world into unfolding processes, then mythos is what gives those cuts weight. Mythos provides the symbolic conditions under which a cut matters — under which it becomes not just a perceptual distinction, but an orientation within a shared world.

Where phasecraft works at the level of semiotic technique, mythos works at the level of symbolic ecology. It shapes what is seen as sacred, tragic, inevitable, redemptive, or possible. It tells us what kind of world we are phasing.

And crucially, it is not optional. Every act of phasing already presupposes a mythos. Even modernity, with all its anti-mythical pretensions, was mythic through and through — its faith in rationality, in mastery, in temporal progress, was nothing less than cosmogonic.

To phase without mythos is to navigate without a horizon. To live-with unfolding without symbolic grounding is to drift in a sea of processes, unable to name what matters.

So myth returns — not as regression, but as the symbolic consequence of time’s collapse.

Living With the Open

What we are seeking now is not a return to traditional mythologies. Those were anchored in cosmoi and ecologies that no longer hold. Nor are we seeking to fabricate new grand narratives, scripted from above.

What we are seeking is something else entirely:

a grammar for symbolic orientation to the open;
a practice of worlding that lives-with indeterminacy rather than denying it;
a poetics of unfolding that cuts meaning without claiming closure.

This is the work of mythos after time.

In the posts that follow, we will explore how different cultures have phased the world through cosmological narrative — and how these symbolic grammars might inform, challenge, or inspire our own. We will examine the colonial wound of imposed temporalities, the more-than-human grammars of mythic ecology, and the emerging symbolic potentials of this transitional moment.

We are not looking for stories to believe.

We are looking for ways to live.

And that, now more than ever, is the work of myth.

2 Cosmoi of the Cut

“Each cut is already a cosmos. Each unfolding bears the weight of a world.”

If time was never a neutral container, then neither were the worlds that grew within it. Across cultures and histories, people have lived-with unfolding in ways that far exceed the grammar of clocks. They did not name time, but cut the world — into seasons and stories, initiations and returns, births and deaths and rebirths. These cuts were never mere temporal markers. They were cosmoi: entire symbolic orders sustained through ritual, genre, and shared construal.

In this post, we move from the critique of modern time to the plurality of world-cuts: how different cultures have phased becoming through symbolic practice. We’re not here to survey traditions for their quaintness, nor to appropriate cosmologies out of context. We’re here to learn how people have lived-with unfolding, and how they’ve sustained symbolic orientation without collapsing into linearity or chaos.

This is not anthropology. It is an archaeology of possibility.

From Time to Cosmos

To say that mythos returns after time is to say that cosmos returns — not as the universe, but as an ordered whole: a world that holds its unfolding through symbolic structure. Every cosmos is sustained by a grammar of cuts: distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the before and the after, the permissible and the forbidden. These are not abstract metaphysics; they are lived semiotics.

Consider a few examples of such symbolic orderings:

Spiral temporalities (e.g. in West African or Andean cosmologies), where events do not repeat, but echo — returning with difference, intensifying through layered cycles.
Kinship calendars, in which unfolding is synchronised with social roles — becoming a parent, elder, ancestor — and the very structure of time is indexed to relational change.
Agricultural rituals, where sowing and harvesting are not just economic acts, but cosmogonic events — re-enactments of creation, death, and renewal.
Initiatory thresholds, where unfolding is cut not by age or date, but by symbolic trial — the world becomes different after the ordeal, and so does the self.

Each of these is a cosmos: not a map of space-time, but a grammar for living meaningfully with change.

The Cut as Symbolic, Not Temporal

What these practices reveal is that unfolding has always been lived through symbolic cut, not measured time.

A cut is not just a moment; it is a transvaluation — a shift in the order of meaning. A festival doesn’t merely mark the passage of days; it alters the world, re-activates cosmological grounding. A ritual doesn’t occur in time; it cuts time, orienting the unfolding around a phase shift that cannot be located on a clock.

This is why modern “time management” feels so hollow. It offers division without cosmos, segmentation without symbolism. It phases the world into units, but never into meaning.

In contrast, cosmoi hold the unfolding through cuts that matter — cuts that orient, bind, and renew.

Phasing as Cosmopoiesis

If phasecraft names the act of semiotic cutting — of distinguishing processes in order to live with them — then cosmopoiesis is the symbolic maintenance of those cuts at the level of world. It is not merely phasing; it is worlding.

In this sense, phasing is never just technical. Every cut is already embedded in a mythos. To phase is to participate in a cosmos — to locate oneself, not merely in a process, but in a meaningful whole.

This has profound implications:

There is no such thing as pure process. All unfolding is construed through a symbolic ecology.
There is no such thing as universal time. All temporalities are local, perspectival, and cosmopoietic.
The loss of symbolic grammar is not neutral. It disables the world’s phaseability.

Toward Pluriversal Phasing

What we are now confronting is a collapse of the dominant cosmos — not just its institutions, but its symbolic coherence. In its place is not chaos, but multiplicity — a pluriverse of potential grammars for phasing the world.

We do not need to adopt ancient cosmoi. We do not need to fabricate new meta-narratives. We need to become conscious phasecrafters of the symbolic — not just how we cut, but how we world.

This will require re-learning what it means to live-with the cut — not as loss, but as cosmogony.

The next post will turn to the colonial imposition of clock time and the systematic destruction of other cosmoi.

