I've had some serious insight into Time

[Nikolai1]

Hi all,

 

So I was woken up in the early hours, wondering if the baby was actually crying or would go back to sleep. In a dream I kind of saw an object, it was lozenge shaped and looked like a double-size cod liver oil pill.   But suddenly I saw that time was a feature of this object, just like its strange shape.  Really quickly a series of insights came to me:  A lot of this a kind of dimly knew but I've never felt it before so deeply and vividly.  I hope you enjoy it.

 

• We imagine that time is something that is always elapsing, yet this is a total illusion.  We imagine that time is some kind of container in which all the events occur one by one by one.  This is also a total illusion.
• If I look at the face of my friend I sense time.  My witnessing consciousness 'remembers' events from the 'past'.  But the past is a present time sensation. Time cannot be sensed at any other time than now.  The idea that things 'were' or 'will be' is a total illusion.
• Time is just another object of the senses.  it is like a smell.  It wafts before our mind and we register it, but there is no permanent time scheme, just as there is no permanent smell scheme.  Both come and go.
• Our error is that we superstitiously place the mental senses (like time) above the physical senses.  We imagine that the physical sensations occur one by one within a higher sequence of continuous time.  in truth, time itself is just another of these sensations and should not form the basis of our worldview.  Perceptions of time are at the same level as the perception of smell.
• The only possible rational worldview is the reality of the witness that sees all these sensations come and go - the witness to whom even our own own egos are just another transient whiff of time.  Our ego comes and goes and then returns one second later so absolutely transformed that it is not a returning but a completely new coming.
• The witness is the totality.  We feel it in its entirety eternally.  The universe is a distinctly lesser reality which arises and passes in an instant and never looks the same way twice.  There is no universe outside of our perception.  All there is to get, we get.
• The idea that the universe  was created in its entirety either by God, or in a Big Bang is ridiculous superstitious nonsense.  When we think such a way we are failing to look reality directly in the face.
• To realise that time is now is the same as realising that all of space is here. When you understand time you also understand space, which is based on the same type of error.  'Another place' is just a mental sensation felt right here on this spot.
• So there is no other place than here, and no other time than now.  And yet the moment you try to reify this here and now with the senses you have fallen back into superstition.  The inly cure to superstition is to realise that the only time and space is who you actually are in the deepest sense of your own reality.
• The world and the ego are a most shoddy one-dimensional metaphor for who you are actually are and what actually is.

For me these ideas are beautiful and incredibly uplifting.  They give me such a satisfying sense of truth and I hope they do for you too.

 

Best wishes, Nikolai

Edited February 18, 2015 by Nikolai1

[Perceiver]

Interesting topic Nicolai - a favorite of mine!

 

Here is my view:

 

Time does not exist. The only thing that exists in the universe are particle changes. We humans then look at those particle changes and assign time to it. We do that in order to measure, quantify and understand those changes. But time itself does not exist outside human consciousness.

 

In absolute God reality, time also per definition cannot exist.

 

Absolute God reality must per definition be one non-stop timeless now.

[Perceiver]

By the way, if anyone know any good books/texts that delve deeper into the nature of time, then I would be interested..

[zerostao]

heidegger's Being and Time, comes to mind

[soaring crane]

I think time is very real.

Time and space; Heaven and Earth.

Two gears meshing infinitely.

[Nungali]

An alien view of time;

 

"The only way I can explain to you (a human) how I ( alien) views time is to get you to imagine this; see that mountain range running along the horizon over there?  Well that is how I see time. If we were to view it ion the way you view and understand time it would be like this; in front of the mountain range across the plane is train track, it has a flat car on it and you are seated in a chair and you cannot move, on your head is a helmet that blocks out everything but one small slit of view at one tiny section of the mountain horizon, the helmet is fixed and cannot move and the train slowly moves along the track .... but you are not aware of all of this, just that one little window of changing view 'going by' you.  But for me I am waking around in a landscape being able to see and be in all of it.

 

~ Courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut  ... and  this too  ;

 

 

[Gerard]

[*]The idea that the universe was created in its entirety either by God, or in a Big Bang is ridiculous superstitious nonsense.

Sorry but this is not entirely accurate.

This world was created by one God (one of the Brahmas, Jehovah in the Jewish tradition) snd there are actually a plethora of beings belonging to various astral planes putting forth his commands, that is he is the architect and the rest (devas of various degrees, including nature spirits) act as the engineers and gardeners. Other worlds are created by other gods; and there are other gods who are placed even in a higher level...a whole rank of them according to their degree of karma accumulated and how much wisdom they attained.

