TIME (AND SPACE) IN PERSPECTIVE TO LIVING
Sara de Clercq - 28 October 2020
With technology improving, we’re getting things done quicker. Great!
That means more time on our hands. And so it’s easy to slide into finding more things to do to occupy that spare time. From food, books, podcasts, social media, papers, Netflix to more work, kids, going to the gym, hanging out with friends, hanging out with colleagues, buying a house, cleaning a house, happy husband, happy wife, trips to the sun, snow and forests.
In general, we seem to be fuller and more occupied with stuff than ever.
Time seems to be speeding up.
But, is it really?
The questions that have been arising here over the years are:
Does time only exist within the thinking mind?
And is there such a thing as cause and effect?
Are time and space really related? Or is that simply how we perceive physical reality to unfold in front of our eyes and therefore being the only way, at this point in time, to really make sense of what we experience day to day?
So I started practising stillness through sitting (meditation),through art and reading…
To really unpack this extremely curious phenomena like time (and space) I’ve been reading multiple books from different perspectives.
Mostly a combination of eastern philosophy, modern science and quantum physics. The most profound insights have arised from my own direct experiences where perception of time and space had momentarily completely disappeared. Ineffable in nature, these moments are difficult to rationalise or put into words.
Nevertheless, here we go...from east to west.
Time From a Buddhist Perspective
In very basic terms, in most Buddhist methodologies and schools, it is understood that the notion of time in the way most humans experience this - as from past to present to future - is an illusion.
Buddhism says that the liberation of Nirvana is liberation from time and space. Buddhism shows a very advanced way of looking at this principle.
In this blog I will scratch on the surface of what buddhist teachings say.
In Dzogchen (the central practise of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism) teachers speak of four dimensions of time. Past, present, future and timeless time. The 4th dimension hints that time is empty of self-nature, as are all phenomena, and manifests according to causes and conditions.
In the absolute reality (dharmakaya), time fades, as space and all other differences. All separation fades. The sense of self disappears and there is a complete melting together with the everythingness and nothingness, simultaneously in that moment.
Dogen, a Buddhist Zen Master, composed a collection of Shobogenzo called “Uji,” which is translated into english as “Being Time” or “The Time-Being”.
This basically means that being itself, is time.
"Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away. As time is not marked by coming and going, the moment you climbed the mountains is the time-being right now. If time keeps coming and going, you are the time-being right now."
Dogen also wrote:
"If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. As time is not annihilated, mountains and oceans are not annihilated."
This very principle also questions the ‘beginning of a universe’. The Big Bang theory is about the evolution of the universe, (the beginning), it doesn’t explain the cause of the Big Bang. “So the universe, time and space all begin with a ‘pop’ ex nihilo, without a cause? That’s as illogical as postulating the existence of a creator who is his own cause.” - The quantum and the lotus - Matthieu Ricard
“According to Buddhism, time and space are concepts created by our perception of the world, and have no existence apart from our perception.
The idea of an absolute beginning of time and space is therefore flawed according to Buddhist thinking. We also believe that nothing, not even the apparent start of time and space, can come about without causes or conditions. In other words, nothing can start to exist or cease to exist.
There can only be transformation. The Big Bang must then be a mere episode in a continuum without a beginning or an end.”
- The quantum and the lotus - Matthieu Ricard & Thrinh Xuan Thuan
What quantum physicists say about time
"Time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality.” - Carlo Rvelli, theoretical physicist.
As Rovelli addressed in The Order of Time, is that time is much more illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time - an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass - is useful as an effective simplification.
Rovelli posits that reality is a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The universe as a whole obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges. Rovelli is one of the creators of Loop Quantum Gravity Theory. The attempt to merge general relativity with quantum mechanics.
Recently some physicists have taken a renewed interest in a peculiar way of conceptualizing time and space that has been around since the 1940s. One of the models of this view reduces the three dimensions of space to just two dimensions, while projecting time as a third dimension. According to this, our reference to ‘now’ is the arrangement of all things and events that is viewed as existing in a single order.
This order, the present moment, doesn’t stay the same.
It changes and seems to rise upward through the third dimension(time). So rather than an element moving in space it moves through time.
With this view, we can imagine the whole of space and time as a three-dimensional occurring as a set of points within this notion.
Some physicists link this to consciousness.
"The objective world simply is; it does not happen. Only the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image which continuously changes in time”. - Herman Weyl
Not long ago, science had to account for a particle called a positron, an actual particle that shows up in a series of quantum experiments. A positron can be seen as an electron running backward or forward in time, so it’s moving, not related to time at all. By looking at this in a more temporally backward/forward way, they’ve recently discovered that they’re able to conceptualise many quantum phenomena that they could not otherwise explain - phenomena that were utterly out of reach and could not be explained for years. What is being discovered in a very real scientific way, is that the universe doesn’t have any size or duration.
