Welcome to this ongoing exploration of no time, no problem. And today will be another day, another session of exploring a modern-day teacher, a modern spiritual teacher — Hameed Ali, founder of the Diamond Approach and author of The Unfolding Now, under the pen name of A. H. Almaas. This will be another interesting session for me personally, because this is another one of these books that I tried to read — and I got further in this one. And what was interesting is that, for a variety of reasons, some of which we'll get into today, it was not what drew me in to the Diamond Approach — even though currently I am in year three of being a student of the Diamond Approach.
Almaas was actually an engineering student, so he knows his science — and can call back to our first half, where we were diving more into some of the "no time, no problem" in physics: this way that in space-time, the more distance you travel, the less time passes. Like this trade-off in nature. The speed of light is like the speed limit for the universe. And so if you're going at the speed of light — like light is — then you're going the maximum amount of distance possible. And the trade-off means that, for the light, no time passes. No time passes for light. Whether that, even analogously, has anything to do with the timelessness of true nature — I do not know.
But we can explore for ourselves this, as Almaas writes: "The immediate in-touchness with the moment is the in-touchness with the now-ness of the moment, which is the same thing as the Being of our presence."
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