 

The Buddhist Theravada tradition has documented this stuff quite well. Kabbalah and the Sufi traditions have probably documented this too.

 

I know some of this stuff as a result of meditation practice.

 

Kind regards.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Gerard

[Nikolai1]

Hi Perceiver

 

 

Time does not exist. The only thing that exists in the universe are particle changes. We humans then look at those particle changes and assign time to it. We do that in order to measure, quantify and understand those changes. But time itself does not exist outside human consciousness.

 

In absolute God reality, time also per definition cannot exist.

 

Absolute God reality must per definition be one non-stop timeless now.

 

Yes, this is just like what I was saying.  To see time in this way is itself a raising of the consciousness. You become the eternally still point from which all change is perceived.  But the only reality is you, yourself - the still point - and the world of things that change in time are nothing more than a kind of metaphor for yourself.  Or perhaps a kind of mirror image or a photograph which captures a certain likeness but is actually flat and lifeless.

 

This is a really wonderful subject and meditating on the nature of time is a very powerful spiritual practice for those who are philosophical. 

 

I don't know of any books about this, but looking back I realise that Buddha's teachings on impermanence have influenced me and helped to see this stuff.

[Nikolai1]

Hi Soaring Crane,

 

 

I think time is very real.

Time and space; Heaven and Earth.

Two gears meshing infinitely.

 

Yes of course this is the view that I held before - that time and space are fundamental properties of the universe.

 

Now I would say that time is neither real nor unreal - its perfectly valid to understand the universe in time, but there is another vantage point - the timelessness of the witness state.  And to see the second vantage point is to realise that the first is now only provisionally true.

 

So what does this mean for those Taoist terms Heaven and Earth?

 

Earth is the place where time and space are real.  People who believe in them are earth dwellers.

 

Heaven is the place of timelessness and spacelessness.  The place I went to in my sudden realisation.  This is the view that falsifies the view of earth.

 

Who is that understands all this? The Great Tao.  I am nothing other than the Great Tao seeing itself. 

[Nikolai1]

Hi Gerard

 

 

Sorry but this is not entirely accurate. 
This world was created by one God (one of the Brahmas, Jehovah in the Jewish tradition) snd there are actually a plethora of beings belonging to various astral planes putting forth his commands,

 

Say what you like.  But prove to me that the one God isn't you?

 

In John 10.34 Jesus was accused of blasphemy by claiming to be God.  Why was he wrong  to say back "It is written in your own Scriptures that God said to the leaders of the people, 'I say, you are gods!"

 

Don't go out of yourself, who is the guy who saw all this stuff  in your meditations?

[soaring crane]

The big gears image works really well for me. Time as one big, infinitely big gear. Space as another. There's one tiny point where they come together as they rotate and mesh, and that one tiny point is all that exists, has ever existed, will ever exist. But the gears keep turning and they "exist" separately, outside of preception for all infinity, except for that one miniscule place where they cojoin. That's the here and now.

 

It's just an image that works for me.

[Nikolai1]

If an image gives you peace and security and a sense that whatever happens is well with you then that image is working! And if this feeling spills out into your everyday life and allows you to be open and fearless and loving and appreciative of all the beauty in the world then the image is working well I say!

 

Do you know what I love about mt spiritual path? It's the insight into things that I never had before. And I love all the coincidence, the synchronicity. I live the increase in meaning and the peace and confidence it brings. When I was young I was pretty nihilistic, even at 10 years old it started. To find meaning has been like finding true love for me.

[idiot_stimpy]

This moment is the same moment that I was born.

 

Nikolai there is no difference between heaven and earth. If you find a difference then it is also just an idea or in your words an object of the senses.

[Nikolai1]

If there's no difference why do the sages make the distinction? Those on earth must first find heaven and then realise that it's the same as earth and that earth always was heaven.

[idiot_stimpy]

I see you understand, please disregard my last post

[Perceiver]

I think time is very real.

Time and space; Heaven and Earth.

Two gears meshing infinitely.

 

Time is of course real in the sense that it is something we as humans perceive.

 

Everything in the universe is real. There is not a single thought or quark that is not real.

 

But in a theoretical higher state of consciousness time as we know it does not exist, I believe.

[doc benway]

By the way, if anyone know any good books/texts that delve deeper into the nature of time, then I would be interested..

 

Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point by Huw Price comes to mind.

Very interesting book but not an easy read.

[soaring crane]

If there's no such thing as time, how could the Rolling Stones sing about it?

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHzcHK3uV-Y

 

[Nikolai1]

Hi all,

 

When we learn to see time in its true sense, everything changes for us.  It starts a complete revolution in how we view understanding.

