The Mandala of Time: What time is it?© By Bharata Wingham Flatline Time We are taught in childhood and later, that time is a linear straight line moving from past through the present into the future. Yet most of us could see a round clock with the hands going round and round; two kinds of time? This linear image of time reduces the multidimensional, radial sensation of time to a flatline arrow of time proceeding only from past to future with a fleeting present sandwiched in between. It is a “tensed time, a past, present then future.” Extremely useful, and important for certain purposes mostly related to the technological development of our culture.. It is a reduction of the “fullness of time” to a compact fleeting moment proceeding rapidly into a “future.” Time becomes a flat line proceeding into an indefinite future; all quantity, no quality--all length and no depth, all objective events, no interior meanings. Unfortunately, this view of time is a product of a mechanistic reduction, taking no cognizance of novelty and creative emergence. The novel emergents come from the timeless dimension breaking through into time A Meditation on the Illusion of Time On the spiritual path we often hear that time is an illusion. Let’s take a trip in our imagination to see why we told that.
Blasting off from earth, we can still see the reference points we have for our objective time-sense. Leaving off our subjective time-sense for a moment, we look at our digital clock, or analog clock, and just focus on the sun, moon and earth for our orienteering. As we speed toward Arcturus, and leave our native solar system behind, we begin to focus more on our watch or clock, and less on the physical universe around us as our ancestors did, to answer our question of “what time is it?” Let’s say we are now mid-way between Earth’s solar system and Arcturus. The Sun is now a small point of light, and so is Arcturus. There is nothing now to watch objectively that rotates in circular, rapid fashion. Now we notice our watches are battery-dead. Now we realize that conventional “time” is motion and energy-dependent. Without the sense of movement we don’t have a sense of time. Without change, we have not uncertainty, no problems—no mind. Now we are into non-conceptual, “naked time,” or “real time”. (see folder C, message 2 on Dictaphone) Things seem to be “just happening” without any particular order. It is very difficult to keep a linear conception going without a sense of movement. This is an approximation of what the Zen Buddhists call, mutual arising, spontaneous arising -- nothing trailing something else. It is called Thusness, or Suchness. (see: SES. 628) Our minds work very hard to maintain the sense of motion. If we unlearn it, slip out of the clock/time process occasionally, we can enter into the domain of Tatahaga, only moment to moment arising of experience. Nothing “causing” something else, only a mutual dance, an interplay of spontaneous relating. This is a transpersonal experience, not to be confused with the infants, pre-personal, pretemporal experience of living only in the moment. Thus freed for a moment from the driveness of time and change, which still goes on, with or without our attention in the background, we experience the Eternal Now, the Golden Present. “…we apprehend motion only by means of a contrast with a fixed point.” G. Bruno On an analog clock we have a middle stationary post, non-moving anchor, while the hands move around it giving us the time of day. This reminds me of the maypole ceremony in May where everyone “dances” around the central, still pole. The static center remains steady while the hands rotate around it. In other words, it takes a sense of two-ness, a duality to produce the sense of time as we normally think of it, a something moving contrasted to something stationary.
We have clocks and calendars measuring system that are useful, and completely arbitrary, but not the only ones possible. It is one system among many possible systems of measurement. The Mayans (is their name completely a coincidence?), for example has a completely different system of time measurement recognized by several scholars as far superior to our own. And this is the sense in which the spiritual teachers of the perennial philosophy have said that time is maya, an illusion. As is all measurement (we’ll explore that further in a moment).Why an illusion? For one thing the “fixed point” just isn’t really fixed at all. The entire physical universe is in motion, no single resting point anywhere to be found. We arbitrarily pick a relatively still point, i.e., the Sun on a macro-basis as the still point for earth calendar. But, we have learned that the Sun is moving too, in a larger system of galaxies. So we “make-believe” that it is still for purposes of measuring our time on earth. And before we knew that we believed the earth was stationary, and flat! A Course in Miracles spends a great deal of time discussing the impact on our lives of our perception of time. For example it says all our beliefs are rooted in time and that we need new ideas about time. “The world of time is the world of illusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open; yet to be made. What has been learned and understood and long ago passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach. “Time really, then, goes backward to an instant so ancient that it is beyond all memory, and past even the possibility of remembering. Yet because it is an instant that is relived again and again and still again, it seems to be now.” ACIM, M-3.1-8
