03. Allowing

So far, we have approached the mystery of time from two sides, using arguments and experiments.  Just like in scientific research, we have introduced some theory, devised experiments to carry out some tests, refined our theory based on what we found experimentally, and used those insights to refine in turn our experimental approach.

Our initial theory started with the hypothesis that appearance is more fundamental than existence.  Our first experimentation took the form of taking short breaks in the laboratory of our life, to learn to shift our habitual attention from existence back to appearance.

Our next theory development included the introduction of the notion of awareness for what appreciates sheer appearance, and the notion of experience for what trades in terms of existence.  This allowed a refinement in our experimentation: rather than simply trying to shift from existence to appearance, we now had an extra tool.  We could try to shift from experience to awareness.  Keenly noticing how experience tends to pull subject and object apart, we developed more appreciation for a non-dual alternative in terms of awareness.

Our theory formation continued with an investigation of where new moments come from.  In terms of existence/experience, each new moment is always second-hand, caused directly by the previous moment with only little variation allowed.  Tracing back through the almost endless string of moments, we arrived at an far removed initial moment of creation, in a Big Bang perhaps.  In contrast, in terms of sheer appearance/awareness, each new moment is truly new and self sufficient.  It arises by itself without ever being created in any solid heavy sense. Again, this extended theory allowed us to extend our experiments: we tried to really test, in daily life, what it feels like to consider ourselves to live in a spontaneously arising timeless presence.

We can and will continue this mutual refinement of theory and experiment, but before doing so, let us pause here for a reality check.  It is all nice and fine to use our imagination to develop more and more ideas about the nature of reality, and to explore experientially what mileage those ideas have in particular situations.  But what does all this buy us, in practice?  What is the relevance for our daily life?

3.1. Pure and Applied Research

In science, we make a distinction between pure research, where we just follow our own curiosity, and applied research, where we try to find a scientific solution to particular problems. The discovery of the basic laws of electricity and magnetism, for example, as well as Maxwell's equations unifying both in the form of electromagnetism, are examples of results of pure research.  But when we use Maxwell's equations to design a new type of cell phone antenna, say, we are talking about applied research.

It is interesting and somewhat counterintuitive that the most spectacular new scientific applications tend to have their roots in pure rather than applied research.  Applied research tends to look for incremental improvements, all very important for practical applications, but limited in their range.  In contrast, pure research is free from the shackles of such goal-driven expectations and is not expected to immediately perform.  That kind of freedom allows for occasional big leaps to radically new approaches.

For example, applied research on telegraph systems may come up with more efficient ways to generate electricity, and better ways to carry currents long distance over cheaper wires that have a longer life time under bad weather conditions.  But no amount of goal-oriented further improvements of a telegraph system will ever lead to wireless communication using radios. Applied research had to wait for the discovery of electromagnetic waves, the result of pure research, before being able to investigate increasingly better ways to build radio transmitters and receivers.

There is always a tension between these two ways of doing research.  Funding agencies, whether external government agencies or internal allocation schemes for company resources, tend to favor applied research.  It is much easier to get money if you can describe some kind of lofty goal that you are striving for, whether it is to fight cancer or to build a better electric car or whatever.

This is a strange situation, given the history of pure research giving the highest pay-offs in the long run.  In practice, most pure science researchers must learn to pretend to be involved with applied research, describing all kind of hypothethical future breakthroughs in order to get funding.  If completely honest pure researchers would publicly say that they just like to play around, exploring new ideas wherever curiosity would lead them, they almost certainly will not be funded.

What lessons can we learn from that ironic situation, given that we have embarked on investigating the nature of time?

3.2. What to Expect from Time Research

Clearly, an all-out investigation of the nature of time is most unlikely to get funded by any funding agency.  What could we possibly promise to produce in terms of deliverables, as the fundraising jargon goes?  What kind of applied results could we expect to find?

Well, let's see.  Better watches perhaps?  Clearly no, since it's perfectly possible to build a very good watch without having a deeper understanding of time beyond a picture of moments following each other neatly like beads on a string.

How about stress reduction, finding ways to let people cope better with the pressures of time?  That at least is conceivable.  But still it is a rather far shot.  When a scientist, a psychologist for example, is asked to find new ways for stress reduction, it is unlikely that the answer will be posed in terms of a better understanding of time itself. Rather, solutions will be sought in terms of either chemical intervention or in terms of behavioral therapy or the like.

Well, let's up the ante.  How about a truly outrageous claim in terms of a possible applied result for the most radical form of time research?  After all, time is about the most fundamental and most mysterious aspect of our existence. A real breakthrough in our understanding of time had better produce a most fundamental breakthrough in terms of new applications.  Something surely far beyond stress reduction.