Because before we can recraft mythos, we must reckon with the violence that unmade it.

3 Clock Time and the Colonial Cut

“To conquer a people, it is not enough to take their land. You must also take their time.”

So far, we’ve spoken of mythos, cosmos, and the unfolding of lived processes. But the end of time — and the return of myth — cannot be understood apart from the colonial cut that severed peoples from their symbolic ecologies. Clock time did not merely displace cosmoi; it imposed a new symbolic order altogether: abstract, universal, measurable, empty. It was not just a technical convenience. It was an epistemic conquest.

To deconstruct time is not just to philosophise. It is to decolonise the symbolic order that made clock time appear natural, inevitable, and neutral. And it is to understand that reclaiming unfolding means also reclaiming the right to live-with the world in one's own way — to phase it, symbolise it, and belong to it.

The Universalisation of One Cut

Clock time is not universal. It is the outcome of a particular historical trajectory — one that emerged in Western Europe alongside industrialisation, colonial expansion, and the commodification of labour.

But what matters most is how it universalised its cut. Clock time did not merely offer an alternative way of organising the world; it redefined what organisation meant. It replaced local phasing with standardisation. It replaced symbolic significance with synchronicity. It replaced cosmopoiesis with compliance.

And it travelled not through persuasion, but through power.

Missionaries imposed liturgical schedules that displaced local festivals and ritual cycles.
Administrators enforced calendars and census regimes that rewrote indigenous genealogies and events.
Educators retrained children to think in hours and years, not in monsoons or harvests or kinship roles.
Capitalists converted labour into timed units, destroying the link between work, land, and sacred rhythm.

These were not side effects. They were strategies of domination — severing people from their world, their unfolding, their symbolic infrastructure.

The Violence of Temporal Displacement

To be torn from one’s symbolic unfolding is not just to lose tradition. It is to lose the very grammar of meaning. The colonial cut was a severing of orientation — a disembedding so profound that it left communities not just dispossessed, but disoriented.

This is why so much postcolonial struggle is not just about land or language, but about time. The call to “slow down,” to “reconnect with cycles,” to “honour ancestors” — these are not lifestyle choices. They are attempts to reworld the cut, to regenerate phaseability within a damaged symbolic ecology.

In this light, even modern calls to “manage time better” or “be more productive” carry colonial echoes. They preserve the grammar of compliance, not of orientation. They assume the legitimacy of the clock, even as they lament its effects.

Resisting Temporal Monoculture

Just as biodiversity protects ecosystems, symbolic diversity protects worldability. When only one mode of phasing is authorised — when only one temporal grammar is legitimate — then all other cosmoi become unintelligible. Or worse: romanticised, commodified, or erased.

To resist temporal monoculture is not to reject coordination or technology. It is to reclaim the right to live-with unfolding in ways that honour one’s own symbolic grounding. It is to refuse the idea that meaningful life must submit to abstract universals. And it is to recognise that no symbolic ecology can flourish under conditions of extraction and erasure.

This resistance is already alive — in indigenous language revival, in land-based ritual, in Afro-diasporic futurisms, in queer temporalities, in more-than-human cosmologies. These are not just cultural expressions. They are cosmopoietic acts — cuts against the clock, in defence of unfolding.

Beyond the Reparative Frame

Yet even resistance can be captured by the grammar it opposes. The dream of “restoring” cosmoi, of “undoing” the colonial cut, risks reinscribing the logic of time — as if symbolic healing were a project with a deadline, a future to arrive at, a past to retrieve.

But unfolding does not move backwards or forwards. It moves with. And so the task is not reparation as reversal, but as reconstrual: a living-with the cut as a site of worldmaking, not world-loss.

In the next post, we will turn to how the more-than-human — forests, rivers, winds, fungi — already phase the world in ways that exceed clock time, and how relational ontologies offer an alternative ground for cosmopoiesis in the aftermath of time.

4 More-than-Human Phasecraft

“The wind does not wait for permission to change. The mushroom does not ask if it is time. The forest phases itself.”

Clock time tells us that the world is inert, waiting to be moved. But in truth, the world is always already unfolding — not as background, but as participant. In this post, we turn to the more-than-human: the forests, rivers, fungi, weather-systems, microbial colonies — not as objects in time, but as phasers of world. They are not resources, not scenery, not passive terrain. They are agents of the cut.

And if mythos is to return — if symbolic life is to be reconstituted — it cannot do so within a human-only cosmology. The more-than-human is already phasing the world. We are the ones catching up.

From Environment to Ecophase

Modernity called it “the environment” — a container for human activity, to be studied or saved. But the world does not surround us. It co-constitutes us.

In relational ontology, the world is not a set of things in space-time. It is an ongoing differentiation of process — and that process includes us only as one strand in a vast, dynamic weave. More-than-human life does not simply exist; it orients, cuts, intensifies. It produces symbolic pressure. It phases becoming.

A fungal bloom reframes the forest’s metabolism.
A drought realigns the village’s rituals.
A migration reshapes the semiotic horizon of the land.

These are not effects of “natural forces.” They are symbolic acts, cutting the unfolding into new orientations. The cosmos is not just human; it is composed across scales and species.

More-than-Human Phasecraft

Just as humans ritualise the cut, the more-than-human world actualises it — through shifts that are not only physical, but relationally meaningful.

