Timefulism is a new religion that gives expression to the debt of gratitude that humanity owes to time and luck, through the observance of holidays that celebrate periods and moments in humanity’s history, which is also the history of the universe.

Mission

The mission of Timefulism is to bring people and communities together in gratitude for the bounties that have been bestowed upon us by Time and Luck, and to work to ensure that those bounties are shared more equally by all of humanity. This post will begin to explore how we will ultimately achieve that goal.

Why Time and Luck?

It’s simple. Time and Luck are something we all share.

Time marks our place in the universe — this infinitesimally small series of moments we call “Life.”

Luck is what brought each of us and all of us here in the first place. Through almost the entire history of the universe, our ancestors were the exact same set of individuals. And it is our Good Luck that each of those millions of ancestors survived predators, disease, starvation, inhospitable climates, mass extinctions, and just plain bad luck to reproduce and contribute to the line that has led to all of us.

In a sense Time and Luck are the parents of evolution — not just of humanity as a species, but of all life, of the earth, the sun, and the universe itself.

Everybody alive today on this planet is a child of Luck and Time — we all are here, sharing this moment in Time, because of Luck.

The Current Four Systems for Reenvisioning Space and Time

At present, Timefulnism offer us two systems for improving our relationship with Time, and two more systems for improving our relationship with Space, which, of course, is closely related to time. The goal is to use these systems to bring people together in support of the mission described above.

Each of the systems will be explored in more detail in subsequent posts. But here is an overview:

Calendar of Contemplation: Using a time compression algorithm, we have mapped the entire life-span of the universe onto a 365-day year, such that January 1 covers nearly the first billion years of the universe, and the last few days of the year each covers a bit more than the previous year. Thus, any given day of the year can be a “day of contemplation,” when we sit back and contemplate what was happening during the day’s correponding historical period and how it helped bring us to where we are today. This supports the mission by bringing people together in contemplation, gratitude, and/or awe of the events that have shaped our world.

Discretization Clock (in search of a better name): This is the idea of breaking a day into discrete slices of 15 minutes each, and marking transitions between slices, as opposed to simply letting time run by. Drawing on Traditional Japanese Time, the transitions between 2-hour slices receive special attention. Each 15 minute “slice” of time has various associations that provide fuel for contemplation during the slice itself and during transitions. The goal is to help us develop a more concrete and personalized relationship with our time, arguably our most precious possession. Rituals relating to the discretization clock can remind us that we all live in and share the same tme moments of time.

A New Geography: Recognizing that reliance on GPS tends to divorce us from the broader context of space, this is a system that divides the Earth into 64 squares, created by the intersections of 8 lines of longitude (180 W/E, 135W, 90W, 45 W, 0, 45E, 90E, 135E) with 7 lines of latitude (67.5N, 45N, 22.5N, 0, 22.5S, 45S, 67.5S). Each square is subdivided into a further 64 squares, such that any location on earth can be identified by a series of squares. Rituals relating to the new geography can remind us of our shared home and also of the connection between space and time, as the Earth itself functions as a clock, by counting out the days and the years.

A New Star Map: This an extrapolation of the “New Geography,” and is based on a parallel recognition that reliance on star-gazing apps causes us to lose touch with the broader context of what we are looking at. The star map is an imaginary sphere with the sun at the center, as used in the galactic coordinate system. The sphere, and thus the universe, is divided into 64 fixed “squares” or “windows” such that (1) any given fixed star (and therefore any constellation) has a precise and fixed location within any given window (discounting the drift that will inevitably occur as the sun completes its orbit around the Milky Way), (2) the windows visible from a given location on Earth will change as the Earth orbits the sun.

Thus, any location in the universe can be instantly understood to belong to a particular square/window, and can be located more precisely via a series of windows, each of which is divided by a 64-square lattice. The particular windows that are visible for a particular night at a particular location on Earth will be readily calculated via an app on your phone. Once you have a sense of the windows, you’ll have a very good sense of what the night sky will look like and how it will be proceeding on any given evening, and over the course of the seasons, just as your ancestors did. Rituals relating to the star map can remind us of our place in the broader universe and the fabric of space-time.

Looking forward

These are just the current ideas for “systems.” They all need to be developed and supplemented with appropriate rituals for bringing us closer to time, luck, space, and each other. And of course, they are not exclusive — other systems and rituals for implementing the concepts of timefulism are possible; Timefulism aspires to be an open source religion.