How can we talk about "no problem" — perhaps interpreted as no suffering, cessation of suffering as extra layers that we add on to the human experience — and not get into the very origin of Buddhism? What the Buddha taught, in his first rolling of the wheel of the Dharma, the Four Noble Truths.
But does this have anything, really, to do with "no time"? I remember, in college, I was in a Buddhist philosophy course, and the professor really went out of his way to make a point that this modern emphasis — of the present-moment experience, or the "be here now" — is hardly at all in the original sutras. What's up with that?
Each age has its own language, its own concerns, its own hotspots. Maybe this same gist of what we have been exploring is running through it all, but not explicitly. "Everything that is liable to arise is liable to cease." So there's no mention of time, no mention of the present moment, no explicit mention of change, yet the summary that gets the nod from the Buddha is this statement on impermanence, on change.
That anything that I might think of as myself is changing, is part of this all-together changing impermanence, arising and ceasing. There's not this self that's smeared out into the past or future as though one’s experience, in a way, "belongs" to a permanent, unchanging self in time. And that we suffer when we try to manage change — the way we want it — for a permanent-seeming self in time. So, that way, the a sense of "everything is now," or "no time," can be a way in.
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
