Heraclitus is famous for the paraphrasing of "you can't step in the same river twice." All is flux. Everything is changing. And Aristotle found this view — everything is flux, everything is flow, everything is process — as quite concerning for the endeavor of what he cared so deeply about, which is coming to understand and know something about anything. If the very same river that you're stepping into is just all this ever-changing flow of waters, then there's not a thing that you can come to say anything about, there's not a thing that you can come to know. And so Aristotle — and philosophy for the coming millennia — would take this form: he said that there are substances. Underlying substances — like the substance of a horse that then can change position, or the substance of a pizza that can go from hot to cold — that there's some underlying thing, and that underlying thing can have changes in properties in time. And actually, isn't that what change is? Change is the sense of, something had this one property at one moment in time, then, a later moment in time, this substance has a different property. And if that substance is the self, then you've got the identity of you, as some self, that is over and above all this flow and flux of ever-changing things. So maybe, instead, we could see what it would be like to put change before time. Before thinking about time, before thinking about clocks — there's change. There's changing. Actually, the title of my paper is "Change Before Time." And we just see what happens to entities when we put change before time. Do they stay as substances? Or is there this way that they reveal themselves more to be like processes, as soon as we begin to really put change first?
So, as we've talked about in this series — in Dr. Park's work Essential Reality and Time — descriptions of how nature works, so far as we know, lead us to what is minimally required to be part of a reality view: what is needed is initial conditions. So what's required is that we not only have a thing at one position, but that there's change — velocity intrinsic to a moment. So we're taking this minimal view of what is needed to have all the empirical effects from physics and finding that the being of something includes the flow of changing.
I can just imagine Aristotle going, "oh my goodness. I wanted so much to be able to know." And millennia later, he could see in physics that this changing is not actually a threat to knowledge; that coming out of this physics knowledge is actually the way that changing can be inherent in being. Changing is inherent in being. Maybe that even sounds like a more radical form of impermanence — not just that, oh, something is the way it is now, and then it's gonna change, it's gonna be impermanent — but impermanence baked in to the very being of everything.
Maybe something we will play with is the existence of breathing. What is our experience, actually, of breathing? How might there be a meditation experience where it almost feels like the breath dissolves on us — even as we might be experiencing the breath more fully than we ever have? And if that can be so for the breath, maybe that can be so for what we call the self. How that's not going to make us not breathe, not going to negate our existence, nor is it a negation of the nose that the teacher can pinch to make that point. Yet maybe some of that dissolving can be part of what eases our suffering.
No Time, No Problem?
An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living
What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering?
Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji—to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries.
Thank you for Being with Being.
beingwithbeing.org
mackenziehawkins.substack.com
