Time Analysis, The Great Chain of Being, Eternal Recurrence

     In the first millennium AD, the Neoplatonist view of The Great Chain of Being was an attractive way of merging natural science with religion.  Like evolutionary laws, there is a hierarchy of being in metaphysical realms, based on how developed souls are.  It remains to be seen if there are souls more advanced than the creatures of earth, but if we are to believe all the mystics through history, they certainly exist but only on "planes" that differ from physical reality.  I'm open to the idea of larger structures in the physical universe possessing "souls" that are more complicated than ours.  For example, if the earth and sun had souls, they would probably be higher on the hierarchy.  

    St. Augustine made an interesting point about the conception of time being an integral measure on the Great Chain of Being.  He believed these conceptions were directly related to the power of mind.  A rock, having no power of mind, has no conception of time or memory.  Plants and fungi may have faint conceptions of it, but that would be hard to measure.  Small animals have fleeting memories; therefore the past and future seem to mingle with the present for them.  Larger, more sophisticated animals perceive time in higher dimensions; the past becomes larger as memory improves; the future becomes more predictable as intuition evolves.  Humans, having the highest ability to reason, stretch the limits of time beyond what we are capable of perceiving directly.  Higher beings, which may involve angels and other specters, can presumably bend time to their consciousness, experiencing it at will and possibly simultaneously with other minds in other periods of time.  The grand unifier of the integral would be God itself, experiencing all time as a single perception.

    I have never thought of time in such a manner.  It's always been about the pagan-Buddhist form of eternal recurrence for me.  I am not ready to abandon my preference, but there is an elegance to the Great Chain's order that moves me to wonder.  For if reason is a function of time analysis, there is nothing more qualified to discover God.  It seems to me eternal recurrence and the Great Chain are not mutually exclusive, as beings could move up or down the hierarchy in cycles of rebirth.

The Great Chain of Being.  From the top: God > angels > royalty > commoners > animals > plants > nonliving things.  Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana, 1579.  Image source: Wikipedia.