Being with Being – Details, episodes & analysis

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Being with Being

Mackenzie Hawkins

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/8d. Total Eps: 50

Philosophy, contemplative practice, and the physics of nature's flow — for finding your own way. For those who don't need the added pressure of another's way, but are curious about ways of understanding, perceiving, and living that mesh with each other — and that only you can make your own.

Each episode is a complete live recording — typically around two hours — opening with a 15-30 minute inquiry into the session's theme, moving into an hour-long guided practice, and closing with comments and discussion. These explorations grew from years of my own searching — trying to fit into practices that promised relief, never quite finding home in any tradition, and stumbling upon a rational basis for getting traction on ways I don't have to try.

As your fellow explorer, I'm Mackenzie Hawkins — researcher in philosophy of physics, contemplative practitioner, and co-author of several books with physicist and Tai Chi Master Dr. Wonchull Park. Drawing from his nowflow philosophy, these series-based explorations use philosophy and physics as ways of understanding and perceiving what's here already.

Not ways to follow, but ways that might help you find your own — for anyone looking to explore beyond the pressures we put on ourselves.

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Servant to Time, or Time Serving Me? - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 50

Friday, October 2, 2026 • Duration 01:34:32

Thank you for Being with Being.

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Flow in Being: Change before Time - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 48

Friday, September 18, 2026 • Duration 02:09:03

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?

No Self in Time: A Way in to “No Self”? - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 47

Friday, September 11, 2026 • Duration 01:44:50

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 , Carlo Rovelli’s , Eckhart Tolle’s , Dogen’s —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries.

The Immediate In-Touchness of Now-ness - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 46

Friday, September 4, 2026 • Duration 01:46:20

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?

A Tantalizing Solution to All Suffering: If Only - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 45

Friday, August 28, 2026 • Duration 01:51:50

So today we are into the second meaning of No Time, No Problem, which is: Is there some way where, if there's not this sense of time, then for us as human beings, there's no problem? In the sense of freedom from suffering. Maybe of the kind of mental extra affliction, dukkha, dissatisfaction, that can be quite enmeshed in the sense of the past — memories of what's happened to us — and the anticipation of the future.

One of the modern-day spiritual teachers who has emphasized this aspect and is quite famous is Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now. For those of you who are not as familiar with his story, it begins with this very personal experience, a matter of a transition that happened in a short period of time, where he went from real depths — some of the utmost of suffering — and then experienced this shift. Then he needed to find a way to explain it, put into words, to share with others this highly subjective experience. On the cover of his book: over 15 million copies sold. I'm sure it's many, many more now. And I can almost even just feel the impact of so many people finding, relating to this book, to the message of this book, and their lives being impacted by it.

And I held a copy of this book over and over again 25 years ago, and I was not one of those people who connected with it. I actually wasn't able to finish the first couple of chapters. Even the former news anchorman Dan Harris, one of the hardest skeptics on the planet who then started Ten Percent Happier, even he could get through the book and find it very helpful.

So in some ways, this exploration is also my own kind of reckoning. What it takes this N of 1 to connect to this teaching on time and suffering. If I now could sit beside my 19-year-old self and kind of hold her hand? Maybe she wouldn't let me hold her hand, actually, but be by her side as we looked at some of these passages. What would I say to her?

How would I help her find sense behind Eckhart's claims about psychological time and clock time and "life situation" and "life"?

How would I help her suffer less sooner?

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?

No Trying to Lop Off: The Past, Present, Future Story - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 44

Friday, August 21, 2026 • Duration 01:50:29

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.

Permission to Be Simply Nowflow: Nothing Left Out - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 43

Friday, August 14, 2026 • Duration 01:53:41

So much of this series has been on the side of: is it really not a problem in physics if there is no such thing as this fundamental time dimension or even a background spacetime container in which change happens?

It seems to me that wherever human beings go, and certainly human beings go into science, they bring shoulds with them. With science as this objective enterprise, it kind of makes sense that we would like a view of reality that is, in a way, a view from nowhere. Why would we want to tie our view of reality to something that is contingent on how fast the observer’s moving, or where the observer is located in space? We want to see that 4D spacetime block from nowhere inside it. We want reality to be invariant. We want it to be what it’s going to be—not a perspective on reality, but reality itself. And the power of mathematics makes it where we feel like it should be that the structure of a mathematical object like 4D spacetime—that’s what physics is telling us is real. That’s gotta be reality.

But Dr. Park just comes at this—the shoulds of how science should be—from the perspective of what is. What is it that we’ve got? What have we got to go on? In physics that at its basis is purely empirical, what we’ve got is experiments. Effects that we can replicate. And anything that relates to a valid or not valid reality view ultimately comes down to: does it have a distinguishable effect? That’s not always what we necessarily want to hear. But it opens the door for even taking our reality views themselves—this is what Dr. Park calls reality view equivalence—and see if they make a distinguishable empirical effect in the setting up, running, and measuring of an experiment. If nothing in experiment—nothing in experience—contradicts my reality view by revealing a distinguishable difference between whether I hold that view or some equivalent view, then it’s a perfectly good reality view by that criterion. It will never lead me astray in anything that can make a distinguishable effect.

