Words From Ken

As the 20th century draws to a close it is natural to be thinking about time, a subject which has both fascinated and perplexed thinkers since the beginning of—whatever it is. Augustine said that he knew what time was as long as no one asked him to explain. Charles Lamb wrote that “nothing puzzles me more than time…and nothing bothers me less, as I never think about [it].” Early Buddhist philosophers did not take the matter so lightly. For them, time as an independent objective entity cannot exist because “distinctions of space and time into past, present and future cannot be made without reference to objects in motion.” Zeno the Stoic, trying to track down time in the 3rd century BC, followed a similar argument to the startling conclusion that even motion cannot exist. Newton’s   great assumption which became the basis  for Western science is that of a uniform time through which all bodies “move”. This objective notion of time accompanies a subjective feeling of an ever rolling stream or universally trodden path, but this notion is itself far from universal; it is challenged by many voices, not only from the past but the present as well. Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner quotes an Australian Aborigine: “White man him go different. Him go road belong himself.” Philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar understands that the era of historical consciousness, ushered in by the invention of writing, (chron-icles), is not only preceded but underlain by a pre-historical consciousness in which time can be a more rhythmic, even circular, pattern than a linear one. Zen Master Dogen: “It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact it stays where it is.” “Ridiculous the waste sad time,” mused T.S. Eliot, “stretching before and after.”

It is not only philosophers, artists and mystics who ponder the riddle of time. Some of the most startling discoveries of modern physics have to do with its mysterious and elusive nature. Einstein’s intuitions of a relative, flexible time have now been confirmed experimentally. Hawking and others have taken his theories still further. It appears that as one gets closer and closer to a complete mathematical description of physical reality, time simply drops out of the equations; in short, time does not exist. This assertion is shocking to our “everyday” experience of temporality and is not easily communicated with our language and thought structure which, following Panikkar, is precisely time-oriented and time-conditioned. The insights of artists are often expressed in metaphor and symbol, the intuitions of mystics by paradox and non-verbal communion, and now scientists find themselves struggling with common words, thought patterns and even the very nature of consciousness. If time does not exist in an absolute sense, then neither can causality. Without a well defined “before” and “after” it is impossible to conceive of a latter event being the result of a former one. Mind boggling experiments in quantum physics are in fact being done, in which operations performed at a certain time can “cause” changes in earlier states. “Before” and “after” precipitates, so to speak, only in conjunction with a certain type of awareness or mode of observation; and it is not merely that there is a subjective as well as an objective side to everything,  two sides to one coin. There is either no real coin at all or else it is spinning so fast that the two sides are transparent to one another. This reminds us of the Buddhist pratitya-samutpada, the radical relativity of all things including space, time and even a cognitive self. Science, which for centuries has striven to build a picture of objective reality—the world “out there”, has wandered into a world of appearances, permutations and timeless interdependence that is anything but objective. Quantum theory has shown us the universe as a game of chance, and we are both players and played. “We’re the bat swung by the children,” sang Rumi, “we’re the ball and we’re the game.”

Without causality every event becomes spontaneous and unique. Though shapes and forms appear to arise and dissolve in familiar patterns and we are tempted to make predictions on that basis, really we can only guess at probabilities. Furthermore, since this is a participatory universe to its very core, our predictions and guesses are themselves woven into the fabric of reality, affecting its texture, color and design. If the pattern appears sometimes frayed or incomplete, it is only so in a relative sense. If it looks beautiful or meaningful it is testimony to the creative genius of rational intellect, for example, or to a particular aesthetic sensibility but not to an absolute status. To be absolutely logical one would have to determine (as Descartes did not) what caused logic itself. It could be argued that rational thought appeared in Greece just as spontaneously as did spirituality in India. Ironies of history are rarely sweet but the course of Western thought, which set itself against the typical Eastern one, has taken it around the world, in a sense, to encounter ancient wisdom in a new way. Many physicists today believe that logical inquiry has sailed nearly its full course into the realm of relativity and quantum theory, and that exploration of this world of primal chaos, uncertainty and timelessness must include exploration of our own consciousness. Reality is a spontaneous collaboration involving ghost-like substance, shifting space and time frames, and an active participatory awareness.  Any purely objective analysis of this collaboration may lead us into what  Buddha called “the jungle of theorizing, the tangle of theorizing, the bondage of theorizing and the shackles of theorizing”. Life need not  always be felt as a series  of nagging questions,  it can also be experienced as lila, God’s play, or pure celebration. Historical consciousness is one of many unique improvisations on Reality, pre-historical consciousness yet another…

Driving the point still further, some physicists postulate that from the timeless, primal “quantum stew” not just one or two realities may emerge spontaneously, but an infinity of them. Some of these “worlds” may be very like our commonly accepted one with a certain kind of time and rational framework; some might be unimaginably different. The reality that each person, or culture, experiences is not independent of countless unknown or even unknowable realms. Today we may have chased the elves and fairies from the woodlands, locked angels in museums of mythology and even bound God with chains of reason. But what do we really know about viruses, global warming or psychological illness? We make definitive statements about life in outer space, but we are more than a little  nervous about the boundaries of our personal earthly existence. We dream of cloning ourselves to escape mortality, but how rational are we really? Cosmologists now agree with the Buddha and others that substance and time are quirky habits that may disappear just as inexplicably as they arose, and that absolute trust and dependence on such concepts is not warranted. It is entirely possible that the 21st century will see the end of time as we know it. In an historical sense this could well mean environmental disaster, nuclear holocaust or world-wide famine, plaque and depression, although we would rather hope for a kind of realized, perfected “future”. In an ahistorical sense it could mean simply transcending this world of flux and change, much as the Souix ghost dancers would have danced themselves into another world even as they were being shot down by soldiers. Again a more optimistic vision would see history ending in a spontaneous collaboration of all peoples including artists, philosophers and scientists that, being timeless, could not involve fear, greed or regret. But without time even apocalyptic visions, whether optimistic or pessimistic, would be out of place. 

