05. Presence as Time

In the previous chapter we looked at a spectrum of positions that we can choose from, along a one-dimensional line between fundamentalist religious at one extreme and ferociously secular at the other extreme, with a variety of more gentle attitudes closer to the middle.  We then thought about ways to go beyond the confines of such a one-dimensional choice, and we wound up with a minimalistic approach: to appreciate the presence of whatever appears, without trying to interpret any of it into a position or belief system.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with belief systems, or systems of not believing for that matter.  It all depends how it is lived out in practice.  I do have a deep respect for ancient traditions, from Christianity and other monotheistic systems to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, just to name a few.  At the same time, I also have a deep respect for those in our modern world who do not resonate with any of those traditions, who do not want to accept anything on faith, and who are skeptical of all the stories and ideas that come in a package deal with ancient traditions.

In short, I would like to convey to the humanists that I understand and sympathize with their criticism of the use of ancient forms of faiths in uncritical ways; and I want to convey to those adhering to traditions that I also disagree with the way that secular people tend to throw away the baby of faith with the bathwater; and I want to convey to both that I think there is a way to reconcile both positions by going beyond a one-dimensional approach.  A new age requires new metaphors and new ways of working with, expressing and living out, old core ideas, and possibly integrating them in new ways.

Trying to drop both belief and disbelief, leaving the whole range of familiar positions, can easily give rise to discomfort.  It is highly discomforting to drop all certainty, and to drop all hope.  Yet all mythologies require the hero or heroine to go through a period of desperation, a period of losing all the old certainties, since those were what was in the way.  In Christianity too, not only Jesus himself but all the great mystics went through periods of deep doubt and wrestling with their faith.  The same is true in Buddhism and all other traditions that I am familiar with.  There does not seem to be a fully `comfortable' path to deep insight into reality.

In general, discomfort is a reliable reminder to us that there is something to look at more carefully.  It's like an indicator on a dash board: a sign that something needs attention.  Our ultimate challenge is to drop (unquestioned allegiance to) all that we have (including the comfort we draw from symbols and rituals).  But there is no need to rush, and running ahead of ourselves may do more harm than good.  So let us take our time to sift through what matters to us, to see what is part of what we have and what is what re really are.  And the most direct way of doing so is to start with time.

5.1. Walking Along a Cliff

Each moment anything can happen.  Our health can suddenly fail, or an accident can occur.  Throughout our life, we are walking at the edge of a cliff, and any moment we can fall off the cliff of time.

When we walk at the very edge of a steep cliff in space, we are keenly aware of the danger of falling off.  Just looking at the gaping void right next to our feet is enough to convince us of the precariousness of our situation.  But we rarely pause to think about the edge of the cliff in time that we are walking along.

Sooner or later we actually will fall of.  Living is the most dangerous thing that we can possibly do, since it carries a 100% risk of dying.

At least this is the message that we get when we consider ourselves to live in linear time.  Not a very pretty picture. In this linear time picture, we move from past to future, along a journey that will suddenly end in our death.  At that moment we will have to drop all of our unfinished plans, hopes and fears. And given the uncertainty of the time of our death, it makes sense to remind ourselves to enjoy and appreciate the present, no matter how firmly we believe in the past-present-future structure of linear time.

However, this appreciation will deepen enormously when we begin to drop our allegiance to a linear time picture.  The more we get a taste of timeless time, the more we can learn to appreciate each moment as a independent and unconditional present from the Universe.  Dropping the burden of linear time can lead to a kind of liberation that simply has no place within our conventional conceptual frameworks.

In timeless time there is no cliff, no walking, no birth and death, and there are no creatures that have ever been created or will ever perish.

There are many ways to express that idea, and none of them are accurate, because there is no accurate way to describe what goes well beyond words and concepts.  Even so, we can try.  And most importantly, we can taste words and concepts in order to get some ideas; and then we can follow those ideas in an ongoing exploration of the nature of reality, refining our ideas as we go along.  And sooner or later forms of realization may blossom that make us smile at all our previous clumsy attempts of trying to put everything into words.