What Dr. Park points to is that there’s a minimal information—position together with its changing, right at the moment—that he calls essential information, and the reality that corresponds to it, essential reality. And here’s the key: if any consistent information is added to essential information, there’s no additional effect. You can add the past. You can add the future. You can add dimensional time, or acceleration right at the moment—and none of those have any further additional effect than what’s already covered.

Do I Have to Be a Spacetime Worm? - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 42

Friday, August 7, 2026 • Duration 01:59:28

At some level there’s the mathematics that everyone agrees on and everyone can use. But what does this mean in terms of time and spacetime?

Something I’d like to reflect on before we dive in is that there is this very human tendency—very, very human tendency—of wanting the universe, wanting reality to make sense to us, to be what we want it to be. We can want reality to be invariant. We can want what’s real for me to be what’s real for you, or else fear that we’re no longer sharing in reality. We can bring assumptions to the table without even realizing we’re bringing them.

This is another wonderful popular book, one that I highly recommend, by Sean Carroll—The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. And if you pick up this book—and I would say most, the majority of writing including popular writing, but also philosophical writing, even physics interpretations of relativity—they will tend towards this interpretation of relativity: Sean Carroll writes: “In relativity, it’s no longer true that space and time have separate objective meanings. What really exists is spacetime.” That was the impression I got reading popular science books, even as a kid. Since only spacetime is invariant between two events, the reasoning goes, you can’t even really disentangle space from time anymore. So there’s this reification of this thing—spacetime.

And that can lead to the conclusion that became dominant after relativity came to the fore: the past, the present, and the future are equally real. Let’s take this a little further—not to torture ourselves, but to really see the impact that a view of reality can have on us. Relativity “means”—I’ll put that in quotation marks—the 4D spacetime block is real. And that “means” that you and me and our dog and our cat and any objects are actually 4D spacetime objects. Sometimes called “worms.” Only the tiniest, tiniest slice of this spacetime worm is ever at the present—that view is called perdurantism—somewhat confusingly contrasted with endurantism, which is the view that you can be wholly present at each moment of existence.

Part of this exploration can be how much we may, in our sense of our identity, our sense of suffering—even in how much we’re trying to be present—have a sense of being spread out in time. Maybe not a 4D spacetime worm, but a sense of being kind of smeared out in time. Instead, what if I don’t leave any trace of existence behind me? Nor is there one ahead. I get to be wholly in the flow of this moment.

Innumerable Clocks, Innumerable Times - No Time, No Problem?

Episode 41

Friday, July 31, 2026 • Duration 01:56:14

When we look at the clock and think it is telling us THE time, then there’s the time, this abstract time that’s passing us by, and then there’s this clock. We almost don’t even think of that as a relationship. It’s almost like the abstract time that’s passing us by is driving this clock. This poor clock. Maybe driving us all. But when physics is telling us how clocks behave, and how there’s not one clock that we can say is the true time, then we’re left with this clock relative to the other clock. This particular changing thing, and that particular changing thing, and a relation between them. There is no truer time. There are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is more “the real” time than the other.

The clocks really do run at different speeds—the faster a clock is traveling, the slower its time goes—and we couldn’t even use our GPS without accounting for that. We can’t perceive that in our own experience. That web of relations amongst this multitude of times is not something we need to usually pay attention to as we go about our daily living. But there’s such a habitual sense of checking the clock and feeling that I’m looking at “the” time—and maybe that we can begin to dismantle. Maybe this fact about clocks in relativity is something that supports us in reclaiming the flow of time into each particular changing thing that’s affecting and being affected with each other. Everything and anything can be a clock, and there’s no one clock that’s telling “the” time. Maybe everything is, in a way, its own time.

So we might come to feel the breath itself as a clock. I’m not going to say that this is the best clock ever. But this rhythm of widening and coming closer together is a kind of clock. We get to be a clock. That might not be the most inspiring thought you’ve ever had. What—I’m just a clock? Maybe feeling into the effect of getting to own “being a clock.”

What if that rhythm is only in relation to other rhythms? What if that rhythm is only in a web of other rhythms? There’s no one time that our breath is happening in.

I’ve been so struck at how much flow time has been stealing from me. The flow of time has seemed to monopolize flow. What’s it like to feel the flow of breath in itself? A flow in this web of flows. All relative to each other. All interacting. And then in an exploration like this, it’s like this small explosion, blossoming of all these particular flows, reclaimed from the abstract sense of time passing us by.

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