The human side of Time

[Magical Realist]

Time...that great cold abstraction of the philosophizing mind. But that is a habit of words. Where does time attach to flesh and bone and blood? How does time bind our hearts and our souls to its relentless cadence?

We wait. We probably spend more time waiting for things than on anything else. We wait in lines. Wait in traffic. Wait on a phone call. Wait for an appointment. Always waiting, feeling the slow pace of duration in every paralyzed muscle and stifled whim. The drudgery of the wait.

We anticipate. We long for the absent. We desire and yearn and pine for what never arrives. We ache for the inrushing flood of pleasure we are missing in our lives. The merciful respite after the tyrrany of the tantalizing urge..

We procrastinate. We delay. We put off till next week, always avoiding what could be done now. Time is our protector now. We use it as a blanket to cuddle up in and ignore the pressing duties of now.

We are bored. We are depressed. Time now as heavy dragging duration. The pure burden of the slow and gradual moment. Nothing feels exciting. Nothing worth doing. We endure the numbing transition of nothingness thru our lives. It makes death and finality look like a blessing.

We are in the flow of now. We are creative and spontaneous and ebullient. Bubbling up out of effervescent energy we ride the cusp of the breaking wave with the wind in our hair. We are really alive now. We feel it. We are time itself in its magical emergent nascence.

[C C]

Any so-called objective, global "now" for the universe (devoid of the psychological capacity below to distinguish and create evidence for itself) would have to lower itself to the incredibly ephemeral durations of events at the microscopic scale. That measurement which is far less than an attosecond would be too "small" for a moment of brain consciousness to "fit" into (even the visual kind extends or rides over slash "falls out" of several milliseconds of brain processing).

The consequences of spacetime or the block-time of philosophy thus don't even have to be appealed to in order for some version of eternalism to rear its head. More "nows" would have to co-exist than the single one which the instinctive folk theory of presentism allows. (Wherein slightly different versions of a 3D world are continuously replacing themselves, with consistency between the current "now" and all the extinct ones being magically maintained without further explanation / cause).

So if it wasn't for non-human animals (as well as potential space aliens and artilects I guess) and whatever would pass for their judgements of one experience ("now") being different from the last experience ("just past"), and thereby discriminating and abstracting a unit of change from that -- then I'm not sure there would be any other "side" to time having a "flow" in terms of those events having empirical and intellectual evidence of themselves.

Since it seems part of the very nature of cognition to be discriminated into components of apprehension (with a sense of relational location between the last moment and the next in sequence), a person's whole lifetime of awareness could be declaring itself constantly / simultaneously; and yet each cognitive moment would only consist of its own discrimination of itself (in isolation from the rest). But yet seeming to "take its turn" in being real, due again to the connective coordination with the other moments (and the static memory each held which as a whole would contain information of the others' existence, as well as conceptual anticipation / prediction of ones in the "future direction").

But such durations of human consciousness are not neatly uniform and compact, and consist of scattered neural operations being collectively synchronous with each other in order to be coherent / unified. At the level of our everyday appearances the extended nature of a fully completed round of cognition becomes greater. Such apprehension mediated by language, feelings / emotions, and memory recruitment has to unfold and hang together over a vast framework of multiple changes in the skull. But we apparently do successfully conceive (as moments of time) that sequential chunk being divided into smaller intervals of consciousness (in terms of the everyday appearances level).

[scheherazade]

Does time even exist outside of our devised system of measurement?

From interactions with my horse, it has been explained to me that it is always 'NOW', though it is possible to recall a 'Now' that one has previously experienced and likewise one can anticipate that the conditions for another similar 'NOW' may yet transpire.

When I retire from work, I plan to take off my watch and just go with the flow of 'NOW' in deciding when to eat, sleep and otherwise experience the world around me. I intend to immerse myself in the present and let 'time', flow through me, instead of dancing to the clock as dictated by corporate consumerism.

[C C]

Does time even exist outside of our devised system of measurement? From interactions with my horse, it has been explained to me that it is always 'NOW', though it is possible to recall a 'Now' that one has previously experienced and likewise one can anticipate that the conditions for another similar 'NOW' may yet transpire. [...]

Our better retention of past events and systematic use of them is sometimes attributed to our capacity for language, abstract concepts, and goal-oriented interests which can be acquired and modified (going beyond innate behaviors).

Animals supposedly lack this extended focus and conceptual organizing of information (especially reasoning analysis and speculative prediction abilities falling out it), and thus get stereotyped as primarily living in the present. But obviously they can be trained and recognize and respond to many things which require considerable recruitment of memory. Even a feral predator tracking a prey is certainly devoting mental resources to that time-extended task. Migrating birds anticipate the future.

But all that said, they probably live closer to some Zen state that casts off reasoning and concept-oriented affairs, and the grounded concerns resting in memory and past conditioning. The kind of understanding and guidance which delayed, abstract thought has cultivated in us as opposed to the immediacy of a life confined to current experience and intuition.