5.2. The Presence of the Present

Right now, we can appreciate the presence of the present.  All we have, really, is the present moment; and all that we can really know about it, is the presence of the present moment. We can look around, see, hear, think, feel, remember, imagine. And while doing so, all that comes our way in doing so are phenomena, forms of appearance.  Who we are, in real terms, we don't know.  What those phenomena are, and what, if anything, is behind them, we don't know either.  But at least we know that they are present; we share in their presence.

Sure, we have our standard explanations for who we are and what the world around us is.  Just like a movie or a dream comes with its own story of what it all means, in a similar way each of us is living out the story of our life.  Relative to the story, we know a lot, an amazing lot!  We could write whole books about minute aspects of our life's history as well as future expectations.  But really, how sure are we of anything? Isn't all that we know something that is only relative to the framework in which we look at things, and look at ourselves?

When we close the book of the story of our lives, what is left of the story?  The book will be closed by force when we die.  But we have the freedom to close the book temporarily by shifting our attention from what we have to what we are.

Letting go of what we have in order to see what we are sounds rather simple.  And in fact, it is extremely simple; so simple that it may seem incredibly hard, if not downright impossible.  Yet this is the challenge that we confront when we really want to explore the nature of time.

Going beyond a picture of linear time requires us to drop our unquestioned allegiance to all that we have, all and every element of the story that seems to completely define ourselves. To the extent that we try to hang on to any element whatsoever, we remain trapped in the very story that we try to investigate, and that we try to transcend.

How could we possibly go beyond the framework that we construct in order to make sense of our world?  How could we possibly know how about radically different frameworks, or about how many frameworks there could be, or about the possibility to transcend frameworks altogether?  And if we would transcend the framework that defines us, what would be left of us?  It may feel like sawing off the branch we are sitting on, but even worse than that: there would not even be a place left to fall into it!

But even with all these uncertainties, at least something appears, right now, there is a presence.  We don't have access to past or future, but at least there is the presence of the present.  And it is in this present that we construct ideas of past and future.  So even if the past-present-future picture would be correct, even then all that we would know for sure in any direct way would be that there is a presence of the present -- everything else is inferred, in an indirect way, and may or may not be true.

5.3. Appreciating the Presence of the Present

Within a specific framework of stories that give meaning to our lives, we can do a lot in the present.  We can work hard on this or that, explaining, preparing, acting, reflecting, making sense of it all on many levels.  And it is important to do so, to live a responsible life, gratefully interacting with all and everything around us, humans, animals, plants, and our whole natural environment.  But now matter how serious, gentle and responsible we are, we do not need to remain trapped.  When we ask what is really real, what it is that we can say for sure beyond any interpretive framework, we are left with empty hands: there is not much that we can rely on, in an absolute way.

In other words, when asking ourselves what we really know, like Socrates did, we realize we are stuck, like Socrates was. But at least we can appreciate that we are stuck, and in that way we can know that we don't know.  And that very not-knowing can help us to appreciate the presence of the present.  This was Socrates' message more than two thousand years ago, and now it is our turn to explore Socratic questioning in a different setting in the modern world.

Given that we are stuck, what can we do?  We may like or not like what presents itself in each moment, but like watching a movie, we have the freedom to shift our attention from what happens to how it happens, seeing everything in the way in which it is given, as part of the movie.  And beyond that, we can make yet another shift, from the way in which everything is given to the very fact that anything at all is given.

At any moment we are free to make this double shift. Starting with all our hopes and fears, problems and pleasures in daily life, we can make the shift from a belief in the existence of things and problems to watching the sheer appearance of all that arises.  And then we can make a second shift to noticing the presence of what arises in the present. And just about the only thing that's left to us to do with that is simply to appreciate it.  Elementary, my dear Watson, as Sherlock Holmes would say.

5.4. Appreciating the Presence of Appearance

When stated in this logical way, it all may seem like a lonely and frankly quite nihilistic way of stripping away both the pleasures and pains of daily life.  But that would be a totally wrong conclusion, based on thinking theoretically about the descriptions given above.  When we actually begin to drop our unquestioned allegiance to the stories we grew up with, we allow the presence of the present to shine forth in ways that we could never have guessed -- since these ways are outside the framework we have been confined to.

