The Reification of Time - I
“At one time I waded through the river and at one time crossed the mountain. You may think that that mountain and that river are things of the past, that I have left them behind and am now living in this palatial building – they are as separate from me as heaven is from earth.
“However, the truth has another side. When I climbed the mountain and crossed the river, I was time. …. I have always been; time cannot leave me. When time is not regarded as a phenomenon which ebbs and flows, the time I climbed the mountain is the present moment of being-time. When time is not thought of as coming and going, this moment is absolute time for me. …
“Do not regard time as merely flying away; do not think that flying away is its sole function. For time to fly away there would have to be a separation between it and things. Because you imagine that time only passes, you do not learn the truth of being-time. In a word, every being in the entire world is a separate time in one continuum. And since being is time, I am my being-time. Time has the quality of passing, so to speak, from today to tomorrow, from today to yesterday, from yesterday to today, from today to today, from tomorrow to tomorrow. Because this passing is a characteristic of time, present time and past time do not overlap or impinge upon one another.”
- Dogen-zenji
“The shamans of ancient Mexico never regarded time and space as obscure abstracts the way we do. For them, both time and space, although incomprehensible in their formulations, were an integral part of man.“Those shamans had another cognitive unit called the wheel of time. The way they explained the wheel of time was to say that time was like a tunnel of infinite length and width, a tunnel with reflective furrows. Every furrow was infinite, and there were infinite numbers of them. Living creatures were compulsorily made, by the force of life, to gaze into one furrow. To gaze into one furrow alone meant to be trapped by it, to live that furrow.
“A warrior’s final aim is to focus, through an act of profound discipline, his unwavering attention on the wheel of time in order to make it turn. Warriors who have succeeded in turning the wheel of time can gaze into any furrow and draw from it whatever they desire. To be free from the spellbinding force of gazing into only one of those furrows means that warriors can look in either direction: as time retreats or as it advances on them.”
– Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time
Contrary to popular belief, space and time have no objective existence. Therefore, to base our science and philosophy – not to mention our everyday lives – upon the assumption of reified space and time is about as absurd as basing them on the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Indeed, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are considerably more real in the cosmic scheme of things than what we call “space” and “time”.
(continued …)