week 2.

March 11

Time flies. It’s nearly spring.

So much has changed. But much is exactly the same.

Truth be told, I haven’t had much time to focus on time. I’ve been trying to build my marketing business. We’re a team of four now.

I’ve also been focused on being depressed. I never imagined that 3 months after breaking up I’d still be missing my ex every single day. And night.

But it’s not just the breakup. My social life is in tatters. I feel the void all around me, steadily gnawing away. It’s a familiar presence. It beckons me down, but I know what is waiting for me there. I know there’s nothing to find.

In terms of ‘time’, the only consistent practice that I’ve been doing is just slowing myself down whenever I can. Talking a bit slower (which isn’t hard in Bishkek), walking slower, thinking slower, working slower (okay, that last one is rather difficult for me).

One other thing has been helpful as well. I read a few books about the science of time. Turns out that the current understanding of most theoretical physicists is that time is not real. Well, ‘not real’ in the sense that it doesn’t accurately describe anything out in the world.

Now, normally this would be quite a disturbing conclusion. But I had already stopped believing in time a few years ago, sometime in the middle of my last acid trip. But it’s one thing not to believe in time, and another thing to read the cold hard facts of physics. There is something about the empirical sciences that is inescapable. Tangible.

It’s like… I sit in bed and look out of the window. I take in everything around me. The trees swaying in the wind. The sounds of traffic. The color of the houses. The people crossing the street. And then I bring to mind that time isn’t real. And then I keep looking, but now I don’t know what I’m seeing. Without time, what is there?

The silver lining, though, is that whenever I’m feeling anxious, I remind myself that time doesn’t exist. And then suddenly I’m a bit less anxious. I feel a bit lighter. I look around with a bit more curiosity.

There’s an ancient practice where you try to picture the day of your death. Memento mori. Against the reality of your own inevitable and approaching death, your true priorities are meant to rise to the fore. Ancient Stoics and medieval Christian monks used this technique to provide perspective and urgency to live a meaningful life.

Well, another version could be to remember that there is no day of your death. There are no days at all. Without time, is there anything left to worry about? Without time, I am free.

It works, because it’s true.

I stare out of the window. This is what I see:

The story of time is the story of change and un-change (persistence? Sameness? Is-ness? Being? Existence?)

What does that mean? Wind is the movement of air against something. Time is the movement of change against something. But what is that something against which time moves? Does everything move at the same speed? Does a tree move at the speed of light? Does everything change at the same rate. One instant and then another one. Or do some instants last longer than others?

The story of time is the story of change and un-change (persistence? Sameness? Is-ness? Being? Existence?)

Change is clear. But what is un-change?

Is it the sun that rises each morning? Is it weight of a book in my hand? Is it my awareness? Is it the appearing of what appears? Is it the mountain out on the horizon? Is it my ancestors? My language?

Here’s something I read in A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time:

“Huw Price, Australian philosopher and founder of the University of Sydney's Centre for Time, is puzzled by this interpretation of such quantum correlations. He thinks that this doesn't take the static theory's block universe perspective seriously. In particular, if you take the block universe proposal seriously (as physicists do), then why presume that causation only works in the so-called forward direction? That is to say, if we truly live in the timeless reality described by physics, then why can't the future affect the past just as the past affects the future? What Price proposes is that what we are seeing in the photon experiments is retrocausation: The later measurements are causally influencing the earlier properties of the particles! That influence would explain their observed correlation without instantaneous nonlocal influence, without our having to revise classical and relativistic physics.”

Let that sink in. No, this is not science fiction. Yes, this is a plausible theory by a leading scholar based on empirical experiments. Retrocausation. Our future draws us forward.

There’s something else that I’ve been pondering. Actually, I’ve been pondering it for a few years now.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve learned — we, the modern man — to fetishize the present. To worship the Power of Now.

There’s a pervasive narrative that all of our troubles are caught up in the past (our worries) and the future (our hopes). If we could only live in the present, we’d find that everything is… what? Transcendent. Calm. Vibrant.

There are no shortage of books, videos, classes and groups dedicated to teaching us — us, the poor ignorant masses — how to live in the now.

But if the present is so great, why do we resist it with all our being? If the now is so powerful, why does it so easily slip away? If we are ‘meant’ to be present, then why does it seem like the most unnatural place to be? So unnatural, in fact, that even after a lifetime of dedication very few can ever claim to find it. Does it even exist?

No. We desire to live outside of the present. Outside of time. Always in the not now. Always lost to ourselves. Lost to each other.

But to be lost to ourselves, we don’t need to move into the past or the future. There is ample room in the present within which to disappear.

Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant:

“We will then realize that life cannot be understood in passive contemplation. Life always finds its primary reality in an instant. The more deeply penetrating our meditation on time, the more minute it becomes. Idleness alone lingers; the act is instantaneous. Could we not say then, conversely, that instantaneity is an act? Take a weak idea, tighten its focus upon an instant, and it will suddenly illumine the mind. Being's repose, on the other hand, is already nothingness.”

Bachelard is pointing out that the sense of duration is an abstraction; an idea that does not represent reality. Indeed, each and every experience occurs in an instant. We catch ourselves. A Cartesian cogito. Aha! By the time we glimpse it, it’s already passed (and past).

What then is in the instant? Nothing.

Time, like a boundless black hole, leaves room for nothing but itself. Nothing but ‘Being’s repose’.

To summarize, the past is no more, the future not yet. All we have is the present. But the present has no duration. It has only an Instant. And the Instant? The Instant has nothing at all.

“We are conscious of the present, and only of the present. The instant that has just fled from us is the same vast death that holds dominion over abolished worlds and extinguished firmaments. And the same fearsome unknown holds the approaching instant within the dark shadows of the future, as much as it does the Worlds and the Heavens that have yet no inkling of themselves. There are no degrees within this death, which is as much future as it is past."  - Roupnel, Siloë

We are constantly being born and constantly dying. In fact, we are that Being whose Being is Death.

In retrospect, I suppose it is no wonder why I’ve been so depressed these last weeks.

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Within the dense fog of a universe in constant flux, the human mind isolates singular structures. These structures themselves are fluctuating, but they hold shape just long enough for our cognition to stabilize them.

Here is a tree. I can touch it. I can climb it. It changes, surely, but all the same it remains a tree and nothing but a tree.

But is a tree immortal?

There comes a day when I pass the fallen tree and I’m not quite sure what I’m seeing. Wood? A log? A few more months and its nearly decomposed. Where is the tree that I once leaned against? It has passed away and become something new.

Everything is somewhere on the spectrum of being created, persisting, and passing away. And each new thing that is being created gathers its existence from something which is passing away.

Here is a chair. I remove the legs. The chair is gone. Something new stands in its place.

Everything is in the process of becoming something else. Or put more accurately, we are always in the process of assigning categories to that which is essentially shifting. We try to capture the sunlight in our hand.

Tracing the comings and goings of things is an immense task for the human mind.

The only method I know of that can help is to sit quietly, now and again, and watch as something new comes into being and slowly passes away into the next creation. That's why we focus so carefully on our breath.

I’ve learned that the only way to overcome my fear, is to love the very thing which threatens me.

Point in case: I am impatient at work. I lay in bed, worried. Things are not as I wish they were.

I prefer to be at the end of the story. Not stuck here in the middle. Where things can turn right or left, up or down. The uncertainty scares me. It chokes me. I must remind myself to breathe.

What can I do? I cannot speed up time. I cannot jump to the future.

Instead, I ask myself: do you really want to skip to the end? Don’t you know that all that is worth loving is right here in the middle? Don’t you remember how sweet this melody can be? Can't life be worth living?

Return to the sweetness. Return to path. There is truly nothing else out there.

Each day, I set out with the best of intentions. I commit to love each hour of the day. And each day I return home stressed, confused, betrayed.

There should be a word in english for self-betrayal. 

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Time is nothing but a collection of events.

For that is what time is: a number of change in respect of the before and after. So time is not change but in the way in which change has a number. An indication: we discern the greater and the less by number, and greater and less change by time; hence time is a kind of number. But number is [so called] in two ways: we call number both (a) that which is counted and countable, and (b) that by which we count. Time is that which is counted and not that by which we count.

• Aristotle, Physics

Time is nothing but a collection of events. Time does not exist. Events exist. And when we bundle events up together we can say, “I took six breaths”, and therefore “Six breaths have been taken.” 

But events occur at different rates. How then can we measure time? Must we have a different time scale for each and every event? And what about a long yawn vs. a rapid inhalation? Are they to be lumped together as breaths? Or should we instead of “2 yawns, 1 rapid inhalation, and 3 standard breaths have passed”?

No.

We find a particular event that occurs at a very steady rate (regardless of temperature, pressure, motion, etc), and then we say “This event shall for all people at all times be the measurement of time! We will measure time in… the falling grains of sand in this glass!”

In other words, we choose a particular collection of events, and we nominate that type of event to serve as the standard by which we measure the duration of all events.

“That song was so short. It was only half an hourglass.”

(Of course, we do the same for weight, distance, currency, and so on.)