It means that the Whole of Reality is - ALL of time, ALL of space - at once.
Nothing rides up or down or through or past time, neither our bodies, nor positrons, nor consciousness.
Take a moment to let that one truly land.
Consider this example to allow for some perspective. Say we excite an electron that sends a signal at the speed of light into the universe. It travels through time. Sooner or later the photon will be absorbed by another electron, the ‘responder’. The electron vibrates in response, and sends a return signal back to the electron where the signal was sent from. According to our common sense view, let’s say it takes 3 million light-years to be picked up by the ‘responder’ and gets bounced back; it will take, logically, 6 million light-years to travel there and back. But it seems (as several experiments have shown) that the responder’s return signal is received by the sender at the same moment the sender first sends out its signal. Not even a microsecond apart, the entire transaction takes place simultaneously, in the exact same moment.
In other words, the whole transaction happens now, outside of time.
Some physicists say that his phenomenon could be explained by the “transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics”, which says that the responder receives a signal and sends its return signal backward in time. And because it takes exactly as much time for the signal to return as how long it took to be sent out, it cancels each other out.
This leaves the question open for more research. . .
From reading both Buddhism's teachings, quantum physics and direct experiences, where I am standing now, at this point in time (oh the irony...), time exists and changes upon there being someone (a watcher/consciousness) to perceive time.
Time exists and it doesn’t exist, simultaneously.
The notion of time could be seen as a demi-reality. As Joseph Scott (from The Coaching Room) would say, it is demi-real. Have you stood there with others seeing a rainbow? It was real right? Until it wasn’t. The illusion, gone. Time exists because there is someone (a watcher/consciousness) to perceive it. From that perspective time is very ‘real’. And time also doesn't exist because when we take that someone (the watcher/consciousness) away, time and space disappears with it.
Okay, so, what does this leave us with in daily life? And how can the above be useful for you specifically?
Part of the work in coaching that I am doing is to work alongside individuals to realise for themselves how ‘free’ of time they actually are. And that it’s a mere concept of the mind. Through Neuro Linguistic Programming, I’ve learned how to speed time up and to slow time down.
By creating a state of flow I can choose and be flexible in the way I perceive time in certain contexts in life.
For example, someone might have the idea that there is not enough time for them to get the work done in the day that they intended to ‘get it done in’. There is a sense of rushing to meet the self-imposed deadline. A speed of working that is required and stress, anxiety and/or overwhelm that can come with that. With some simple tools and practises we can slow time down, especially in the context of work. So that this person is a) Not being had by their emotions and/or state in that moment and b) actually have a sense that time is slowing down and there is enough time for them to do their work from a place of calmness and clarity.
Our world or current system is heavily dependent on time requiring us to plan, schedule and time-block really well. And so whilst in this system, can we do that - plan and schedule as well as we can, to minimise the force that schedules can have upon us and therefore allow for the spontaneity of life to flow through?
In this case we use our modern tools to work with us, so we can relax into the moment as it arises.
This planning is extremely useful and effective in a lot of contexts. But not sufficient.
Practising presence, using tools like sitting-practice, journaling and breathing, can allow us to slow time down and allows for conscious choice instead of a force of time. Presence allows for deep relaxation, interconnectedness, flexibility and possibility. These tools can be used, and are used in coaching with individuals, until these tools are not necessary anymore and one can let go of what they have learned fully.
So, any sense of overwhelm, stress, procrastination, looking forward to, looking back to, anxiety, depression (which are all concepts and labels of the mind) can only exist in the notion of time. When we presence, and we do this often enough, these illusory stories simply fade away and therefore have less of a force on our way of being in any given moment.. With practise, this is possible for each and every one of us.
To spend more and more of our moments in this life fully here with it. Living it, more fully.
So to be here, in this boundless-less, timeless-less, spaceless-less moment.
Now.
Are you as curious about these juicy topics as we are?
Click here for YES&’s Digital Event | 2020 Edition - Honouring Chaos and Possibility. Through a collective dialogue, using an Integral framework, we will be honouring our recent challenges and lessons and navigating whatever is next, with openness, spontaneity and resilience.
Note: The blog above is based on books, articles, personal coaching and experiences. It is not to be taken as absolute truth. One can only directly experience this or confirm or deny above, for themselves through direct realisation.
Links:
Book: The quantum and the lotus - Matthieu Ricard & Thrinh Xuan Thuan
James M. Yearsley and Emmanuel M. Pothos. 2014, The Royal Society Biological Sciences retrieved from here: Challenging the classical notion of time in cognition: a quantum perspective
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2020 retrieved from here: New perspectives on time perspective and temporal focus
Barbara O’Brien, August 26, 2018 retrieved from here: About Time from A Buddhist Perspective
Steve Andreas, Jan Saeger, and W. Keppel. Retrieved from here: Eliciting fast sequences: Time distortion and alternatives.