Meditation and time perception

[Seeker of Wisdom]

I've noticed that a good session of either shamatha or vipashyana feels a lot longer than it actually is.

 

There's research on this from here:

 

Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. [...] The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations.

Increased resolution of attention -> dilated time perception.

 

Has anyone else noticed the same? Or the opposite?

[z00se]

Massive change in time perception.

 

Without meditation, i feel like i don't have time for anything, always just task after task with no rest.

 

With meditation, i feel i have time for everything. I can do something right now, or at least start it. The problem is meditation takes time also, so it is a bit of a catch 22

[Michael Sternbach]

I hope you will find this interesting... I'm sure, I do!

 

7. Zen's Understanding of Time and Space

 

Given Zen's seeing as articulated above, one may entertain a natural question: how does Zen understand time and space? Are they significantly different from time and space as conceived by many other theories of time and space? In what follows, we will briefly provide how Zen understands “here and now,” “zero time and zero space,” and “an integrated time and space.”

7.1 Here and Now

 

In spite of, or rather because of the above-mentioned experiential dimension of Zen-seeing, Zen insists that the Zen practitioner plant his or her feet in the everydayness of “here and now.” In this respect, Zen philosophically advocates a position of “not one.” Otherwise, it fears that if the practitioner remains in the stillness of meditation, while suspending judgment for action, it falls into one-sidedness, a source of prejudice and misunderstanding of reality. How then does Zen understand “here and now”? In this connection, one may reasonably ask: “how far and wide is ‘here’ and how long is ‘now,’” when Zen speaks of “here and now.” Are they each limited by a present perceptual experience? In the case of “now,” for example, is it an internal phenomenon of consciousness that allows the practitioner to experience time sometimes as a “memory” (or retention) and some other times as “anticipation” (or “protention”) in the ever flowing stream of “present” (e.g., St. Augustine, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty)? And in the case of “here,” is it delimited by the practitioner's spatial range of perception within the sensory field, situating the Zen practitioner as the point of reference? (There is in both cases a suggestion of involvement of the autonomous activity of the unconscious, of which Zen demands we must stand outside.) Zen's response to both of these questions is a resounding “Yes!” and “No!” however contradictory it may sound. “Yes,” because the practitioner, while living, cannot depart from the “here and now,” because he or she is incarnate, in which case time and space is always experienced as “here and now.” “No,” insofar as the perceptual model implies an ego-logical “human, all too human” stance (Nietzsche) with its attendant limitations, even though Zen does not exclude this model as long as it is not delimited by the dualistic, either-or ego-logical perspective. In the everyday human world that is “here and now,” Zen maintains that “riddhi and [its] wondrous activity all shoulder water and carry firewood” where “riddhi” refers to a power that naturally becomes available to the practitioner through the practice of meditation.

7.2 Zero Time and Zero Space

 

Yet Zen thinks that the preceding is still a partial understanding of “here and now.” To fully understand it, it is helpful to examine the following often-quoted phrase, as it is particularly illustrative. Zen demands the practitioner “to show one's original face before one's parents were born.” This demand points to an experiential dimension prior to the bifurcation between the subject and the object—and hence “not two”—where “prior” means negation of the spatial-temporal ordering principles such as in Kant's understanding of time and space as a priori forms of intuition. It points to a non-dualistic experiential dimension that is zero time and zero space, by which Zen means that neither time nor space is a delimiting condition for Zen-seeing. In zero time there is no distinction between past, present, and future, or between “before” and “after,”; in zero space there is no distinction between the whole and its parts. One can also say that both time and space, experienced from the point-of-view of the everyday standpoint, is relativized when zero time temporizes and zero space spatializes, where zero time and zero space characterize the bottomless ground. Accordingly, Zen contends that zero time and zero space are the natural and primordial being of all things including human beings, for they are all grounded in it. Taking these points together, the Zen enlightenment experience suggests a leap from a causal temporal series.

Consequently, Zen contends that “here and now” is enfolded in both zero time and zero space. This means that one time contains all times and one part contains the whole, as in the case of a holographic dry plate in which a part contains the whole. Seen in this manner, “now” for the Zen person is a temporalization of zero time, while “here” is equally a spatialization of zero space, even though he or she may be anchored in the perceptual field of “here and now” as understood above. In other words, for the Zen person both “now” and “here” are experienced as an expression of thing-events in their suchness, because, as mentioned in the foregoing, Zen takes zero time and zero space to be the original abode of thing-events. Caution must be exercised here, however. Zen's zero time should not be confounded with the idea of eternity standing outside a temporal series (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Newton's “absolute time”) by means of a logical or intellectual transcendence, nor the zero space to be identified with “absolute space” (e.g., Newton) wherein there is no content of experience. In other words, Zen does not understand time and space by imposing a formal category on them, by presupposing in advance a form-matter distinction, which indicates an operation of the discursive mode of reasoning by appealing to the either-or, dualistic, and ego-logical epistemological structure.

7.3 An Integrated Time and Space

 

Zen makes another equally important contention through this abstention, namely that time and space are lived as integrated space-time in the interfusion of a concrete temporalization and spatialization. For example, Dōgen speaks of it as “being-time” (u-ji) to indicate their inseparability; being cannot be apart from time, and time cannot be apart from being, where a being spatializes through the process of temporalization, and where it temporalizes through the process of spatialization. This is a concrete spatialization-temporalization that is lived without any intellectual abstraction, reflecting the Buddhist position that everything, excluding no-thing, is impermanent. Zen abhors an intellectual abstraction that merely thinks time and space. This is because the Zen person rides on the rhythm of living nature. That is, “here and now” is one experience (and hence “not two”), and for this reason they should be designated as “here-now.”

