Living In Time

This is the most attention I have paid to autumn since coming to America with its four seasons. Should I look back to this time of interest the colors will most likely be shades of yellow and brown contrasted with the crystal blue of the sky.

This morning, waking up to the drumbeat of rain falling on the roof outside my bedroom, I took my cup of Verona Starbucks coffee back to bed with me and read G. J. Whitrow's What Is Time? Snuggled in bed I wanted no interruption so I cancelled my lunch with Tony. What a wonderful meditation on time!

I have not done any more work on defining a text project since first opening Eric Maisel's The Art of the Book Proposal but elements of what he suggested fly about the mind influencing what I think. I have thought of writing a book on the theories and practice of  vipassana meditation using Western psychology and philosophy language. Whitrow's book underlined one of the areas about the practice that fascinates me the most: the concepts about time and memory.

Whitrow, after quoting Robert Hooke writing in the seventeenth century, said that what Hooke referred to as "the Soul" nowadays we would call the mind. He didn't explain how he made this transposition but it made sense to me as if I'd always known it. Soul and spirit are nowadays not much differentiated, the first term now hardly used as we immerse ourselves in the enlightened, more secular world of science, computer technology and global warming. While writers in the past differed in how they used the word "soul," it did seem to carry the burden of  the psychological component of our individual being where resided the historical collection of our exercise of choice, our subjective interpretation of events and our image of ourselves.

Buddha reportedly advocated the absence of self, what perhaps is best equated with soul, not that people did not experience self but on the contrary lived through self or the soul which is the reason why they suffered. The self was the individual's psychological processes which he or she refers to as reality but in actuality are something he or she collects in the course of life and imposes on an undifferentiated reality far vaster than the collection he or she makes. Critical to the operation of these processes is the element of time no matter that karmic time is understood in a very different way than time as understood in the West. In India, time might be described to be circular as opposed to linear, progressive time in the West but this is simplistic. Time in Buddhist philosophy is really chaotic, only superficially organized by karmic events. Buddha himself taught that there were four things a human being could never understand and karma is one of these.

The soul experiences time as memory. Science, of course, understands time as progression of events although some theories in quantum physics challenge linearity to events in a similar way that Buddhist philosophy thinks of chaotic time. Hugh Everett, for one, in PBS's Nova program, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, proposed another explanation of Bohr's thesis that electrons revolving around the nucleus of an atom are simultaneously present everywhere. Only when an observer observes them do they take concrete positions in space. Imagine that if electrons indeed are simultaneously present everywhere our concept of time goes bananas! Because time in the West is linear, Whitrow argues, deriving he claims from the dogma of Jesus Christ dying on the cross once and for always to save all humankind from sin committed all over the spectrum of past, present and future.

I doubt I would have the patience to sit down and develop the themes about time that reading Whitrow's book has inspired. I doubt I would ever settle down to one project I could develop into a book, a movie or a photographic project. Having said this I would also add that I doubt I know what I shall be doing in the future. Ancient cultures like the Mayan developed their ideas about time in an effort to control events in the future. We use the past nowadays for a similar motivation. Even our construct of the four seasons is in part an attempt to predict the regular recurrence of events in the future so that science in effect is a throwback to the pre-historic idea of circular and chaotic time. The Buddhist avoids paralysis by training himself to value the present and only the present. Take care of the present and the future takes care of itself.

Or as one of the survivors in the recent Heartland Film Festival movie, Stranded, decided after an avalanche cut off their oxygen supply: don't fight it, experience the moment.