Everydayness and Polypsychism
everydayness, the dull hypnosis of everyday life
polypsychism, the condition of multiple competing selves or egoes within the mind
We find ourselves entranced by mechanical loops of living. Our sense of time is a major accomplice. The days of the week, the hours of the day, even the months of the year all carry emotional charges. To register the time is to fall, almost automatically, into a suggested mood. This is a form of auto-hypnosis: we unconsciously accept the emotional spell cast by the hands of the clock.
Our greatest crutch is the word tomorrow. It gives us relief, but at the cost of sovereignty. It excuses the discontinuity of consciousness by postponing our responsibility into another self who may never arrive. Thus the psyche splinters. Rather than leaning on tomorrow, we must expand the presence of today.
Everydayness is sustained by our obedience to inherited divisions: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. We admit, uncritically, the emotions they prescribe. Hence the inescapable cycle of time-anxiety, boredom, and thought-noise. Our inner theatre becomes crowded with conflicting opinions over what counts as productive use of time.
Furthermore, there is the problem that the calendar can at anytime be modified by government, corporate or civil society decisions. It is a social construction that floats on a sea of competing interests. The Old Calendar, with its busy time and leisure time, trains us into fracture. We allow one self to labor through commitments so that another self, the leisure self, may briefly be released. This duel between leisure and responsibility appears at first economic, but in truth it precedes it. Even without money, the psyche would still divide itself, for one self must always wait while another self occupies the stage.
The leisure self, however artificial, claims the aura of authenticity. It feels closer to our true nature while the responsible self seems like a mask. Thus the leisure self endures repression by holding fast to the hope of later. This structure is superimposed onto weekdays, holidays, mornings, evenings, and seasons, until hundreds of days become emotionally negative because they belong to repression. Everydayness then appears natural, even inevitable, through its endless cycles of weeks, months, and hours.
The Ompyrean Hour, Jyotish and Panchanga
This polypsychic romance is the result of solar and lunar cycles emptied of meaning. Yet every cycle is nested within a greater one, and the task of a calendar is to reveal these nestings. A day belongs to a week, a week to a month, a month to a year. But if this only reminds us of weather and consumer sales, it remains trivial.
The Ompyrean Calendar refuses triviality. It abolishes the 24-hour prison by bundling Vedic tithi into greater units called Ompyrean Hours. There are 96 such Hours in the year. A 24-hour day is too short for our ambitions, too shallow for the higher mind. By de-conceptualizing and de-emotionalizing clock-time, we awaken to an ever-present duration spanning light and darkness, alive with cosmic pressures that can be allied with or defied.
Each day and each night contain not mere repetition but continuously unique duration. Within the previous unit of a 24-hour cycle we must distinguish between the cosmic pressure influencing the day cycle (i.e. karaṇa) and the separate pressures (i.e. karaṇa) shaping the night. Logic itself urges further division as the karaṇa is not a discontinuous quantity (i.e. a numeral) but a spectrum of transitioning qualities. Ultimately repetition of any discontinuous unit is implausible and we confront only a flux of living forces.
Similar to in length to a tithi is a nakṣatra which is of further significance when reading cosmic influences upon a given field of temporal potentiality. There are also grahas or planetary influences which add to the depth to each Hour. We may continue to consider the weekday as subordinate to a planetary influence by taking account of vara. An even further appreciation of time will take all the elements of the Panchanga into account and include nitya yoga, which comes from a measurement arising between the Sun and the Moon.
This allows us to compare present skies with past myth or history. We begin to live not in abstract dates but in zones of force. Thus the Ompyrean Calendar situates consciousness in both Panchāṅga and epic. It reminds us that our moment partakes in the same theater as, say, Prometheus, Arjuna, or Gilgamesh.
The Transformation of Time
The result is that we can astrologically read the cosmic influences impinging upon the field of potentiality at any given moment. The next thing we may consider is what events in history or myth (e.g. supra-historical events) have occurred under similar skies. We may understand the present moment as a zone of forces and then situate ourselves and our agency within it. To accomplish this the Ompyrean Year is divided into 96 Ompyrean Hours which are each informed by Vedic Pachanga, and as well are granted a supra-historical significance. The reader is thus presented with not only the present cosmic conditions but also an epic tale of action that serves as an inspiring backdrop regarding the human journey.
Ompyrean Time then refers the leisure-work polypsychic identity to a process of spiritualization wherein traditionally objective truths of nature can be integrated and dissolve the binary relationship created by the everydayness of the Old Calendar. The first impact is the acknowledgement that cosmic influences are present and active. The next impact is that the polypsychic drama of the two selves begins to feel very small and petty. The truth of the possibilities of human life grow brighter and more certain. Eventually the Old Calendar exists as but a convention for social navigation and lose their hypnotic effect. At that point, day and night both ascend in tangible qualities. The weekend and evenings are no longer possessed by the leisure self like a fortress in emotional opposition to the possessions of the adulting self. Instead these designations collapse in light of the unique plenitude ultimately indicated by karana. If there are special properties to each day-cycle then there are also differences within a day-cycle. This means that each hour within a day-cycle is not a repetition but a unique cosmic pressure. And likewise for the night-cycle. When nominal entry keeping of time ends then we discover each hour possesses qualities of its own. When the impossibility of repetition dawns in the mind the senses awaken with a spiritualized consciousness.
In the end, the Ompyrean Calendar acknowledges the freedom of puruṣa to shape prakṛti. It offers both cosmic maps and legendary backdrops, not as chains but as instruments for imagination and choice. Human consciousness may ride the higher waves of influence, or sink under the weight of its polypsychic quarrels.