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The Function and Purpose of Linear Time
By Stephen Proskauer MD | September 24, 2007
The mystic skilled in deep meditation and the theoretical physicist skilled in higher mathematics have converged on a single understanding: the commonplace experience of a continuous linear time continuum is an illusion of the apparent world, not an irreducible property of nature. The mystic learns to perceive an eternal present that encompasses both past and future. Linear time is an illusion to the meditator just as much as the permanence of physical objects.
Buddha saw that time did not unfold in a smooth unbroken flow despite appearances. He discovered that each moment of awareness was composed of many thousands of discontinuous instants, each one itself unmoving, a frozen scene like the frames in a movie film. When we watch a movie we have the impression that the action is continuous even though we know in the back of our minds that we are watching a flickering sequence of still pictures.
Buddha realized 2500 years before motion pictures were invented that our concept of reality in the mind is an illusion just like this. He concluded that our universe appears and disappears thousands of times a second and that nothing, not even our awareness itself, has any continuous existence at all! All sense of substance and identity and continuity is an illusion, a projection of the mind, just like the illusion of movie action based upon a rapidly moving sequence of stills.
Modern cosmologists and particle physicists have discovered matter mysteriously appearing and disappearing in space. Quantum theorists postulate that particles can move backward in time and that present interactions affect both past and future events. At a subatomic level time does not appear to be continuous or even linear. One theoretician (Barbour in England) has found that the only way to reconcile Einstein’s relativity theories with the laws of quantum mechanics is to eliminate time completely as a variable in the equations of both theories, a revolutionary and counterintuitive concept almost as radical as Buddha’s insights.
If linear time is an illusion, what possible purpose can it be serving in the evolution of consciousness? Why would the entire human race be caught up in such a limited interpretation of reality? If we regard our lives as courses we are taking in Earth School, then linear time can be understood as a way of spreading out the lessons we are learning so that we can deal with each separately. Were we to dwell constantly in the eternal present, all life lessons would coexist and be blurred together.
The eternal present just does not seem to lend itself well to focusing on the cause and effect patterns governing different issues. If all the furniture in your house were packed helter skelter into a single storage unit, how could you ever learn anything about the balanced arrangement of chairs and tables in a room? The eternal present is like a tall narrow storage locker, while linear time is the equivalent of the space in an ordinary room that separates the chairs and tables in a meaningful way.
The law of cause and effect ceases to have meaning in the eternal present, yet we need cause and effect in order to work out the issues of living in physical reality. Hence, linear time is as necessary a dimension as physical space for us to learn the lessons of Earth School.
Topics: Time |