The Models in Our Heads Are Deeply Held

Really enjoyed this, and I say that as someone who is decidedly not a fan of Brad Warner. I do wonder, where IS the present moment? I while ago I was in a reading group where we talked about an idea coming from Bergson through Deleuze (Bergson is the 'process philosophy' guy and there is now 'process theology' which I'm planning on reading) where he talks about two different models of time - one where the present moment doesn't exist, i.e. it's like an infinitely thin knife-edge dividing past and present - and one where the present moment is like a space between past and present, a space which is the only thing that exists and which we always inhabit.

In relation to Warner's point about Dogen there's an interesting quote here from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about Bergson:

Bergson's third image [of time] is an elastic band being stretched. Bergson tells us first to contract the band to a mathematical point, which represents “the now” of our experience. Then, draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. He warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which traces it. If we can focus on the action of tracing, then we can see that the movement — which is duration — is not only continuous and differentiating or heterogeneous, but also indivisible. We can always insert breaks into the spatial line that represents the motion, but the motion itself is indivisible. For Bergson, there is always a priority of movement over the things that move; the thing that moves is an abstraction from the movement. Now, the elastic band being stretched is a more exact image of duration. But, the image of the elastic is still, according to Bergson, incomplete. Why ? Because, for him, no image can represent duration. An image is immobile, while duration is “pure mobility”

Sailor Bob also talks about time and space in a way that I find thought-provoking:

“Q: Can you talk about space and time being the same thing?

Bob: Well space is volume really, isn’t it, and time is duration?

Q: Yes

Bob: Now for me to get from here to where you are, does it take duration, take time? If it wasn’t for the volume, would there be any need to get from here to there? So they’re really one and the same thing. Again it brings it back to the non-duality of everything. And you see that couldn’t happen if there wasn’t a me and a you first – there wasn’t a centre for it to be measured from. That duration and the seeming apparent entity have to be in the volume. There can be no distance without measuring from some point.

I'm not sure I really see them as separate, at least for me personally. Once upon a time, for sure...

To explain, I'm not saying that the experience of something, and reading a description of it, are the same thing. But I'm also not sure, when it comes to practice, that there IS such a thing as reading a description of something, and experiencing it. In other words, reading and thinking about philosophy is acting on and in the mind, and so is practice and experience. The description of the taste of a cup of coffee is not an inferior version of drinking a cup of coffee - it's a different thing.

For sure, if someone only ever read about philosophies of time I personally think it would be a shame - though for all I know, someone doing that might lead to awakening experiences on its own, without formal practices (e.g. look at the Direct Pointing forums).

But I don't subscribe to the attitude that is critical of intellectual understandings of things which also relate to practice experiences as somehow being lesser or unnecessary (this reminds me of my early Zen days, and was one of the reasons I didn't stay with Zen) - what I mean by seeing them as non-separate is that they are both doing work in the mind and that work is intertwined - as Morcheeba put it, 'It's All Part of the Process.' There's a radical inclusiveness there that is what I'm working with at the moment.

For me personally, the thing/event/whatever that felt like my deepest insight was related to time and the experience of time, so I feel like that's something that I've seen a bit more than some other kinds of experiences (like the different awakening distinctions Adyashanti discusses) and that will condition my take on the relationship between philosophy-as-experience and phenomenology-as-experience in relationship to it.

Hi Rowan, I've wanted to ask for some time now if you would be interested to describe that experience, I think you said it was a knock-your-socks-off A&P during a retreat?

No problem! Will do so in my practice thread.

Well, I'm a historian, and our work to an extent tends to focus on "what actually happened" in the past. However, in so doing, we always appropriate "the past" in some way, shape, or form, if for no other reason than that we are always talking about it in our own experience of the present, and while we may argue about what actually happened--did the Roman Empire end and something else take its place, and if so, what? What is the "Holy Roman Empire" and to what extent did its leaders' appropriation of a past--the "original" Roman Empire--shape their understanding of their own time? Etc., etc.--there ultimately is no solid and unchanging object of our study. At some level, however, we can say that certain views of the past are invalid--denial of the Holocaust, for example. People ignore evidence, or interpret it selectively to fit a pre-set ideological bias, or whatever.

I'm sure no one here asked for a discussion of the philosophy of history, but I can't end without pointing out that history is a field of study with its own rules and protocols for working with certain sources and artifacts for the purpose of creating a narrative. Why bother to do it? Because that's what humans do. They can do it in ways that are destructive and self-serving (Fox News comes to mind) or in ways that open up more capacious ways of understanding their world. But all of this occurs in a constantly vanishing present. And the rules and protocols change over time.

I think this gets back to whether the view in question is through the microscope or the telescope: through the microscope "history" involves seconds and minutes; through the telescope, decades, centuries, epochs.

Maybe, wrt practice, it's necessary to use the tool that suits the task at hand. The telescope rarely seems to be called for, as it is conducive to those "stories" that get such bad press.

I don't find the "two views" incompatible. That is, eternity-in-the-moment is. And discussions of Roman history over tea also are. The one doesn't negate the other, somehow.

True; I was at some pains to not prefer one view to the other-- except as to whether it suits the investigation. Not much to be discovered about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire using a microscope. Not so much to see of "the point-instant" with a telephoto lens taking in the entire story of my life: I will subordinate the minutiae to the story arc, and defeat my purpose.