Let us consider:

Coral bleaching, not just as an ecological event, but as a cosmological cry — a cut that says: you have breached the relational contract.
Mushroom networks, not merely as underground highways, but as distributed phasecraft — synchronising decay, renewal, and growth across ecologies.
Tides and winds, not as background conditions, but as tempo-shaping forces — cutting movement into phases, producing ritual synchrony without a clock.
Animal migration, not as instinctual behaviour, but as a living semiotic, phasing regions into seasonal orientations and sacred thresholds.

These are not metaphors. They are symbolic operations within ecologies whose semiotic logics do not depend on humans to be meaningful.

Cosmopoiesis Beyond the Human

When the colonial clock cut through symbolic ecologies, it not only severed human cultures — it desevered the more-than-human world. It rendered the world inanimate, unspeaking, passive. But in relational ontology, the more-than-human is symbolically active — co-participant in the phasing of cosmos.

This has consequences:

There can be no reconstitution of mythos that is not ecosemiotic — involving plants, animals, weather, topologies.
Cosmopoiesis must be distributed — held across species, not centralised in human institutions.
Phasecraft must be listened for, not just designed — because the world is already cutting itself, even when we are deaf to it.

This is not to romanticise nature. It is to relocate cosmological power: to understand that the grammar of unfolding is not anthropocentric — and never was.

Learning to Listen With

The task is not to give voice to the more-than-human, but to relearn how to hear it — not as data, but as phasic symbolisation. This means cultivating new forms of attentiveness, new grammars of encounter:

Ethnobotany as semiotic apprenticeship.
Ecological restoration as ritual reconstrual.
Animism not as belief, but as relational literacy.
Seasonality not as weather report, but as phaseable grammar.

Living-with the more-than-human requires more than science or policy. It requires worlding otherwise — composing cosmoi in which humans are not the sole symbolic agents.

In the next post, we will ask what it means to craft mythos from here — in the aftermath of the clock, in the pluriverse of cosmoi, amid the phasing of more-than-human life.

What might symbolic life become — when it is no longer confined to time?

5 Mythos After Time

“Myth is not what we believe. It is what believes us.”

What remains, after time ends? After the colonial cut is revealed as a violent abstraction, after the more-than-human is restored to symbolic agency, after unfolding is reclaimed as the very texture of life — what remains?

What remains is mythos.

Not a return to old stories, nor a retreat into nostalgia — but the emergence of new symbolic grammars, forged in the aftermath of temporal conquest.

This final post invites us to linger here: not in time, but in unfolding. Not in recovery, but in reconstrual. And to ask: what does it mean to live symbolically — now — without the scaffolding of time?

The Mythic is Not the Primitive

Modernity taught us to associate myth with the past: primitive, pre-rational, obsolete. But this framing is itself a product of the temporal cut — of a worldview that treats abstract progression as the only form of development.

Myth, however, is not bound to chronology.

It is not a stage of history. It is a mode of worldmaking — one that never ended, even when it was repressed.

The mythic is not primitive. It is phasic. It phases the real through symbolic intensities: narrative, ritual, sacrifice, rebirth, encounter. It creates thresholds and thresholds create cosmos. Where time seeks continuity, myth cuts.

And where time is indifferent to meaning, mythos is saturated with it.

Mythos as Construal

In relational ontology, meaning is not found, but construed. It is not located in objects or in minds, but in the cut — the distinction that makes orientation possible.

Mythos is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is a symbolic construal of unfolding — one that enables a people, a place, a process to phase itself meaningfully.

A creation story is not a history; it is a symbolic grammar for becoming.
A taboo is not a rule; it is a cut that holds the cosmos in tension.
A ritual is not an act; it is a phase-transition in a semiotic ecology.

In this light, to craft mythos is not to imagine fanciful tales — it is to take up the responsibility of world-construal.

And in a pluriverse, there can be no single mythos — only co-emergent cosmoi.

Symbolic Life Without the Clock

If the clock is no longer our master, then what orients us?

Not a replacement universal. Not a new timekeeper. But shared phasecraft — relational grammars for living-with, living-as, living-through. Symbolic life becomes not a matter of deadlines and durations, but of attentions and thresholds.

It becomes possible to ask:

What are the rhythms of this forest, and how might I phase with them?
What are the sacred tensions in this community, and how are they held?
What cut must we now make, to symbolise our changed relation to the world?

These are not technical questions. They are mythic ones. They call not for solutions, but for orientations — not for certainty, but for meaningful unfolding.

After Time, We Make Cuts

To live without time does not mean to live in chaos. It means to live by the cut: to recognise that every act of meaning is a differentiation — and that we are always already phasing the world through our participation in it.

We do not need to return to old mythologies. But we do need to craft new ones — slowly, carefully, relationally. Mythos is not a relic. It is a method.

For sensing what matters.
For orienting in the pluriverse.
For cutting meaning into the flux of unfolding.

After time ends, mythos begins again — not as belief, but as responsibility: the responsibility to cut meaningfully, to phase with care, and to world otherwise.

Coda: On the Far Side of Time

“To end time is not to end the world. It is to let the world unfold otherwise.”

This series began with a question:

What becomes of meaning when time ends?

We have not answered it once and for all — because the question is not one of fact, but of orientation. It is a phasic question, not a temporal one. And every answer cuts the world differently.