Physicists are being led to the conclusion that every view of reality is relative and contingent, that there is no primary substance, absolute meaning, method or time frame to which we can refer. We are enmeshed in a four-dimensional space-time pattern in which everything that we feel as our past, present and future exists en bloc. Observation of this total reality, or any particular mode of perception, can occur only by slicing it so to speak into three-dimensional sections, each section representing an aspect of the Absolute. The “slicing procedure” developed by early Greek philosophers, modified by Arab and Jewish theologians, then refined by Newton, Descartes and others has given us our 3-dimensional material world and a subjective feeling of a linear, flowing time. Native Americans took a different cross-section, in which at least two of the four directions—East and West—did not come quite clean from time and in which the power of the world, like  the Sun moving across the sky is rhythmic  and circular.  Tatanka-Ptecila, a Souix medicine man, sings:

                “In this Circle O ye warriors, Lo I tell you each his future,

                  All shall be as I reveal it in this Circle.”

Don Juan taught Carlos Casteneda that the universe is an infinite agglomeration of energy fields and that rational perception is a particular choosing or grouping of these fields. “Time, space and causation,” wrote Vivekananda, “are only like a glass through which the Absolute is seen.” Infinite, unconditioned Reality, like the primal quantum state of modern physics, is original not just in a temporal sense but as a timeless basis for perception itself. Raimon Panikker hearkens a trans-historical consciousness, in which the past and future are integrated into a tempiternal present. Angelus Silesius wrote:

                   “Do not compute Eternity as year after year,

                     One step across time, Eternity is here.”

“History is now,” said Eliot, the sense of time being only a detail in the over-all pattern. “Time past and time future point to one end, which is eternally present.” From this standpoint then, how can we view and evaluate our personal past and, more importantly only in a historical sense, how can we envision the 21st century?

In our meditation on time we have glimpsed some radical new (and some very old) insights: That time is not absolute, uniform and changeless—it may curve and twist, revolve in circles, even break and disappear; that, time being relative and subjective, so too is the notion of causality and determinism—spontaneity is at the very source of things;  that there is an infinity of possibilities not only vying to become the future but claiming equal status with our past; and that these worlds of possibilities— what might have been and what  might be— exist perpetually and interdependently with what has been and what will be. As our rational perception cuts its unique slice in this infinite agglomeration of energies it indeed does so in linear time, but other cuts can be made in other modes and frequencies. Our historical consciousness sees the past as a finished product conditioning a future which is always waiting to happen, while the present is felt as an irresistible one-way motion. If we suffer chronically from a sort of motion sickness it is significant that we seek a cure in dreams of perfection or even immortality in the future, while Native Americans for example sought to “circle back” to a timeless world of their ancestors. In our modern world, the historical past comes alive only in a psychological sense, but as not only mystics have told us but also philosophers and artists and now even modern physicists, this is a narrow vision. As time looses its absolute status our meditation on time becomes a rather Zen-like piercing of the tempiternal moment in which past(s), present(s) and future(s) are all equally infused with vitality and consciousness. Our past, the 20th century, the whole history of mankind is not just like the beginning of a detective novel whose riddle will be solved in the future. The 2nd and 3rd millenniums, “time past and time future”, truly exist, or emerge spontaneously as you would have it, in an illuminated present. 

Carlos Casteneda tells of Calixto Muni, the popular hero of the Yaqui Indians, who was executed by Spanish conquerors. “What would you say,” don Juan asked him, “to a story of Calixto Muni the victorious rebel who succeeds in liberating his people?” Carlos replied that that might be an acceptable way of  “releasing psychological stress”, but don Juan came back, “The story teller who changes the end of a “factual” account does so at the direction and under the auspices of the spirit. Because his pure understanding is an advance runner probing that immensity out there, [he] knows without a shadow of a doubt that somewhere, somehow, in that infinity, at this very moment the spirit has descended. Calixto Muni is victorious. His goal has transcended his person.” Before our historical consciousness can recoil too much against such re-telling of historical fact, it might be appropriate to remember another story. If a particular son of a simple Jewish carpenter and his devout wife had only been a very great teacher, spiritual leader or political revolutionary; even if, like Calixto Muni, he had died a martyr’s death, that might have been a very great thing historically; but it is doubtful if, on that basis alone, we would now be contemplating the 3rd  millennium Anno Domini. It was not historical consciousness that “changed the story” of Jesus from that of a great man to an Eternal Presence. It was not historical consciousness that revealed his “victory” on the cross, that moment of the spirit descending when “his goal transcended his person”. And it could not have been with historical consciousness that Christ himself might have experienced the splitting of the shell of temporality, the breaking of the chains of causality and determinism, revealing his identity with all things, and all beings, past, present and future. We do not need to accept this story either, but as we approach the year 2000 AD it is only fair and rational that we keep it in mind.