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Does Buddhism support the idea of time travel or refute it?
LostLight
Veteran
Because Buddhism believes in a constant stream of consciousness and cause and effect, does the current understanding of time travel work with or work against these ideas?
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Precisely because it's current, and Buddhism is timeless.
To reverse time is to reverse change, to reverse causality. If reversing causality were possible, that would be a kind of backward time-travel, but who knows? In either case it's not traveling through time, but changing space-time in momentary increments either way... there'd be no way to skip the changes being spun forward or backward to a particular "time".
It would be something if time were actually independent, rather than an abstract measurement of change, but that's the whole ball of yarn right there. It's change that we have to "change" to get to another specific moment.
-I am paraphrasing a quote from another person whose name I can't recall.
All we have is now. Everything else is just thinking.
Although human conditioning imposes the idea that time is linear, I doubt that the stream of consciousness or cause & effect, is subject to such limitations.
But does Buddhism as a Teaching have anything to say about it? No. It doesn't refute it and it doesn't support it, because it's not important to end suffering.
I suppose in Buddhism, we say the past and future are connected through karma, and use the term dependent origination to describe the process. But the overall time based cosmology is one of a wheel, where time travel eventually happens because time itself is a universal repeating loop. But that doesn't mean people are fated to repeat their past events again.
Fate can even be disproven with quantum theory, which -as of current understanding- says that the position of particles is given by a probability. So you can never know for sure where a particle (or atom, or molecule, or baseball or whatever) will be or go, but let's not go there. :crazy:
Ok.. this hasn't got a lot to do with Buddhism
I'd rather travel to a parallel universe with a different version of the timeline than risk bumping into myself in this one
Plus I don't think it would work the way many imagine it to anyways. There would be no resetting a timeframe that is already there. A new one would be created like a vein in a leaf.
If I went back in time to kill my father I doubt I would disappear. A new timeline would branch off the old one wherever the interaction was made and unless I found my way back I would be living in a world where who I was when I arrived will come early with no historical record of who I am except my blood and DNA (eventually DNA leastways).
In the original timeline, I will simply have disappeared and my father would continue his existence (well, not really as he's passed on long ago but you get my point, lol) and if I was able to return I would see that my effort was in fruitless as far as my experience was concerned.
Plus just imagine the negative karma I'd be sowing.
In a sense that is seeing back in time I guess.
However, Buddhism I think time is psychological time rather than physics time. In psychological time the past is dependently derived in the present. Past is memory. The present can be divided again and again or in other words we can never 'be' in the present though that is of course how it feels. The future is also dependent on the past and future. I haven't realized this learning but I read it in a book and it has to deal with the relationship between non-self and impermanence which I would like to realize in my meditation.
"All time is relative" therefore all time is irrelevant.
People saw the sun rising and falling and the seasons changing and created its measure based on that. The length of a day would have been very different thousands of years ago, and when that concept of day out of the window, hours, minutes, years, all go out the window with it.
Time is also experienced subjectively - "time flies when you're having fun" "a minute of pain can be an eternity" but not absolutely.
We have this thing called an hour, but if astronomers or whoever it was had calculated things differently what is an hour to us could have ended up being two hours.
You can't go back in time because time isn't real. It's simply a measure of causality, which also isn't real.
I realized all that when I was really, really high once, a few years ago, but it still makes sense to me. Sort of. :buck:
But it's a rangtong shentong thing. Rangtong, such as his holiness the dalai lama believes that each moment is caused by another in succession. At least that's one presentation he gave in a book I read, ethics for the new millenia.
The shentong view is that thoughts come from nowhere, abide nowhere, and go nowhere. Matter is just the form skhanda of mind, which is actually the cittamatra view, I am not sure the shentong.
An example is that in shentong, relative bodhicitta is not real. It is just a perception we have as we go on the path. Relative bodhicitta is love as we learn a skill. It grows with age. Ultimate bodhicitta is in the nature of mind to perceive and a baby has it as well the hunger and ignorance. Relative bodhicitta is not real because we don't have totally vast reliable knowledge and it may even hinder us like the full teacup and the zen master overlowing.
That part makes less sense now I'm sober, but I get the idea.
I'll have to explain this better later. On the mundane level causality is evident, while I'd agree that causality doesn't apply to each new moment of existence in the absolute sense (because it's always something new).
And so causality at least exists on one level, and it's my understanding that both the mundane/conceptual and the supramundane/absolute are simultaneously expressed.
If we think of everything (or the universe) as being the "same thing", this is the same as supposing there is an unchanging self. If it were the same thing, it couldn't possibly manifest appearances of things and beings and change. There wouldn't be any experience whatsoever, reality would be "static".
The entirety of "what is" is something new in each moment, and so it's not the same thing... how could it be? Again I'd say that the mundane/conceptual and the supramundane/absolute exist simultaneously and are both valid. Causality applies to the one of these, and the other is something new in each moment. There is the "nature" of causality... but it can't apply to an unchanging "thing" or self. That would be a contradiction, an oxymoron or what have you.
If we throw out causality, we throw out karma and dependent origination.
We throw out rebirth, we throw out liberation as something a path can lead to.
We'd never get from point A to point B without causality.
There's a philosophy that denies causality, but the Buddha taught causality...
So if you rotate one particle on one side of the universe, the particle on the other side of the universe also rotates. (Don't ask me how they found THAT out
Can anyone please help me out here? I feel not so up to this task!
And Buddhism and physics go together like tuna and mayo in my book, but I know that it's not for everyone.
I struggle with the karma idea and the nature of consequence, too, in light of the theory that cause and effect are illusion, but that just makes it more interesting to me. The theory could, of course, be entirely wrong, but it definitely makes me question what I think I already know, so even if it's wrong I'll have benefited from it.
There's a lot in science that is "iffy", unstable, but the heart of it works because of causality. Everything works because of causality, or there'd be no linkage between anything. I think the word "illusion" is misleading... it leads one to think something doesn't actually happen or exist... but rather it's "delusion" at play, seeing things incorrectly rather than how they actually are.
If you truly believe causality is an illusion, place your hand in a fire.
We might discover something that blows causality out of the water - something that the school of non-duality claims to have already done - and we have little things that might be pointing to just that that idea, like entanglement. I mean, that's really oversimplifying it, but the principle holds. Well put.
What would be interesting would be to understand this school of Buddhism that you're talking about, so I'm going to do some research and try to understand if it's something other schools of Buddhism accept, or if it's only provisionally accepted in a certain way, or what. Of course I usually go back to what the Buddha taught when in doubt, because if he was fully enlightened (which is something we have to have faith or confidence in) then he understood the process from our perspective as well as from the perspective of emptiness. There have been other forms of Buddhism and some things make sense, but the upturning or denial of what the Buddha taught has to have some compelling evidence or a way to find out (for me).
No, you're totally right. Everything is subject to change.
As far as horse tranquilizers go, I don't do drugs anymore, but... Well, I guess you just had to be there