We have seen how the idea of time — linear, abstract, colonial — severed unfolding from meaning. How it froze becoming into units, stripped processes of their symbolic force, and claimed the right to organise all life by its grid.

We have also seen how time was never a neutral measure — but a worldmaking force: one that enabled some lives to count, and others to be discounted.

But the clock is not eternal. Its authority is not absolute.

And it is failing.

The end of time is not a catastrophe.

It is a threshold. A portal. A moment of phasic reorientation.

When we no longer believe in time as a container, we begin to see the world again as unfolding — as process, phase, cut, and construal. We rediscover the symbolic life of the more-than-human. We remember that cosmology was always a shared act.

To step through this threshold is not to abandon all structure. It is to accept a different kind of responsibility:

To listen for phases rather than impose plans.
To construe rather than control.
To make meaning not once and for all, but again and again — in relation.

So what becomes of meaning when time ends?

It becomes ours to make again —

with each cut, each gesture, each unfolding.

And in this, we are not alone.

The world is already phasing.

We are simply learning to hear it once more.

22 September 2025

Unflowing Time: Rethinking Temporality Through Relational Ontology

1 Against the Flow

We are accustomed to saying that time passes, that it flows like a river, that it slips away or marches on. These expressions are so deeply embedded in our ways of speaking, thinking, and feeling that they rarely invite reflection. Time is something through which we move, or which moves past us. It seems self-evident — a background against which everything happens.

But from within a relational ontology, such expressions are not neutral descriptions. They are construals — ways of making sense of unfolding processes — and they carry with them metaphysical assumptions that no longer hold. To speak of time flowing is to treat it as a substance or medium, as something separate from the world that somehow governs its change. It is to mistake the shape of our construal for the structure of reality.

This post opens a short series that will dismantle the metaphor of time’s flow — not just as a linguistic habit, but as a model of thought that underpins physics, psychology, and everyday life. Our aim is not to eliminate time from our vocabulary, but to reconstrue it more carefully: not as something that exists apart from systems, but as the perspectival unfolding of those systems themselves.

Time as Reified Metaphor

Consider what is implied by the phrase “the flow of time.” It invites us to imagine time as a stream, with entities either moving through it or being carried along by it. It presupposes:

a direction (from past to future),
a uniform medium (time as an independent continuum),
a fixed rate (something that can speed up or slow down).

But none of these are observable features of reality. What we actually observe are systems in motion, in change, in unfolding. A plant grows, a body ages, a wave rises and falls. These are all events within systems. Time, as we speak of it, is not something in addition to these changes; it is how we construe the phases and sequences of their unfolding.

The metaphor of time’s flow, then, reifies a construal — it turns an abstraction into an entity. We come to treat time as something with its own properties, separate from the phenomena that give rise to it. In this way, construal is mistaken for substance, and temporality becomes ontologised as a kind of invisible fluid.

From Flow to Unfolding

In contrast, a relational ontology does not treat time as a container, a current, or a fourth dimension. Instead, it begins with the premise that systems are structured potentials — that what exists is the unfolding of possibilities within systems in relation. To speak of "time" is simply to cut across this unfolding from a particular perspective, tracing how processes become actualised.

Time, then, is not a medium in which systems exist; it is the construal of systems as unfolding.

This reframing has significant consequences. It means:

There is no independent variable called “time” that ticks away in the background.
There is no "flow" of time, only the perspectival construal of change.
There is no ontological "past" or "future" — only phases of potential as construed from particular cuts.

To say that time flows is to impose a metaphor of movement onto something that is already movement — to construe the construal.

What’s at Stake

This is not just a semantic quibble. The metaphor of flowing time underwrites everything from physical theory to personal identity. It shapes how we model the universe and how we understand our own becoming. If that metaphor is misleading — if it treats second-order construals as if they were first-order phenomena — then it needs to be held to account.

In the next post, we will develop this critique further, showing how time as construed unfolding allows us to move beyond both everyday metaphor and scientific reification. We will trace how temporality emerges from relational processes — not as a dimension or substance, but as a perspectival effect of construal.

Time does not pass. Systems unfold. And that difference matters.

2 Time as Construal

In the previous post, we challenged the idea that time “flows” — arguing instead that what we call time is a construal of unfolding systems. But what does it mean to say that time is a construal? What exactly is being construed, and from where?

In this post, we build the foundations of a relational theory of temporality. We move away from time as a dimension or quantity, and toward time as a perspectival cut across the unfolding of systems in relation. Here, time is not something that exists independently of experience, nor something that structures reality from the outside. It is the way in which reality is brought into phase — by and for a perspective.

1. From Events to Systems

The dominant image of time in many traditions — including classical physics — treats the world as a collection of entities that change over time. But from a relational standpoint, this is already a misstep. There are no isolated entities “in” time. There are only systems in relation, and each system is a structured potential for unfolding — what we might call system-as-theory-of-its-instance.

An unfolding, in this sense, is not a trajectory through time. It is what time becomes — the construal of that system from a perspective that traces its actualisation phase by phase.

To say “this system has a history” is to say that it can be construed as unfolding — not that it moves through an independently existing temporal field.

2. The Cut That Makes Time

So how does time arise? Time arises through what we call a relational cut — a perspectival construal of difference within a system’s unfolding. That is: time is not a process, but a way of construing process. It is not the sequence of changes itself, but the construal of those changes as successive.