 

If there is no 'flow' to time - if time is something that just arises in conjunction with the object and then passes away again - it follows that there is no such thing as 'past experience'.  Everything we 'know' comes in the form of a direct, and entirely novel intuition.

 

I look at the face of my friend and I also see time.  I intuit the day we met, the things we share.  But we have never met before, I only believe we have, and it is this belief that gives my intuition full power and accuracy and makes my friend someone I can share with.

 

Empiricism is an illusion.  We do not accumulate knowledge over the course of time.  To believe in our own learning history is to place limits on our own understanding.  To remove this limit, which shall happen when we learn to properly understand time, is to give ourselves the ability of intuiting things we never thought possible.  Skills of clairvoyance are facts, and are just everyday styles of knowing performed by those who are not confined by their own learning history.  Believe in clairvoyance and you shall become clairvoyant.

 

The average individual believes in their own life story very very strongly.  This means that they are highly clairvoyant in those situations which relate to their own story.  On the other hand, they are almost entirely unclairvoyant in anything that they they believe they haven't experienced.

 

Understand time correctly, and your own life story will become less clear because you believe less in your learning history, but you will also become more clear in what isn't part of your life story.

 

So I've already noticed the changes in my own life.  Strange things occur at three levels of strangeness.  The first level is pretty common even in those who have a conventional view of time.

 

Level 1

 

Deja vu

 

This is a transitional situation where our minds are still in the conventional time view but our feelings are beyond time.  At the intellectual level we recognise that the situation is completely new but in our feelings we are directly understanding it as if there was something in our learning history.  Its a kind of vague feeling where it seems we can predict what will happen next in this strange scene but we have no clear cognitions.

 

Although deja vu is common, there are lots of people who don't get it and cant understand it.  They think they experience deja vu when things are simply repetitious.  This is not the same thing.

 

Jamais vu

 

This is the mirror image of deja vu.  Here our time based minds are telling us that the situation is old and familar - an everyday occurrence in our life story - and yet it feels to us so new, so fresh, so unexpected.  We may have done this drive to the office everyday for ten years and yet it barely seems possible.  Never has the kebab shop on the right been seen until this very moment.  Can it be true that these daffodils have been appearing here for the last 38 years?

 

Deja vu and jamais vu together show the 'opening up' of our egos.  We are starting to feel affinity where they should be none, and no affinity when there should be affinity.  We are becoming less of a distinct personality because we have seen through the illusion of time.

 

OK, it gets stranger, but this is getting long so I'll take about Levels 2 and 3 tomorrow.

 

Best wishes, Nikolai

Edited February 23, 2015 by Nikolai1

[Orion]

Cool topic.

 

What you describe, I've heard coined "present awareness" by others, and it's the term that I like the best. Everything arises and dissolves in front of present awareness, including memories of the past and psychic impressions of the future. It's all happening right now. There is no here or there, just now. If someone asks you what time it is, the time is always now.

 

When we schedule things for the future, we're just creating that in the moment. If I plan to meet somebody at noon, noon doesn't exist; but I can keep checking the clock until now is noon, and I can call the plan successful.

 

I think the notion that humans perceive time is less accurate than we create time through a series of assumptions and expectations. There is really nothing happening outside of this very moment.

Edited February 23, 2015 by Orion

[Perceiver]

I look at the face of my friend and I also see time.  I intuit the day we met, the things we share.  But we have never met before, I only believe we have, and it is this belief that gives my intuition full power and accuracy and makes my friend someone I can share with.

 

Hi Nikolai, this point piqued my interest.

 

Can you elaborate what you mean when you say "we have never met before"? - regarding your friend.

 

Is it the same kind of thinking that "if a tree falls in the forest, but noone sees/hears it, then it didn't happen"?

 

 

[Nikolai1]

Hi perceiver,

 

 

Can you elaborate what you mean when you say "we have never met before"? - regarding your friend.

 

Is it the same kind of thinking that "if a tree falls in the forest, but noone sees/hears it, then it didn't happen"?

 

Let's imagine I meet my friend and best man in a bar for a beer.  The music, the barmaid are all part of the scene and so is the mental imagery of the wedding and the stag party.  They all arise in that moment together.  It is an illusion to think that some of these phenomena are in the present and some are memories.

 

Even my fiend is a complete stranger to me, but my attitude is that I know him already, and this attitude empowers me to make all sorts of direct and relevant intuitions (although you could also say they arise automatically as part of the flow)

 

There is a different koan that captures this:

 

When the Master Daito saw the Emperor Godaigo who was another student of Zen the master said: " We were parted many thousands of years ago, yet we have not been separated even for a moment.  We are facing each other all day long, yet we have never met."

