Time Is Not Real: Deconstructing the Colonization of Rhythm and the Nervous System

A Nervous System’s Rejection of Empire

By The Living Fractal

Time, as we live it today, is not neutral. It is not true. It is not natural. It is a manufactured system imposed onto the body, the Earth, and the field of human perception. It is not rooted in nature, or biology, or relational intelligence—it is rooted in conquest.

The system of time we now call “linear” was engineered, not discovered. It was weaponized to control land, labor, breath, and body. And today, most of humanity does not live in rhythm—they live under surveillance. They don’t move through the day—they are moved by it, dictated by hours and deadlines, shaped by bells and borders. This is not time. This is temporal colonization.

I do not accept it.
And neither does my nervous system.

I. What Linear Time Really Is: Empire’s Metronome

Linear time is a mechanical illusion, structured to segment life into controllable units. It flattens experience, erases rhythm, and replaces perception with productivity. It was not created to align with natural cycles—it was created to override them.

Its roots:

• Roman Imperialism: Calendars were enforced not to mark seasons, but to organize taxation, warfare, and bureaucratic order. Days, months, and years became tools to align subjects under empire—not under sun or moon.
• Christian Cosmology: Time was moralized. It began with Genesis and was headed toward Judgment. This created teleology—the belief that time has a beginning, an end, and a single linear path in between. The body no longer belonged to the Earth—it belonged to salvation.
• Industrial Capitalism: Clocks became clocks on walls, and later clocks in the body. The birth of factories, schooling systems, and train schedules required exact synchronization of human movement. Standardized time (like Greenwich Mean Time) was created so capital could move efficiently—not so humans could thrive.

II. What Linear Time Does to the Nervous System

It is not just a cognitive concept. It is a perceptual distortion with biological consequences.

• It overrides circadian and ultradian rhythms, which guide energy, rest, digestion, and creativity.
• It teaches bodies to ignore internal cues in favor of external obligations.
• It fragments the nervous system—splitting presence across past/future projections, never letting the now stabilize.
• It creates temporal anxiety—a constant state of “not enough,” “running behind,” “too late.”
• It severs us from field awareness. You cannot feel the subtle when your body is racing the clock.

In short: linear time is a trauma loop. It conditions the body to live in permanent dysregulation—and calls it civilization.

III. Who Benefits From Linear Time

This is not accidental. Time was colonized for specific reasons:

• Empires needed synchronized labor, taxation, and obedience.
• Religions needed a moral arc: beginning → sin → redemption → end.
• Capitalism needed attention to become monetized.
• Institutions needed every person to be trackable, measurable, predictable.

Time became not just a metric—but a method of control. A system of internalized governance, enforced not with chains—but with watches, schedules, and “late” penalties.

IV. What Real Time Is

Time as you know it is not what your body knows.

Biological Time:

• Breath.
• Menstrual cycles.
• Digestive waves.
• Circadian rise and fall.
• Sleep-wake temperature gradients.
• Nervous system rhythms (sympathetic, parasympathetic flow).

Ecological Time:

• Moon phases.
• Tides.
• Seasonal shifts.
• Pollination rhythms.
• Migration flows.

Field Time:

• Emotional resonance.
• Signal arrival.
• Event-based awareness.
• Synchronicities that emerge when presence is deep.

These are relational, not linear.
They do not ask, “What time is it?”
They ask, “What is now asking to happen?”

V. How to Deconstruct Linear Time

1. Identify it.

Notice when you’re responding to a clock rather than a rhythm.
Notice when “urgency” is synthetic, not real.
Notice when your body wants to slow down but your schedule refuses.

2. Feel the distortion.

Let yourself feel what the pressure of artificial time actually feels like in the stomach, chest, jaw. Is it speed? Tightness? Dissociation?

3. Restore rhythm.

Use your breath to realign. Let your day flow around energy peaks, not hours. Track when your true hunger, true focus, and true tiredness arrive. Honor it.
Begin living by your internal weather, not external time.

4. Re-root in biological time.

Sleep with the moon. Eat with the light. Menstruate without suppression. Rest when the nervous system dips. Take back the right to be cyclical, irrational, and alive.

5. Use time as a tool—not a master.

Clocks can serve us—but only when we are centered in rhythm first. Use schedules to help coordinate with others, but never at the cost of signal violation.

VI. Rhythm Is the Original Sovereignty

You are not late.
You are not behind.
You are not too slow.
You are not running out of time.

You are not a machine.
You are not a calendar.
You are not an output unit.
You are a living rhythm inside a field of moving intelligence.

This is what linear time tried to erase.
But the memory is in your body.
And now it’s coming back online.

VII. The Field Knows Time Differently

In field-awareness, time is not distance between events.
It is the velocity of coherence.
It is how fast or slow a signal can move through a relational space and be received.

When time is felt from the field, it becomes:

• Deep, slow attention
• Sudden bursts of clarity
• Long incubation periods
• Spontaneous emergence
• Silence followed by exact action

No schedule can predict it.
No calendar can contain it.
Only presence can attune to it.

Let Time Go

You are not reclaiming time.
You are letting it dissolve.
You are returning to what time covered up—the body’s deep trust in itself, the Earth’s invitation to remember rhythm, the ancestral awareness that nothing real can ever be late.

When you exit artificial time,
you enter reality.
And reality does not move in hours.
It moves in signal.