In living this integrated, living space-time, Zen does not understand time to be a quantifiable and homogeneously punctuated unit (i.e., the clock time of natural science), nor does it conceive of it as a linear progression from past to future through the present, although it does not exclude them insofar as they are useful for everyday life. The negation of the linear idea of time also includes the negation of the idea of time as symmetrical as well as reversible, because in the Zen experience of space-time, a teleological intentionality, an “in order that,” is absent. Yet, Zen does not accept, time as a “fleeing image of eternity” (i.e., Plato). Zen takes time to be living. According to Zen, theories of time built through conceptual abstraction, are distanced and separate from the immediacy of “here-now.”

Space, too, is neither a container (i.e., Newtown's “absolute space”) nor an a priori limiting condition (i.e., Kant), nor the place of displacement for the volume of an extended thing (i.e., Aristotle). Rather it is a living space. Dōgen for example captures this sense of space as “the bird flies the sky and the sky flies the bird.” In this statement an independence of both the sky and the bird is recognized, but it also recognizes that the sky and the bird each become themselves only through their interdependence. In other words, what makes this space a living space is the dynamic, interdependent, bilateral play of both bird and sky, from which the living space-time as the continuum of “here-now” emerges as an ambience, where each of the terms entering the relationship through the activity is granted a full recognition of their being. This is because the Zen person lives the dynamic activity of non-dualistic “coming-together” of “the two,” whether this “two” happens to involve the “betweenness” of two individuals, individual and nature, or individual and trans-individual.

7.4 The Structure of Things Appearing

 

Given Zen's mode of seeing, which is non-dualistic in nature, occurring in zero time and zero space, one may be curious to raise a question as to how things appear to the Zen mind under these condtitions. We can interpret Zen's nondualistic experience epistemologically as that experience which arises from a nondiscriminatory state of meditational awareness. To be more specific, the nondiscriminatory awareness means that it is the foundational background, as articulated in the foregoing, that is bottomless or is nothing, and as such it does not participate in the discriminatory activity. However, when a thing appears, a discrimination occurs on this foundational, though, bottomless, background. Because it occurs on this foundation, it does not distort the shape of things to appear along with its force. We designated its activity as discernment vis-à-vis nondiscrimination in the foregoing. Or, it may also be characterized as nondiscriminatory discrimination, in order to capture a sense of how things appear in meditational awareness. In this nondiscriminatory discriminatory awareness, no ego is posited either as an active or a passive agent in constituting things of experience as this awareness renders useless the active-passive scheme as an explanatory model. This awareness lets a thing announce itself as a thing. It is a rejection of the idealist position, e.g., Husserl's intentionality thesis in which a meaning-bestowing activity is assigned to the act of consciousness. It is also a rejection of the British empiricist's stance in which the epistemological subject is considered a passive being of tabula rasa upon which attributes are impressed. These implications are suggested because Zen's nondiscriminatory discriminatory awareness arises out of the state of no-ego in which no projection from the unconscious and no superimposition of intellectual ideas occur in the field of meditative awareness.

Moreoever, because things are experientially “constituted” in this manner, we can interpret the epistemological structure of appearing to be such that things appear in the field of meditative awareness without presupposing the Gestalt psychology's distinction between foreground and background. This is because the ego is turned into nothing in the state of nondiscriminatory discriminatory awareness, and hence no-ego, where this nothing is paradoxically a background that is not the background at all, because it is a bottomless background. To use Nishida's terminology again, the nondiscriminatory discriminatory awareness is an act of “seeing without being a seer.” Or, to use the terminology of Phenomenology, the bottomless background or the background of nothing is the stance in which the noetic act is rendered nothing. Accordingly, the noematic object is allowed to announce iteself without an intentional constitution by the latter. This is the meaning of “no projection” and “no superimposition” mentioned above. It consequently opens up a bottomless horizon, on which a noematic object announces itself in toto as a phenomenon.

This opening up simultaneously accompanies, as mentioned in the foregoing, a de-substantialization and de-ontologization of things of experience, because there is no act of the ego that substantializes and ontologizes them; substantialization and ontologization both arise as a consequene of an anthropomorphic activity that is intricately tied to the discursive mode of reasoning. Consequently, we are led to conclude that things of experience announce themselves in toto without concealing anything behind them. This is because there is nothing in the bottomless background to determine or delimit how things appear. Zen uses such terms as “suchness” or “thusness” to designate it. For example, Dōgen captures it by stating in “the Buddha Nature” fascicle that “nothing is concealed in the universe.”

In order to see how the above mentioned structure of appearing operates under the conditions of zero time and zero space, we must capture a sense of a temporal-spatial awareness reflective of the nondualistic experience. In the foregoing, we discussed zero time temporalizing and zero space spatializing in which temporalization is spatialization and spatialization is temporalization, e.g., Dōgens theory of “being-time,” wherein there is no formal separation between temporalization and spatialization. Hence, neither time nor space is conceived to be a container. Rather, they are expressions of things “thinging” the primordial mode of their being. This thinging of things springs from zero time and zero space. One must stand in ground zero to see the “thinging” of things where there is no temporalization and no spatialization of things.

 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/#ZenUndTimSpa

[Grok]

Yes, as well as the opposite.

 

Space can be created within time. 

 

Or condensed which "accelerates" time.

 

-grok

[SonOfTheGods]

Yes, as well as the opposite.

 

Space can be created within time. 

 

Or condensed which "accelerates" time.

 

-grok

 

Hours pass like minutes in deep altered states