In the first half of this series, we did a big long detour into the physics, so that we could approach what various people say as beneficial and helpful — seeing them as options that can be consistent, rationally, with what we know from physics. And now we're bringing it a little bit closer to home.
Where this exploration is headed is something I've never quite seen laid out: how much we are embedded in a story of change. How much of our living, our identity, who we are and what we're doing — and what we're being, even — is really embedded in this way that we remember the past, anticipate the future. And that we need to counter this, in a way. Sam Harris says straight-up in his book Waking Up that nothing is more important for happiness than the "trite" fact that everything is now.
I kind of got the sense, for a long time, that the way to more fully be here now would be to jettison the ways we flash back to the past or flash forward to the future. Almost like a horse with blinders on — just focus on the now.
But what I'm exploring here — as I try to put into words something that has been dawning on me for many years — is that our embeddedness in these stories of change runs so much deeper than our mental chatter, or our mind wandering, or what we might even be able to catch consciously. That's not our brain doing something wrong. That's part of being a human being. Dean Buonomano calls the brain a prediction machine — remembering the past in order to predict the future, moment by moment, automatically and subconsciously. Without any conscious thought, we anticipate where a ball is going to be, based on all our past experience. If we were an athlete catching a fly ball, we'd likely just feel like we're in the zone — even though we're entirely responsive to, and flowing with, a past, present, future story that lets us act.
One possibility of this exploration of what is at the root of this difficulty is perhaps seeing even more fully how much our enmeshment with managing change — and since change is so related to time — this sense of living in time is really so fundamental to our experience, both conscious and subconscious.
Maybe the difficulty is not that we remember, or that we anticipate. Think of a melody: without remembering the previous note, we couldn't know whether this note was higher or lower — there'd be no rhythm, no melody at all. And that remembering doesn't tend to take away from what's happening now; the previous notes add to our enjoyment of the note we're hearing. It can feel different from remembering the events of yesterday.
So maybe the difficulty comes when we have a storyline past, a storyline future, that's a little longer, or more about ourselves. But these storylines of change themselves don't seem to be the root problem. Because if we just lopped off past and future from our storylines, there would actually be very little left of our experience. We're not going for a meditative lobotomy here.
What if we merge these two perspectives — so that the nowflow can hold, quite easily, the storylines that include past, present, future? St. Augustine called these the present past, and the present present, and the present future. Everything in that storyline is actually now. That's how we can be affected by it. That's how we can affect it. So there's this embracing of our storylines of change in the wholeness of nowflow. They don't have to seem to separate us, or make us sacrifice the wholeness of everything here and now.
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