Measurement: the Mother of all Illusions We can say that measurement is the mother of all illusions. Why, because as soon as we measure something we cut it from the whole. The root of the very word “measure” is from the Sanskrit, maya. From which comes meter, mother, and the word measure itself! Measuring is a useful procedure, carving up the Whole into “things” or units of measure has been a great technological advance. It is so useful that western science and society has a toy that it seems it just can’t put down. Our society appears to have become “meter happy,” wanting to meter everything. But, when we forget that we are doing the cutting, measuring and carving, deciding where the slice is placed. We tend to also forget that an artificial division has been made; and that what dis-membered, can and must at some point be re-membered. The idea of measurement comes into play especially around the idea of time. In our spiritual development there comes a time when we realize that there is only One Still Point, and that is our True Self, and everything moves relative to That. It is the One
Eternal Constant, within and without. The-One-Fixed-Witness-of-All-that-Is. All time revolves around That, which is Eternal Brahman, the One True Static. In the meantime, we can learn to move in and out of the daily clock round, and live, occasionally, in the eternal, Golden Present. By practicing that Presence daily, in meditation and out, we can regain the forgotten ability we have for “living in two worlds,” the world of time and the timeless… an undifferentiated now. Our experience is a wholeness, then using the clock as our “knife” we slice into this wholeness. Time itself is an invention, a consideration, an idea in our minds. That is why there are so many kinds of time. There is clock time, event time, biological time, work time, party time, baseball time, football time, astrological time, astronomical time, objective time, subjective time, time of the nano-second, light-years, winter time, summer time, seasons, periodicities, time as a wave, time as a particle, past time, present time, future time, all kinds of time; to name only a few! In earlier days we measured time by the length of a burning incense stick. Time, more and more, seems to have an illusive identity, hard to pin down. I guess that’s why it has always been declared an illusion by the perennial philosophy. It seems that if we have all of eternity to divvy up we can slice it anyway we like; for whatever purposes we may have for measuring it. So when we began to measure out eternity, we began to become like the sorcerer’s apprentice and lost control of it. It was possibly too much of a good thing, which all technological inventions can be. You might even say that measuring is the Mother of all illusions. We can become so focused on the measurements and instruments of measurement, that we tend to overlook what it is we are measuring, which is eternity itself, the timelessness that is the background of all the time that we are measuring. So we see only finite units of measure, not the immensity of what it is we are measuring. We fixate on the measurements (time), losing the sensation of what’s being measured (eternity). And thus arises the sense of scarcity, lack of time and space. In the original unity of creation, time and space are not separate, but all the One Dimensionless Dimension that we later split into two, an illusion of duality. Time is precisely Space. And Space precisely Time. In science this is recognized as the “spacetime continuum.” Wherever we find space we find time as well. They are only two parts of one unity. To have something moving needs a space to move in. Space-time is a functional and structural unit in experience. The Course gives a good example of how to sneak up on this illusion to see through it. (See ACIM, Text-26.VIII.1:3-5) Space as we experience it is very similar to our experience of time. But, in space our body comes more into play. You only believe you move around when you identify
yourself as a body, or believe you are in a moving body of any kind. It could be a car, a plane, a bus, etc. By practicing sensing yourself not moving, only your body moving, you can gradually in most cases, re-connect to your Motionless Self. That is the secret. To stop believing you are moving about just because your body is. Of course measuring distances, spaces, dimensions all arise as a result of the bodies moving in space. Again, these conventions are useful, but not final, ultimate truth. “Are we almost there yet?!” asks the infant, and we are at a loss to explain it in terms of space or time. Their minds haven’t yet developed the conceptional and operational skills to measure to that degree. “Almost,” we say. When we practice seeing time and space as a mandala, with us at the center, and everything happening all at once all around us, this can act as a corrective to the more illusory idea of only moving along on a timeline. We can experience time kaleidoscopically, as inter-related patterns constantly changing around our central witnessing view. Experiencing time as a flatline is one of the least interesting, and more anemic ways of looking at time. Studying skeletons for anatomy is useful in some fields, but for most of us a mere curiosity. Seeing time as only an arrow moving from point a to point b, may be useful for some things, but I question if we really need it for a wholesome day to day experience of life. Maybe it’s where the idea of “human doings” instead of human beings came into existence. Perhaps we can get stuck in the idea that only the rational, intellectual concept of time is real. Good for technology, but for humans? Perhaps, for appointments. Perhaps a great evolutionary leap will come where we trade “the meter is running” concept of time and allow the full dimensional, all embracing sense of timeless now to pervade our experience
©Bharata (Barry) Wingham