Prehistoric civilisations by their definition didn’t have a linear concept of time. They did not think time progressed toward a point. They considered time to be a circular, eternal recurrence. Consider the Aeon of the Greeks and the creation myth, repeated every year, by the Sumerians and proceeding Mesopotamian civilisations. The argument made in Thomas Cahill’s Gifts of the Jews is that Abraham may have been the first man in history to conceive of time as linear, or at least the first to think that way and intellectually survive, on the urging of his personal god Yahweh.
Is it the case that they were the first? Likely not. Consider the difference between the Greek words ‘Chronos’ and ‘Kairos’ – the former is time passing, time eating away, entropy- that’s why Chronos eats his kids in the myth. The latter actually means ‘weather’ now, but it used to mean ‘time’ in the sense of ‘the right time/opportune time’ which was more ritualistic, more mythical. Pre-modern people say that myths occurred outside of time – Kairos is when they mean, -pre-historical not just in the sense that no historical investigation, as we know it from Herodotos, existed, but also in the sense that nobody felt time to be moving ‘forwards’, towards a particular point. Plenty more examples exist even now – the Australian Aborigines, for one, still think of time in terms of the continuous Dreaming. I’m sure you’ll know others, but they’re the ones who come to mind at the moment. My point being that ancients probably understood themselves to have recently emerged from the period of eternal time, when the myths happened, and plunged into history, into the early ages.
Christianity not only inherited a linear view of time from the Jews, expecting a return of Jesus at some point in the future, but actually placed the origin of it into material history, and created a sacred piece of time – Jesus’ lifespan – in an otherwise droll 33 years around the start of the Roman Empire. The Christian expectation and remembrance of material and recorded, rather than allegorical or mythical history, essentially keeps us rooted within this relatively new conception of time. Notice, too that all of the world that’s made contact with Christianity thinks like this.
Detachment is to ignore the future as an objective. We always anticipate something, but when it arrives it’s disappointing because it’s arrived. It is a universal desire, to use a childish metaphor you might be familiar with, to want a continual state of just beginning to open a gift. The only way to avoid that state of being is to ignore the passage of time, to try to remove yourself, think in terms of circular or unchanging time.
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