Time is Our Life - Unit 3, Week 6

Posted on May 8th, 2009 by

Conventional Linear Time

For the last few weeks we've been working with observing how our normal view of time, our habit of attention, is centered in the past, in that we carry forward what we know, and these same past-based ideas are then flung forward to formulate an imagined future through our stories and models. Living consequently becomes a linear progression due to this more limited structuring of time. Our teacher advises to just follow along and observe as the mind jumps, being aware of our butterfly mind, and staying with it. Not so much controlling a one pointed focus, but staying aware of, and being present to our own experience -- the self 'coming-out', and receding back into the flow of time. We tend to get carried away and lost in the narrow content; however, TSK is about being present to both of these modulations. Like surfing time, catching those moments when we feel truly alive, but there are also less dramatic moments to observe..."Shifting shapes of unfolding presentation."

TSK suggests we shift perspective from a past-based view; we are asked instead, to cultivate a future-based view; not the future we normally imagine in which we create a space and project our past fears or desires into it, but rather, a future that is a gateway to the dynamic of time -- where things have not yet been given form. TSK points to a different way of 'being' through this shift in perspective, a way of living that allows for a fullness of experience and the rich feeling of 'aliveness', at the edge of the open future.

In the 2^nd exercise of my last post, I observed how it appeared that moments ended and began. At the edge of the future I saw that I was setting up the bystander-self in the act of 'separating' from an object out there, in the act of "standing-by", thereby creating 'distance'. I was doing it with the 'content' of my experience, but I also was doing this with time, not only objectifying particular objects visually, but by creating objects out of moments as memories and images.

So while I was 'freezing' experience by 'coming-out' as an identity located here, I was also alternately relaxing or releasing that identity and its location, by returning to the edge of the future with an open and welcoming attitude toward the unknown. By taking a perspective at the open edge of the future, self-projecting concerns into the future were halted, and the cycle of reaching back to the past that fed into the present was stopped, at least long enough for me to see what was happening. The present, thus, proceeded openly, without the ownership and location that normally comes from triangulating between me, the past, and the imagined future.

In terms of my experience, employment of this new metaphor at 'the edge of the future', and its shift of attitude toward the future's open potential - the 'future infinitive', (and not projecting ideas into it), in a sense time was restored to time. My exercise of looking over the contours of the land became a flow that did not depend on moments. Experience was actually more fundamentally prior, and time was a dynamic continuum. The 'now' was widened or expanded between alternating incidents of 'coming-out' and 'freezing' time by means of location and distance, and then, receding into time's flow by relinquishing them. Here was a modulation of focus, present to both the self's 'coming-out' tendency as well as the melting of its frozen positions. In a sense the now contained the past and the present, and the future-infinitive provided the open, potential of the not-known. And it was from this source the sense of aliveness came from the future, filling the present to the brim.

As Tarthang Tulku says:

"Without ever taking form, the unrestricted dynamic of future time manifests in the non-arising of obstacles that might hinder the 'coming to the present' of events in time. Time presents experience in a perfect neutrality, allowing for boundless possibilities, including those that express our highest aspirations. Through the availability of the future, there is no interruption or discontinuity, no resistance to be overcome, no delay or impediment.

We have learned to consider this unfettered present arising as natural to being. Can we instead allow ourselves to feel grateful for this offering of time? If so, we may discover in this ongoing, unexamined dynamic a gateway to the future infinitive.

Instead of somehow passing on substance to the present, the future sustains the present through its coming. Though this ‘coming' never arrives, its dynamic contributes the charged ‘field' within which the aliveness of present experience can unfold. " DTS p.95-96