In this view:

The “past” is not behind us — it is the potential we construe as already actualised.
The “future” is not ahead of us — it is the remainder of the system’s potential, not yet cut into phase.
The “present” is not a moment in time — it is the standpoint of construal itself, the cut that gives temporal shape to the unfolding.

There is no ontological timeline. There is only the structured possibility of unfolding, and the perspective from which that unfolding is construed as time.

3. Time as Semiotic Resource

This has strong affinities with linguistic theory — particularly systemic functional linguistics, where time is not a thing but a meaning potential. In the grammar of tense, aspect, and phase, we find tools for construing experience as temporal. These are not windows onto a pre-existing dimension; they are semiotic resources for construing experience as if it were distributed across past, present, and future.

In this sense, grammar does not merely describe time — it helps constitute our experience as temporal. Our orientation to time is not given by the world but realised in the way we construe the world.

This does not reduce time to language. It situates time in a broader category of semiotic construal — ways of meaning that arise through systems in relation. Time is just one way of cutting experience; a powerful one, but not a neutral or universal one.

4. Implications: No Time Outside the Cut

If time is construal, not substrate, then it follows:

There is no temporality that is not perspectival.
There is no “objective” passage of time — only the unfolding of systems and the ways they are brought into phase.
Every experience of time is already a cut — a construal of difference and phase in a relational system.

This cuts across both common-sense metaphors (“time flies”) and scientific models that treat time as a fixed variable (“t = 0”). In both cases, the construal is mistaken for the structure. We reify the cut as a dimension, forgetting that it is made — not found.

In the next post, we’ll turn directly to the language of temporality. Phrases like “time passes,” “time heals,” or “time is running out” are more than figures of speech — they are metaphysical commitments smuggled into grammar. By examining the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, we’ll expose the hidden ontology that underwrites our temporal thinking — and begin to imagine other ways of cutting.

3 The Ontology Behind the Idiom

By now we’ve seen that time, in a relational ontology, is not a substance that flows but a perspectival construal of unfolding. What we call “time” emerges from the ways we cut across processes and bring systems into phase. It is not something we move through, but something we construe in the movement of things.

So what are we to make of our everyday expressions — “time flies,” “time is running out,” “time will tell”? These idioms are not innocent. They do more than decorate thought — they shape it, and in doing so, they reproduce an ontology in which time is treated as a thing. In this post, we trace the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, and expose the metaphysical sleight of hand it performs.

1. Time as Space

One of the most pervasive metaphors for time is spatial:

We’re approaching the deadline.
We’ve moved past that stage.
A long time ago…

Here, time is construed as a linear spatial path. Past, present, and future become locations along a trajectory. This invites two reciprocal metaphors:

Time moves past a stationary observer (“time marches on”).
The observer moves through a stationary landscape of time (“we’re coming up to August”).

These are not mere figures of speech. They enact a model in which time is an objective terrain through which events or agents move — a container, an axis, a medium. They give time a kind of dimensional solidity, as if it existed independently of the systems that are construed within it.

From a relational standpoint, this is an error of category: it treats the construal of unfolding as if it were a thing that unfolds.

2. Time as Resource

Another common metaphor construes time as a scarce commodity:

I don’t have enough time.
We’re wasting time.
She gave me her time.

Here, time is imagined as something we can possess, lose, save, spend, or allocate — a kind of quantifiable resource. This model underwrites entire systems of labour, efficiency, and value. But again, the metaphor obscures its own origins: time is not something we own or use. What is being counted is not time, but the unfolding of processes brought under a particular construal — one that slices them into abstract, exchangeable units.

This is not a metaphysical claim about time itself. It is a cultural construal that allows some kinds of activity to be measured and coordinated — often at the cost of obscuring their actual systemic dynamics.

3. Time as Agent

Then there are idioms that construe time as an active force:

Time heals all wounds.
Time will tell.
Time destroys everything.

These expressions personify time, attributing to it the power to act, to change, to reveal. Time becomes not just a medium or a measure, but a subject — an agent that performs.

In relational terms, this is the most extravagant error: time is not a thing, nor a quantity, nor a being. To ascribe agency to “time” is to displace the actual agencies involved — to treat construal effects as causal forces. It amounts to a metaphysical evacuation: replacing the dynamics of real systems with an abstract spectre called “time.”

4. Metaphor as Ontological Commitment

These idioms are not ontologically neutral. Each one recruits a familiar construal — of space, substance, motion, agency — and applies it to unfolding processes. In doing so, they:

obscure the perspectival nature of time,
reproduce the fiction of time as independently existing,
naturalise a model in which systems are subordinated to temporal “laws.”

We are not arguing for a purging of metaphor. Metaphor is how meaning happens. But we must distinguish between metaphor as construal and metaphor as ontological smuggling. When metaphors about time are taken as literal descriptions of reality, they collapse second-order construals into first-order fact — and this is precisely what a relational ontology resists.

Toward a New Temporality

What if we treated these idioms not as truths, but as testimonies to our ways of cutting? What if we read them not for what they say about time, but for what they reveal about the construal of process?

Then, instead of saying “time is running out,” we might ask: Which systems are unfolding, and how are we positioned within them?

Instead of saying “we’re approaching the end,” we might ask: Which construal is framing this phase as an “end,” and from what standpoint?

