Being the Urmother, Time the Urfather
In the present, becoming is the child of existence and temporality.
To be is to act; a thing’s essence is nothing but its power to affect and be affected.
—Baruch Spinoza
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 91
Being. To exist is to exert. Yet this implies that informational and relational properties are primitives of the physical. Being is thus presence—the sheer fact of is-ness, that standing-forth of what exists. In actuality, being is the property of something as such, where what something is is inseparable from what it does. Being answers the question—What?—with the stubborn thereness of information, relation, exertion, and potential exertion. Being’s exertion is a potential to change the state of something else, which is to relate to that something and thereby transmit or instantiate information. Yet exertion does not require an actual relational partner.
A solitary entity exerts itself against the void—its presence is already a state change relative to absence, the most primitive information: the distinction between something and nothing. To be is to be differentiated from nullity, and this self-differentiation is the ground from which all further relations elaborate. Even in the absence of another entity, being carries its relational character in the subjunctive: if there were something with which to interact, there would be a state change. The dispositional is not an addendum to being but constitutive of it.
Time. It is the medium of becoming, the dimension along which being unfolds, transforms, perishes, or renews itself. If existence is exertion, time is what gives being its room—the opening within which difference can register as such. Without time, a state change would have no before and after, and therefore would involve no change at all. A frozen juxtaposition. Time is like a river that bears being forward. Moments reveal difference. It is the condition under which relation becomes process and presence becomes persistent. Without time, being would be eternal and unchanging—existence without succession, without the rhythm of appearance, disappearance, or difference that constitutes multiplicity.
What and When
Yet time is not external to being, like some container in which things merely happen to sit. Time realizes exertion—the immanent articulation of being’s relational character. To exist in time is to endure or to perish. Even apparent stillness is a kind of temporal work—the maintenance of a state across moments, a continuous reassertion of presence. Time thus answers the question—When?—but in doing so, it reveals that “when” is inseparable from “what,” at least at this level of description. A thing’s temporal profile—how it persists, how it changes, at what rate it unfolds—is not incidental to its nature but constitutive of it.
Being and time are thus not two things but two aspects of the same standing-forth: being as the fact of presence, time as the structure of its disclosure. Being provides the content (what information), time provides the sequential unfolding (actualized relations), and the physical emerges as their informational-relational offspring, in patterns that persist in the next moment.
To see into the future is to perceive the radiance of the All.
A Generative Union
Being is the Urmother, the womb of all actuality—fertile, grounding, the source from which forms emerge. She says, “Here, this is real,” which means the negation of absence, yet eternally connected to the void in wholeness.
Time is the Urfather, the active principle—the force of movement, separation, and sequential unfolding. He introduces difference by allowing one moment to give way to another.
Such makes narrative possible.
Their holy union—a continuous coupling—generates our mundane existence: neither static being nor hollow duration, but our reality becoming—our onto-epistemology—as lived in the present moment. Human existence is thus being-in-time, the concrete instantiation of possibility into actuality, as each moment that arises passes away.
Every moment is a child of the Urmother and Urfather.
Present as Offspring
Possibility stands as the quantum field between the two parents. It is what being could become, given time’s advance. Possibility is the latent potential activated by time, yielding the present.
Without being, possibility would have no information or relations to actualize. Without time, possibility would be negated—with all potentiality existing simultaneously, but none capable of being born as actuality. Time is what allows the possible to become actual in succession, rather than as an infinite set of potentialities.
Possibility, then, is the child who inherits from both parents: from being, the content (what might be); from time, the opportunity (when it might occur). It is the living edge where the not-yet meets the now.
The Future as the Omniperspective
If the present is the child of being and time, the near future is the limen of the All. That makes the far future more infinite and unknowable by degree of distance from the present. The sum of possibilities is winnowed to a smaller sum, like sand at the point of stricture in the hourglass. What is now gives way to what shall come, so the present carries within it the seeds of succession.
As the All is both being and void, time and timeless, potential and actual, we can practice reverse dialectics to see that the future holds the ultimate unity. When the Urmother and Urfather mate, instead of moving from opposition toward unity, we move from unity toward opposition. The All is an undifferentiated whole, a primordial synthesis, which then undergoes a kind of fission—splitting into distinct, even antagonistic, moments that were formerly integrated and indeterminant.
Our creation story is that of multiplicity.
The future is thus the All’s omniperspective—what being might become, but always constrained by the shrinking sum of possibilities, only one of which will be born as the present. The All is the Law, after all. Unlike the past, which is fixed in its state of having-been, the future retains indeterminacy—multiple paths radiating outward, narrowing as the present advances and forecloses alternative paths.
If the future is, to us, possibilities given by the All—but filtered by our hope or dread—some measure of agency is revealed. To act, then, is to reach into the future and attempt to narrow the set of possibilities that gets actualized. The future, then, is not merely what will happen but the space in which what can happen still matters—where the exertion of existence remains open, where time’s unfolding being (becoming) has not yet settled into the fact of having been.