 

Actaully the first sentence refers to the illusion of space; it is the second that deals with the illusion of time. 

 

Hope this helps!

[Nikolai1]

Hi all,

 

Deja vu and Jamais vu are both pretty strange when we experience them, but they are basically subjective.  Reality isn't matching up to what we feel on the inside - that is the only uncanniness.

 

The next level is when things actually happen in reality that don't follow the normal laws of time and space.

 

Level 2

 

Synchroncity

 

This is when we are able to make links of meaning between this situation and other situations in the same way as we do when we think we have previous knowledge.  But the links of meaning in synchronicity make absolutely no sense in the normal laws of time and space and therefore can't be based on knowledge.  

 

This is because our transcendence of the illusion of time is also a transcendence of the way things conventionally happen in time.

 

Phenomena, we realise, are linked together in ways that start to seem quite uncanny.  Things that we normally view as symbols - and so merely superimposed on events - we now recognise play a meaningful part in the flow.  In spring its not unusual to see the daffodil repeatedly everywhere we go.  But now we see the same words, the same series of numbers time after time.  We are aware of a depth of meaning to everything that we never thought possible.

 

Objects are normally just objects.  But now they appear as motifs in our day, just like symbols in a dream.  Whether we understand the symbols or not, the world has an uncanniness.  It feels at time like we are dreaming it all up, or like Orion says, that we create the world of time and space rather than perceive it.

 

The world opens up, we see meaning in more types of ways and therefore our understanding of the world is more comprehensive and our actions more effective.

 

It is only when we loosen our attachment to the way things normally happen in time and space, that divination techniques start to work.  We can consult the I Ching, and understand and expect that the appropriate hexagram will arise just as the appropriate flowers will arise as the sun gets warmer.

 

People who cannot understand the true nature of time will be intellectually bound to conventional understandings.  Synchronicity will not happen for them, only mild coincidence explainable by the laws they know so well.  I Ching won't give any meaningful response, and they will have no choice but to discredit it as superstition.

 

But they are spared the darker side to synchronicity which doesn't get talked about as much, although lots of us have experienced it.

 

Dyssynchroncity

 

This is where we start to lose the intense powers of intuition we had into our own life story.  Remember, knowledge based on experience is and always was a myth.  The knowledge we had as indivduals was not based on the past, but were powerful intuitions allowed by our very strong belief that we knew about ourselves.

 

When we see the true nature of time, we are expanded and the world opens up - but our knowledge of who we are as individual egos actually contracts.

 

How does it feel?

 

Well the opposite of synchronicity.  Things that we expect to happen, don't happen.  Things go wrong, or projects fail.  Things we think we should know, we suddenly find ourselves not knowing.  And they get interpreted by us and others as lapses of memory so shocking that it seems we have a medical problem.  It takes a lot of faith and understanding to realise that this is normal for us.

 

It can be pretty mortifying.  Skills and abilities we would expect to learn easily we find we do not.  All our colleagues take to the new computer system like a duck to water, but we struggle for a long time.  We seem fated to fail at some things.

 

Things aren't happening as they should.  Its baffling.

 

Also, things lose their sense and meaning.  Activities that once filled us with a wealth of purpose and connected us to our situation now leave us cold and alienated from the people in our lives.

 

You get the picture.  We change as people, and all we can do is surrender to the fact that anything not essential to you Way, will fall by the wayside...but the essential will grow in meaning and manifest itself.

 

To see the timelessness of time is simultaneously to grow into a whole new person, but also to stop being the person you once were.

 

I'll talk about the next level tomorrow otherwise these posts get too long.

 

Best to you all!

[Owledge]

.

Edited February 24, 2015 by Owledge

[Perceiver]

Hi perceiver,

 

 

 

Let's imagine I meet my friend and best man in a bar for a beer.  The music, the barmaid are all part of the scene and so is the mental imagery of the wedding and the stag party.  They all arise in that moment together.  It is an illusion to think that some of these phenomena are in the present and some are memories.

 

Even my fiend is a complete stranger to me, but my attitude is that I know him already, and this attitude empowers me to make all sorts of direct and relevant intuitions (although you could also say they arise automatically as part of the flow)

 

There is a different koan that captures this:

 

When the Master Daito saw the Emperor Godaigo who was another student of Zen the master said: " We were parted many thousands of years ago, yet we have not been separated even for a moment.  We are facing each other all day long, yet we have never met."

 

Actaully the first sentence refers to the illusion of space; it is the second that deals with the illusion of time. 

 

Hope this helps!

 

sorry, but it doesn't . still don't understand it.. would like to though..