How about a complete dropping away of all forms of stress? A total radical liberation of all conceivable worries?  A deep sense of unconditional joy in the eyes of both life and death?

Now we're talking!  Amazing if true.  But seriously, such claims can only arise in the minds of madmen, you would think. They seem to lie in the realm of fantasy, based on wishful thinking, perhaps having a place in fantastic tales based on magic, not on science.  Or?

3.3. The Magic of Pure Research

Before we toss out such seemingly silly ideas, let us pause for a moment to look at past results of pure research.  It is safe to say that the applied results of the greatest pure breakthroughs have always had the look and feel of magic.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, telegraphy was in itself a stunning application of scientific insights.  But the leap to radio communication must have seemed like true magic.  How can you possible get a signal transported over thousands of miles without using any wire, without any visible carrier whatsoever?

In the middle of the twentieth century, chemical explosives formed the most powerful means of destruction known to humanity, and chemical fuel formed the most effective ways of generating energy for peaceful purposes.  But then the leap from chemical to nuclear explosives, based on pure research, showed how a single pound of uranium or plutonium could be as destructive as many thousands of tonnes of conventional explosives.  Similarly, a pound of the same material, used in a nuclear reactor, can provide as much electricity for a big city as a fleet of a thousand trucks loaded with fossil fuel.  If that doesn't look like magic, what does?

And now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are finding ways to tinker with the chemical code of the human genome, for better or worse, as well the genomes and other details of the cells of all living organisms.  Where nuclear energy has given us the key to transmute chemical elements into each other, molecular biology is now giving us the key to transmute species into each other.  A further step on the scale of magic.

One might argue that none of these three examples can be called cases of magic if we define magic by definition as something that clashes with the laws of physics.  However, we have to be careful, even with such a strict definition. Nuclear energy certainly clashes with the laws of physics and chemistry as they were known a hundred years ago.  The only way to not call nuclear energy magic is to allow for any future as yet unknown changes in our knowledge of the laws of nature.

However, with that definition the word magic is excluded from any use by fiat.  Anything looking magical, upon further study is likely to lead to a widening of our scientific understanding of nature.  X rays, for example, must have really seemed magical at first.  Why, they enabled one to look straight through solid objects, and to see the bones that are embedded in living persons!  And indeed, the physics of the time had no room for anything like X rays.  No problem: physics evolves, and as such fortunately is a moving target; before long X rays could be described perfectly well in a sound physics way.  But that still didn't change the sense of magic when X rays were first discovered.

So for all intents and purposes, we might say that applied research can lead to great improvements, but that only pure research has lead to breakthroughs that had all the signs of magic -- incredible occurances that can't possibly fit into the structure of the world as we understood it before.

3.4. The Magic of Time

Given all this, would it be conceivable that a radically deepened understanding of time would not result in a new kind of magic, effectively?  Forget about better time keeping, whether with better clocks or better ways of coping with stress. Wouldn't we expect a far more impressive potential change in our lives?

Of course, we don't yet know whether it is possible to reach a truly radical new way of looking at time.  In any kind of new research, pure or applied for that matter, we start off by groping in the dark, and we'll just have to see what we find. But imagine that we stumble upon such a really radical new way of dealing with time, then what?  The most conservative guess would be that such an insight would lead to a new kind of magic, at least in terms of what it would look like from the point of view of previous concepts of time.

So, starting off with a linear past-present-future understanding of time, and exploring a shift from such a view to what we have called timeless time, shouldn't we expect some kind of magic to show up?  If it doesn't, we haven't been very radical, and probably we haven't probed deeply enough.

This conclusion really ought to give us pause.  Switching from existence to sheer appearance, or from experience to awareness, may seem like nothing more than an exercise in philosophy, together with an added poetic touch.  Could it possibly lead to anything resembling magic?  

3.5. Another Working Hypothesis: We Are Always Hiding

Whether we believe that existence is more fundamental, or that sheer appearance as such is more fundamental, in both cases life goes on, so to speak, the world keeps turning, our clocks keep ticking, and phenomena keep happening.  Or so it seems. So what difference does it make which kind of belief we are trying out?

In previous chapters we have felt at least some difference. A shift from existence to appearance may have helped us focus more on presence, and may have enhanced our appreciation of what presents itself.  A certain degree of relaxation likely accompanied such impressions, and overall we may have felt a better quality of life.  But none of those would qualify as magic.  And all of that could be explained away as clever and partly useful psychological tricks.  It is time to delve deeper, to see what we can find in terms of more radical aspects of a turn toward sheer appearance in timeless time.