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David Darling: Zen is . . . difficult to talk about. So alien, indeed, is Zen to the analytical Western mind that it is perhaps easier to say what it is not. Zen is not a faith because it doesn’t urge the acceptance of any form of dogma, creed, or object of worship. Nor is it antireligious or atheistic; it simply makes no comment on the matter. Zen is not a philosophy or even, to the Western mind, a form of mysticism. As we normally understand it, mysticism starts with a separation of subject and object and has as its goal the unification or reconciliation of this antithesis. But Zen does not teach absorption, identification, or union of any kind because all of these labels are derived ultimately from a dualistic conception of life. If a label is needed that best approximates to the spirit of Zen then “dynamic intuition” is perhaps as close as we can come.

There is a saying in Zen: “The instant you speak about a thing you miss the mark.” So, presumably, this saying has also missed the mark — and this one, too. Our endless analysis can lead us into all sorts of difficulties. But how can we break free of it? Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death. Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen’s whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs.

Because it eschews the use of the intellect, Zen can appear nihilistic (which it is not) and elusive (which it is). Certainly, it would be hard to conceive of a system that stood in greater contrast with the logical, symbol-based formulations of contemporary science. More than any other product of the Oriental mind, Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth. As one of its famous exponents, Master Tokusan said: “All our understanding of the abstractions of philosophy is like a single hair in the vastness of space.”

[...] The very reason human thought has progressed as far as it has is by virtue of having access to a sophisticated language. And all of human language, Oriental and Occidental alike, hinges upon the use of words, names, labels, and symbols — the purposeful fragmentation of the whole and the substitution of tokens for the pieces into which we have broken reality. Removal of the wall between ourselves and the cosmos at large, dissolution of the subject-object barrier, can only come with the cessation of thought based on language. Yet, try as we might, we cannot stop thinking. The very act of attempting to shut out thought involves thought, so that this approach is defeated from the start. If we apply our intellect to block our intellect we only make matters worse — we simply end up distancing ourselves further from an innocent awareness of how things actually are.

All human beings the world over face this same dilemma. Evolution has made us into inherently self-centered individuals bent on survival. But our conscious experience of selfhood, of our individuality — which is ultimately the creation of language and rational thought — can lead to suffering and anxiety and, in particular, a preoccupation with death. Easterners harbor the same concerns about self, survival, and mortality as we do. Yet, in the West, our difficulty is made more acute by the belief in the supremacy of the intellect. Our immediate reaction to any problem is always to try to think or reason our way to a solution: an approach that, being predicated on the notion that the self is separate from the world, can never in itself lead to the experience of selflessness. Our dogged objective probing of the world has finally led, it is true, to the discovery that at the subatomic level all divisions and boundaries imposed by us on the universe are in fact illusory — including the split between mind and matter. But although we have discerned this at an intellectual level, we still feel ourselves to be apart from, rather than a part of, the universe as a whole.

Philosophers everywhere have long known that the human mind is capable of two contrasting modes of consciousness, the rational and the intuitive. But whereas the West has favored the former, in the East the latter has always been given priority. Buddhism, as a case in point, reveals this bias in its distinction (made in the sacred texts known as the Upanishads) between “higher” knowledge, or prajna, also referred to as “transcendental” or “absolute” awareness, and “lower” knowledge, or vijnana, identified with analytical or scientific thought. Thus, although Buddhism has a rich intellectual base and body of philosophical teachings, it uses these not as an end in itself but as a way of pointing to the greater truth that can only be attained by a suspension of logic and symbolism.

[...] In a sense, what modern physics is to the history of Western thought, Zen is to the development of the Eastern worldview: the ultimate refinement of more than two thousand years of incisive debate, discussion, and critical development. Yet the difference between the two could hardly be more marked. Whereas physics is interested above all in theories, concepts, and formulas, Zen values only the concrete and the simple. Zen wants facts — not in the Western sense of things that are measurable and numerical (which are, in fact, abstractions!) but as living, immediate, and tangible. Its approach to understanding is not to theorize because it recognizes that previously accumulated ideas and knowledge — in other words, memories of all kinds — block the direct perception of reality. Therefore, Zen adopts an unusual approach. Its buildup involves language — which is unavoidable. Any method, even if it turns out to be an antimethod, has first to convey some background in order to be effective. But the way Zen uses language is always to point beyond language, beyond concepts to the concrete.

[...] Zen uses language to point beyond language, which is what poets and playwrights and musicians do. But, less obviously, it is also what modern science does if the intuitive leap is taken beyond its abstract formalism. The deep, latent message of quantum mechanics, for instance, codified in the language of mathematics, is that there is a reality beyond our senses which eludes verbal comprehension or logical analysis. [...] Intuition has ever been the handmaiden of science. And although science represents its theories and conclusions in a “respectable” symbolic form, its greatest advances have always come initially not from the application of reason but from intuitive leaps — sudden flashes of inspiration very much akin to Zen experiences. --Zen Physics