In the next post, we’ll shift from metaphor to mechanism — exploring how the invention of clocks, calendars, and symbolic timelines gave rise to a materialised construal of time as regular, divisible, and objective. These technologies did not simply measure time — they helped to constitute it, and in doing so, reinforced a particular ontology. We’ll ask what it means to cut systems according to symbolic regularity, and what is lost in the process.

4 Clocks, Cuts, and Calendars

In our previous posts, we’ve argued that time is not a thing that flows or a dimension we occupy, but a perspectival construal of unfolding systems. We’ve seen how everyday metaphors treat time as space, resource, or agent — reifying construal into substance. But how did this reification become so dominant, so infrastructural to our ways of living?

In this post, we turn to the material side of temporal construal — to the technologies that have enabled and sedimented the illusion of time as objective, regular, and divisible. Clocks, calendars, and timelines did not merely track time; they enacted a symbolic cut across systemic unfolding, and in doing so, helped produce the very temporality they claimed to measure.

1. The Symbolisation of Regularity

Every system unfolds in relation — with internal rhythms, thresholds, and phases. A day-night cycle, a growth phase, a seasonal pattern: these are not “in time,” but temporalised by construal.

The symbolic move comes when we begin to abstract recurrence from these systems — to treat a particular pattern as a unit, and then impose that unit back onto other systems. A clock does not simply reflect unfolding; it regularises it. It cuts the continuous into discrete intervals and overlays these intervals across domains.

Thus:

A sundial maps solar movement into a flat surface.
A mechanical clock converts rotational motion into ticks.
A calendar reduces ecological cycles to a repeatable grid.

These are not neutral devices. They materialise a theory of time — one that treats temporal unfolding as uniform, universal, and external to systems.

2. From Phase to Schedule

This symbolic reconfiguration of unfolding has deep consequences. Consider the difference between a phase and a schedule:

A phase is a systemic threshold: a stage within the unfolding of a particular system (e.g. germination, migration, digestion).
A schedule is an imposed cut: a regularised interval that determines when phases should begin and end (e.g. 9:00am meeting, fiscal quarter, delivery window).

The schedule overrides the system’s own dynamics. It imposes a symbolic order that may or may not align with the system's actual potential. In doing so, it creates the illusion that time exists outside the systems it organises.

This is not just a practical convenience — it is a disciplinary move. It allows institutions to coordinate labour, regulate bodies, enforce norms. It replaces systemic potential with symbolic command.

3. Clocks as Cuts

In relational terms, the clock is not a measure of time but a cut across systems. It does not reveal how a process unfolds; it imposes a construal that detaches unfolding from its local dynamics and aligns it with an external symbolic order.

This cut is not simply epistemological — it is material. Clocks discipline not only thought, but action:

The worker must conform to the shift, not the body’s rhythm.
The student must submit to the timetable, not the arc of learning.
The event must happen “on time,” regardless of its readiness.

The symbolic regularity of clock time thus becomes a means of control, a way of abstracting systems from their potentials and rendering them legible, predictable, governable.

4. When Symbols Forget Themselves

Over time, symbolic timekeeping systems come to forget their own origins. The clock is no longer seen as a model or a tool — it is seen as reality itself. We no longer ask which systems are unfolding in what ways; we ask what time is it? As if the tick of a device captures the essence of change.

This is a metaphysical reversal. A symbolic construal of unfolding is taken as ontologically primary, while the systems it cuts across are treated as secondary, or as noise to be normalised.

Thus, relational potentials are subordinated to symbolic rhythms. The construal becomes law, and time becomes a fiction we live as if it were fact.

Toward Other Cuts

What would it mean to reverse this process — to treat symbolic time not as reality but as construal, open to revision?

It would mean:

Returning to the unfolding of systems as the basis for temporality.
Treating clocks and calendars as tools for coordination, not truth.
Attending to local phases, rhythms, and thresholds rather than imposed intervals.
Making visible the cuts we make — and recognising them as cuts, not structures of the real.

In the next post, we’ll turn our gaze to physics — a domain in which time is most rigorously formalised as a variable, a dimension, or an illusion. But we’ll ask: what remains of physics when time is no longer granted ontological priority? Can the universe be redescribed not as evolving in time, but as a relational field of unfolding systems — where time, once again, is the cut?

5 Time in Physics — A Friendly Dismantling

Physics is often treated as the ultimate authority on time. Nowhere else has time been so meticulously measured, modelled, and theorised. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s spacetime continuum to contemporary debates about the “arrow of time,” the discipline has produced a rich and rigorous tradition — and one that appears, at first glance, to have little interest in metaphor.

But even here, we find reifications at work. Physics inherits — and codifies — a model of time that treats it as an independent variable, a dimension of the universe, or, in some recent formulations, a psychological illusion. In this post, we offer not a rejection of physics, but a dismantling of its temporal ontology — a friendly one, grounded in the same commitment to rigour, but from a relational standpoint.

We ask: What happens to physical theory when time is no longer treated as a structure of the universe, but as a construal of unfolding?

1. The Variable That Structures the World

Much of classical physics treats time as a parameter:

Position changes over time.
Forces act across time.
Systems evolve as functions of time.

This model treats time as a neutral backdrop — a uniform parameter within which change can be described. But as we've seen, this is already a construal: it imposes a one-dimensional regularity across heterogeneous systems, cutting their unfolding into commensurable intervals.

