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Do you think that time is a concept in the mind ?
Do you think that time is merely concept in the mind , and there is just this ever-changing moment to moment?
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Our problem is clinging to how things were, or wanting control over that change to have things be a certain way. The problem with the first is that however things were is already gone... the problem with the second is that we don't really have that much control, and even if we did get things how we want them, they'd change again. There's nothing to grasp. Our thirst/tanha/craving drives us on and on against this natural feature of life (change), because we're ignorant; we don't fully perceive that nothing can be grasped. That in fact because of the incessant change there are no "things" to grasp, there is no self-essence but rather interdependency.
It's like saying that distance is a real thing... distance isn't a real thing, it's a measurement and has no substance whatsoever. Or velocity; velocity is a relative measurement that uses other measurements like time and distance.
The only thing we're pointing to in any way is "change", whether it's something natural for us to notice (like night and day, seasons and years) or a break-down of that into hours and seconds just so we have smaller units to work with and measure things with.
It is real in all universes that have change.
It is real in this universe as part of the underlying structure of the universe (spacetime)
It is real as something sentient beings experience as they interact with the universe in the above two senses.
I guess the crucial gem that dharma offers outside of the above is that in terms of the quality of human experience it is only the NOW that is real and important.
Even the awareness that we perceive the present with continuously rise and fall. It is not something solid and concrete . The present moment itself changes every moment, just like the water in the stream.
Grasping and craving creates agitation in the mind and make it become obsessed with the future and difficult to let go of the past. It is what perpetuate the vague feeling that something is missing, or dissatisfaction.
It is simply a process in nature flowing on. Grasping creates restlessness .
With Metta,
Regards
Spiny
Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle,
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved.
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives
From music, sounds, and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody.
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
The Buddha
Spiny
We don't directly measure time. Look up how they know a second to be a second... there's nothing direct to measure, which is why I said it's an abstract measurement. We measure something else, completely unrelated, just to give us a "fixed" measurement so we all "agree" that a second is just-so long. We could easily change how long a second is, and rework our maths. Why isn't 2 seconds 1 second? There's no way to tell, because it's a man-made system that does not measure anything real.
We define a second thus (from here): "The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom." ... So it's a measurement of change, but how much change is completely defined by us (what we choose to measure). We could just as easily say that it's a different number of periods of that radiation, either more or less, it's something we've arbitrarily agreed upon.
Ok so time is just a concept. I think we can say the same thing about "Silence" too right? Can there ever be complete total silence throughout entire existence?
I don't understand total silence? Sound and silence are like light and dark, one implies the other. Can the universe ever be entirely dark, or entirely light? It's possible I suppose, but things are always changing (and light has a source, so all the light sources would either be extinguished or be the only thing in existence).
Spiny
Spiny
"The mind of the past is unknowable, the mind of the future is unknowable, the mind of the present is unknowable."
Mind can not be found. Only reflections(past), experiences(present), and imagination(future). Always occurring in the only place that really exists. The ever changing eternal present moment. It can never be grasped as that would be a reflection. It can only be experienced as it occurs. Another way of saying this is that the Universe lives though us moment by moment.
The reality of the unknowable past is completed and gone. Mental manipulation is an illusion leading to delusion and attachment. Yet not irrelevant, as past karmic echos are brought forward into current perceptions and actions.
And so we come back to time being an abstract measurement of change, directly observing the change in a cessium atom as a method to stabilize the length of a second, which is part of a system we created based on our natural cycles (years split into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into minutes, minutes into seconds). Take the same system and apply it to another galaxy, and their "second" couldn't be the same length so they'd have to use something else to measure it by. Remember the second didn't come first, years and seasons existed long before and it was only in breaking down our "year" into smaller units that we got down to a second and needed to be able to say how long it was consistently...
We could say a second was as long as it takes to open and close someone's eyelid, take a short video of that so we'd always be able to see how long it was, and go from there. It wouldn't be any different, though we might shorten the second and have more of them in an hour, day, month and year.
To sum up, we created this whole system of time, we just needed a way to keep track of it, for all of mankind to be able to agree on how long a second was for all of our technical maths, so we chose (arbitrarily because it happened to match what we thought a second should be) the decay of a cessium atom. We do the same thing with weights, like the kilogram... we have actual pieces of metal sealed up in vaults (5 of them) that define how much a kilogram weighs, and pounds are derived in a formula from kilograms. An amount of change does happen throughout the universe no matter what numbers we have, so any numbers we choose will still work out whether they match something in nature or not (like the cessium atom).
I think I'm about exhausted on this one. If it's still unclear then there's just nothing more I can say. Change happens; time is just an arbitrary system that must necessarily link-in with this change (no matter how "long" the "time" duration is) because the change is universal, everywhere at once (which means nothing can be self, nothing can be permanent, this change is the reason for everything else we must learn in Buddhism!).
Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
-The Buddha
Thanks, Jeffery for posting the Samadhi Raja Sutra. It is observable truth.
Get close enough to dying and you too will observe that this world indeed does appear to be illusion where nothing is as it appears.
Yes, exactly as Cloud says, change happens.. and time is a concept the mind uses to record change....
but when you get too close to dying it is as though time (or at least the mind's concept of time/spacetime) entirely collapses, such that what you observe is that all change and time and distance exists right here and now all simultaneously as layers/dimensions of a timeless time and a distanceless space. Focus on any of it and your consciousness is instantly "there," but all of "there" is only just a particular layer of a much greater "here and now" than is observable in our 4 dimensional world of the living. At least that is what I experienced and observed. Dying is a very strange phenomenon indeed.
I asked an operating room full of hospital staff who hadn't touched me at all how long I had been gone, how long I had been out of my body, how long I had been dead.
It had seemed like an eternity out there, but back here they said it wasn't hardly any time at all and attended to sewing my torn body back together. They also arranged to meet one another at the pub across from the hospital, take the rest of the day off, and discuss my "unusual case" they had just witnessed.
My observations were that what we normally observe as the "here and now" of our world (solar system, galaxy, universe) is just one particular layer among the many overlaid layers of a very much greater "here and now" cosmos than we the living observe in normal daily life.
Spiny
Spiny
It's just when we go further and say that this "time" thing is actually an independent phenomena, rather than simply an abstract measurement of an unmeasurable "amount of change", that we have problems. There is change, it can be pointed to and demonstrated, and it's the answer to the question "what is time?". Time and change both refer to the same thing, even when we don't know it; our usual notion of time as an independent phenomena is baseless.
Spiny
Who would have thought that such a simple practice could ever be so powerful as to enable one to live or die peacefully and consciously through horrific traumatic physical pain? I would not have thought that such a simple thing could ever be so powerful...
but a young nurse trying to clear away some of the blood emotionally lost control and was excitedly waving her hands in my face asking "Why isn't she screaming? Why isn't she going into shock? She hasn't even had any anesthesia! What's she staring at?" and another nurse threatened to slap that nurse if she didn't "shut the hell up."
It is a simple practice, to focus on the breath. I had been doing it to detach from the horrific burning pain of my body torn apart because there was nothing else I could do. I had been practicing for quite some time, but eventually there was just no more breath to follow at all. There was also no more need for breath, no more desire for breath at all, and I was staring past her waving hand in my face and seeing through her and beyond her.
When people think of the "emptiness" they think of the dark desolate vacuum of space...
but truly empty of breath, empty of body, empty of self,
the universe is observably full of light and life like you wouldn't even hardly believe, and all of what we ordinarily see as empty darkness is full of light.
The only every day experience I can think of that is at all like the experience of dying without actually dying would be sitting in a dark theatre with your entire world strictly limited to the scene on the stage lit up by the spotlight, but then suddenly all the houselights go on and you are startled to see suddenly hundreds of people and everything else all around you in the auditorium that was really there in the dark all around you all along....
but you had never seen them before, because all you had seen up until that point was just that tiny scene on the stage lit by the spotlight.
Our familiar mundane world just wasn't solid at all... from the point of view of not being attached to my body and spending all my time breathing anymore, and being able to see through it and walk through it without my body, our ordinary mundane world looked something like a spotlit theatrical stage set in an ongoing far greater reality than we ordinarily ever notice.
I asked a dead man out there why the living do not ordinarily observe the dead. He shrugged and said that the living generally have far too much fear and far too much desire to observe much of anything at all.
Practice is far more powerful than people realize; it certainly was far more powerful than I ever realized! I'm as fearful, desirous, healthy, alive and living, as likely to complain over a paper cut, and completely oblivious as anybody else on the block...
but at one point in my life I lay motionless in a pool of my own blood focusing on watching my breath...
and practice enabled me to remain conscious and calm, to endure with no anesthesia at all, and to observe all of what transpired, including the eventual physical detachment(ahh!) and the physical reattachment(argh!) of body and breath.
Practice is a very useful thing indeed.
So time is a very real concept...
these are just conceptual projections from our minds. if you cut away all concepts what are you left with?
the non-dual reality. all ideas are baseless in that they are mere abstract projections onto an undivided reality.
Shrug.
My personal experience is that the Buddha was right.
My personal experience is that practice is far more powerful than I ever would have believed.
My personal experience is that I've got the scars that prove it was no dream.
Your own personal experience of life and death, of course, will be your own.
is dead.
it's all mind.