Let us start by considering the conventional views based on linear time.  When we see ourselves as living in an existing world, moving in time, we tend to spend most of our time either dwelling on the past or on the future.  Our hopes and fears about the future are driven by our satisfactions and regrets of the past, and our minds keep shuttling between those four poles of experience.  With the immense weight of all of our past decisions and the enormous challenge to face up to all the uncertainties in the rest of our life, our little present that is sandwiched in between doesn't seem to give much shelter.

When we look carefully, we can discover the kind of protection mechanisms at work, to keep our life bearable in our little present moments.  The bottom line is: we keep hiding.  We are busy making plans upon plans, we are involved in myriad projects, we are running around after this goal and that, and why?  Mostly to hide from what would be obvious once we would truly stop, by truly dropping our whole web of concerns.

Perhaps this last paragraph rings a bell, perhaps not. Even when it does, there is no reason to buy into it, or believe it automatically; nor is there any strong reason to deny it.  Let us treat this notion as yet another working hypothesis.  The suggestion is: we spend our life hiding. True or false?  Let's find out.

3.6. Allowing Ourselves to Be Seen

Here's a suggestion for another exploration.  Whenever you find some time, allow yourself to be seen.  One effective way is to do this a few times an hour for a few seconds at a time, say nine seconds every fifteen minutes.  Another way is to spend a longer time, five minutes or more, a few times a day.  Even better to combine both approachees.

What does it mean, to allow yourself to be seen?  It can mean many things, and it may be best to just do this kind of exploration without any preset expectation or judgment as to what to expect, or even how this experiment should or could be done.

However, if you prefer to have some more specific suggestions, here are a few.  You could go for a walk in nature, or even just visualize yourself as going for such a walk, while letting all animals and plants and even seemingly inanimate elements of your surroundings watch you.  Or you could do that in a city environment, or just while sitting in a room somewhere indoors.  Let all that appears watch you. Or, for starters, you can just look at one object, and then let yourself be seen by that object in turn, whatever it is.

Also, you can relax and play a kind of witness role, observing your own thoughts and emotions as if they were soemone else's.  In this case you let yourself by seen by yourself as the witness.

If you happen to have a prefered approach in terms of a spiritual tradition, you can let yourself be seen by (a) God or saint or the Universe or whatever elements of reality you consider to be meaningful in your tradition.

You could even view your life as playing out on a stage in front of an imagined audience, letting yourself be seen in that way.  The possibilities are endless.  Which one you choose is not that important.  It is more important to really feel what difference it makes to be seen.

3.7. Allowing our Hiding to Come to Light

After we get more familiar with this move toward allowing ourselves to be seen, in general, we can specialize a bit. Within this more open stance of allowing, can we go so far as to allow our own tendency to hide to be seen?

When we try this, it is unlikely that we will get very far right away.  At first we may not be aware that we are hiding anything.  And if we get some glimmers of what we are hiding, or what we are hiding from, it may be too uncomfortable to get deeper into.  All of that is okay: there is no reason to hurry, and there are many reasons to be patient, and to treat ourselves in a gentle and kind manner.  Hurried observations are not very accurate or useful.

In chapters to come, we will continue these explorations further, in various ways.  Hiding and allowing to be seen are key elements in our relationship with time, and we won't get very far with a time exploration if we keep hiding our hiding.  In contrast, once we allow a bit of our hiding to be seen, time itself will become more visible in unexpected ways.

This promissory note is a pointer to the kind of magic that is bound to show itself when we truly get into a radical exploration of time.  But again, let us really go slowly.  When we start to open up, to ourselves or to whatever we consider to be `others' in our world, it is likely that we encounter some initial psychological discomfort.  It is like leaving solid land and getting out into a large ocean: we may first have to cross the surf before getting into deeper waters.

Where to start in terms of finding what we tend to hide? The best approach may be not to probe at all, and just to watch what happens once we regularly take a more open stance of letting ourselves be seen.  However, if you like to have some pointers, there are plenty to be found.  A big one is the fear of death.  Biologically, every living organism tries to fend off death, as long as possible, and we humans are no different. And since we tend to live more in the future than other animals, we habitually protect ourselves by hiding a sense of impending death from our day-to-day consciousness.

But there are many smaller ones as well, many quite big in themselves, among what we tend to hide.  Just pick any good novel or movie, and what makes those so good is typically the way they describe how the main characters try to hide their problems in work and relationships, through disillusionment and trouble in getting to grips with changing circumstances, and so on.  Movies could become quite boring without the heroes and heroines hiding some deep feelings not only from others but also from themselves.

For now, for a couple weeks, let's just try to let ourselves be seen a bit more, and let's try to find some of what we habitually tend to hide.  Most likely we'll be only scratching the surface, and that's fine.  Letting more and more of ourselves come to light is a form of cultivation akin to gardening or cooking: trying to let grass frow faster by pulling it, or trying to speed up the baking of a cake by increasing the temperature, is not a very good idea.