More subtly, it assumes that all systems are embedded in the same time — that there is a single, shared temporal field in which all events occur. This assumption is ontologically incoherent from a relational point of view. Systems do not unfold within a universal clock; their unfolding is their time, and no system’s unfolding can be ontologically subordinated to another’s symbolic regularity.

2. Relativity and the Persistence of Time

Einstein’s theory of relativity destabilised Newtonian time by showing that temporal intervals depend on the observer’s frame of reference. Simultaneity is no longer universal; time dilates, stretches, bends. But even here, time remains a dimension — integrated into the four-dimensional geometry of spacetime.

This is often hailed as a radical shift, but it still treats time as a thing — a structure with measurable properties, woven into the fabric of reality. It refines the model, but does not abandon the ontological assumption.

From a relational standpoint, this is still a reification. What relativity captures is not time’s curvature, but the relational perspectivity of unfolding systems — the fact that no cut across systems is absolute. In this sense, relativity affirms our model more than it contradicts it — but physics continues to construe the cut as a structure, not a perspective.

3. The Block Universe and the Denial of Becoming

Contemporary physics often embraces the block universe: a model in which all events — past, present, future — co-exist in a static four-dimensional structure. In this view, the flow of time is an illusion. Nothing happens in the universe; everything is.

This model achieves ontological elegance by abolishing becoming altogether. But in doing so, it obliterates the very unfolding that gives rise to our sense of time. The block universe is a geometry, not a world; it captures the structure of relations, but erases the perspectival cuts that constitute experience.

In our terms, this model mistakes a second-order abstraction (a totalising construal of all cuts at once) for a first-order ontology. It denies process in the name of completeness — and in doing so, forgets that process is the ground from which all cuts arise.

4. Physics Without Time?

Some physicists — particularly in quantum gravity — now speculate that time may not be fundamental at all. In certain formulations, it drops out of the equations entirely. Others propose that time emerges from entanglement, thermodynamic irreversibility, or informational complexity.

These moves open space for a relational reframing — but often without breaking the reifying habit. “Time is emergent,” we are told — but emergent from what? If it emerges from systems in relation, then we are already in our framework: time is not a variable to be found; it is a construal to be made.

A physics that begins here would not look for time in the world, but for the conditions under which construals of unfolding become meaningful. It would treat temporal form not as structure, but as a perspectival alignment of systems in relation.

5. What Remains

Physics remains a powerful means of construal — a symbolic system for bringing certain domains of unfolding into alignment. But it is not an ontology. It is a modelling practice grounded in cuts — and like all cuts, it is perspectival, selective, and system-specific.

What remains, once time is released from its metaphysical role, is not less science — but a science grounded in process, relation, and perspectival construal. A physics without time is not a void. It is a field of unfolding systems, cut differently.

In the next post, we’ll turn from the theoretical to the existential. What does it mean to live without the flow of time? How does this reconfiguration shift the way we understand urgency, change, loss, and becoming? Without the scaffolding of “past,” “present,” and “future,” what becomes of the self — and of the world?

6 Living Without Flow

To live without the flow of time is not to live without change. It is to live without a fiction — a fiction that imagines time as something that slips away, runs out, or carries us forward. What we have been dismantling in this series is not experience itself, but a particular construal of experience: one that cuts the unfolding of the world into “past,” “present,” and “future,” and then treats these phases as locations in a larger, invisible medium called “time.”

But once that scaffolding is removed — once time is no longer flowing, no longer passing — what are we left with?

We are left, simply, with systems in relation, unfolding from within their own structured potentials. We are left with phases, thresholds, actualisations. We are left with a world that becomes, but not “in” time — a world whose becoming is the ground for everything we construe as temporal.

This post explores what it means to inhabit that world.

1. Urgency Without Time Pressure

Much of modern life is governed by temporal urgency: deadlines, countdowns, expiry dates, diminishing windows of opportunity. These are not inherent features of reality — they are symbolic construals imposed upon systems by calendars, clocks, and economies.

To live without flowing time is not to deny the reality of thresholds — a seed rots if left unplanted, a tide turns, a window closes — but it is to relocate urgency. Urgency is not the pressure of time itself; it is the phase-specific sensitivity of unfolding systems.

Instead of asking “how much time do we have left?”, we might ask:

What is this system’s phase potential?
Which conditions make a particular shift possible or impossible?
What unfolding is imminent, latent, delayed?

Urgency is no longer a race against time, but an attunement to the relational readiness of systems to shift.

2. Memory Without the Past

We often think of memory as a bridge to the past — a way of accessing a part of the timeline behind us. But in a relational ontology, the past is not “behind” us at all. It is not a location or container. What we call the past is simply the traces of prior actualisations — configurations of meaning, form, and relation that have left their imprint within a system.

Memory is not travel. It is reconstrual — the act of cutting across a system to bring forward a pattern that was already latent, already folded into the system’s unfolding.

To live without flowing time is to stop treating memory as a window onto another realm. It is to treat it as a perspective enacted in the present — a present which is not a point in a sequence, but a cut through unfolding.

3. Anticipation Without the Future

Similarly, anticipation does not require a future. The future is not “ahead of us.” There is no “ahead.” There is only potential yet to be actualised — patterns not yet brought into phase.

Anticipation is the modelling of potential within a system’s unfolding. It is not foresight into an ontological domain called the future. It is construal: an act of alignment between one’s current perspective and a system’s possible shifts.

This reframing has ethical implications. It rescues anticipation from fatalism — the belief that the future is already “out there” waiting to arrive — and returns it to participation: to the choices we make in how we cut, construe, and engage with unfolding systems.

4. Loss Without Linear Time

What of grief, decay, and loss? These too are often construed through flowing time — as things “left behind,” “gone forever,” or “lost to time.” But again, the loss is not to time. It is a change in the unfolding of systems — a shift in what can and cannot be brought into phase.

Loss is not the disappearance of an object down a temporal river. It is the reconfiguration of relational potential. A system is no longer available to be construed in the way it once was. But traces remain. Cuts can be re-made. Meaning can be re-aligned.

To mourn without flowing time is not to mourn less. It is to mourn differently — not as a sequence of stages to “move through,” but as an ongoing negotiation with unfolding and construal.

5. Becoming Without a Timeline

Finally, what becomes of becoming itself?

In place of a linear timeline, we have the perspectival cline between what is possible and what is actual. Becoming is not movement along a path; it is the shifting of phase space within and across systems. It is the actualisation of new potentials, the emergence of new construals, the formation of new relational cuts.

To live without flowing time is not to live without becoming. It is to live within becoming — no longer framed by the fiction of temporal movement, but by the lived reality of unfolding.

In our final post, we will return to the question of the “present.” Often treated as the most immediate and real slice of time, the present is still a metaphorical cut — still framed by the assumptions we have now left behind. We’ll ask: What becomes of the present when time no longer passes? And can we speak of “now” at all, if there is no flow?

7 No Time Like the Present?

Of all the temporal metaphors, none feels more immediate — more real — than the present. It is the locus of attention, the threshold of action, the vanishing point between memory and anticipation. Even those who doubt the reality of the past and the future tend to anchor themselves in the now. The present, we are told, is what we have.

But what is “the present,” exactly? Is it a moment? A slice? A duration? A flicker between the no-longer and the not-yet? Or is it — as we have come to suspect — another construal, another cut, shaped by the very metaphors we’ve been dismantling?

In this final post, we turn our attention to the metaphysics of now. We ask what becomes of the present when time no longer flows — and whether there is anything left to call the present once we stop mistaking construal for reality.

1. The Present as Cut, Not Container

The common image of the present is that of a moving spotlight: a narrow beam sweeping along a timeline, illuminating each moment as it arrives. This is the metaphor of the sliding now — the ever-advancing front edge of time’s flow.

But if time does not flow, then there is no beam, and no timeline to sweep across. There is only unfolding — and the cut we make when we construe a phase of that unfolding as present.

In this model:

The present is not a moment that exists.
It is a construal we perform.
It is not the location of reality.
It is a perspectival cut across systems in relation.

The “now” is not a thing. It is a way of orienting to unfolding — a construal that traces what is currently being brought into phase.

2. The Duration Illusion

Some try to salvage the present by expanding it: the “specious present,” the “lived present,” the interval of awareness that feels real. But this too is a metaphor — one that treats time as measurable stuff, capable of being portioned out and assigned width.

From a relational standpoint, such attempts miss the point. There is no objective width to the present, because there is no objective temporal field to measure. Different systems unfold on different scales, and different construals cut across them in different ways. What is construed as “now” in one context may be vastly broader or narrower than in another — not because reality changes, but because our construals do.

3. The Present as Synchronisation

Instead of thinking of the present as a universal moment shared by all systems, we can think of it as a mode of alignment:

When multiple systems are brought into phase — when their unfoldings are construed together — a “present” is forged.
This present is not in the world; it is in the relation.
It is a synchronisation, not a timestamp.

This has profound implications. There is no singular “now” ticking along universally. There are as many “presents” as there are perspectives — as many cuts as there are construals. And each present is the outcome of a relational configuration, not a metaphysical fact.

4. Letting Go of Now

This may sound disorienting. To let go of the present seems to threaten the very ground of experience. But what we are letting go of is not experience — only the fiction of a metaphysical now, detached from systems, hovering over unfolding like a spotlight.

What remains is far more robust:

The actuality of unfolding systems.
The perspectival cuts we make as we engage with them.
The meaningful phases we construe — some emergent, some recurring, all situated.

To “live in the present” is not to inhabit a fixed temporal location. It is to engage with unfolding systems from within the perspectives available to us, to attend to what is becoming phaseful, to trace the contours of actualisation as they emerge.

5. After Time

If time does not flow, then the present does not pass. It is not a fleeting gift to be clutched, nor a shrinking platform from which we glimpse the abyss of the future. It is simply a perspectival act — one among many — through which we cut across unfolding and make it meaningful.

And with that, the metaphysical drama of time dissolves. No more past slipping away. No more future bearing down. No more present poised on the edge of oblivion.

What remains is relation, construal, unfolding. What remains is a world not in time, but becoming through systems and cuts.

Coda: Living the Unflowing

This series began with a question: what if time does not flow? We have answered it not with a new theory of time, but with the dissolution of time as theory. We have shown that temporality is not an underlying structure, but a semiotic act — a way of cutting across the world’s unfolding in order to construe phase, pattern, potential.

To live without the flow of time is not to live without meaning. It is to recognise that meaning is not in time — time is in meaning. It is the name we give to certain kinds of construal, made from certain standpoints, over certain systems.

And when those construals are no longer mistaken for reality, we are free to cut differently.