But we don't have to wait for a kind of divine spark or whetever we imagine may help us.  Just as we can use words to argue for a stripping away of what is in the way, similarly we can use words in a more positive way to try to point out what may be available after that stripping.  It is here that the notion of sheer appearance is so helpful.  We explored that already in our very first Chapter, right from the beginning, in contrast to a view of reality in terms of existence and experience.  However, our approach to appearance there was still a bit naive.

In our first chapter we mentioned appearance in contrast to existence.  In the next chapter we clarified that we were dealing with sheer appearance, rather than mere appearance. But now it is high time to make sure that we don't get stuck in a focus on sheer appearance as such.  To try to embrace appearance can easily lead to new and more subtle forms of grasping.  We learned to let go of existence, but replacing one stick to lean on by another is not an ultimate solution.

To put it in a radical light: exchanging the lollipop of a belief in an independently existing world for the far more tasty lollipop of sheer appearance still keeps us hooked to lollipops.

We can let go of the notion that "everything is appearance" just as we let go of the notion that "everything exists".  We can do so in a gentle, and far more effective, approach than trading in existence for appearance.  The trick is to switch from an appreciation of appearance as such to an appreciation of the presence of appearance.

In this way we can drop any sticky relationship we may feel with respect to appearance.  We can treat each phenomenon respectfully, as a good friend, without any tendency to judge our friend, without trying to tell our friend what to do; all we need to do is simply be with our friend.  That's all.

To just "be with" what appears boils down to "appreciating the presence of the present" or more positively to "appreciating the presence of appearance", of all that seems to appear in the present.

So these are two ways we can work with appreciation of presence.  We first realized how we can de-emphasize all that seems to happen in the present, cleaning all of that out to make room for a much more direct appreciation for presence. That was a more negative approach, stemming from a kind of spring-cleaning attitude.  In a more positive way, we can appreciate the presence of what presents itself in the present, namely, sheer appearance.

5.5. Freedom

Let us pause for a moment to take stock of what we have explored so far.  We started with (sheer) appearance, and we found how we can access a form of awareness of the arising of appearance in timeless time.  We then experimented with letting ourselves be seen, and by the end of the last chapter we started to work with an appreciation of the presence of appearance.  Not that all that became crystal clear; far from that.  But at least we got some gut feeling for the possibility of living/seeing/sensing differently.

Most likely, our access to timeless awareness has been rather haphazard.  And most likely we have remained by and large still firmly entrenched in a picture of subject-object interactions, seeing ourselves as the subject experiencing interactions with all kinds of objects around us.  And that's okay.  Besides, if that's what we find, that's how it is for us, and it would not make sense to wish or try to force it to be otherwise.  We have to start from where we (at least think we) are.

The important thing is not to feel dejected when we can't right away experience what we imagine to be a life in timeless time.  What is important is to get some glimpses, some taste, no matter how tentative.  Far more important than a million words and thoughts is a small but actual sense of the freedom we have to look around a corner of the blind alley of linear time that we seem to be stuck in.  And any of the explorations that we have been playing with, at the end of each chapter, has given us an opportunity to peek around corners.

To what extent our experiences are `just a form of fantasy' is not important.  Many true insights can be triggered by starting with fantasies.  To imagine something is a way to flex new mental muscles, to create some room within otherwise rather atrophied ways of dealing more richly with the world. And by subsequent testing of what we find, it will become more and more clear what is fantasy and what is real.

This is not to say that we will reach a point where we can mathematically prove that we have acquired a new insight, or use a physics experiment to convince ourselves and others, or use an ironclad form of reasoning.  Rather, it will be like waking up from a dream, in which you say "ah, yes, of course!"

So for the time being, let us continue to shoot little holes in the conceptual cover that we have been hiding under for so much of our lives, ever since we were told to drop the magic of childhood.

5.6. Time

Let us return to our earlier exploration of `appreciating the presence of appearance.'  This is what we tried at the end of the previous chapter, and what we discussed more broadly in the present chapter.  But let us do so with a twist.

So far, most of our discussion has been rather impersonal. We have talked about awareness and appearance and arising, and all that may sound more scientific than spiritual.  And indeed, in many ways it is scientific, in spirit.  But that doesn't mean that it can't also be spiritual.  In fact, it can very well be, equally well.

An emphasis on an appreciation of the presence of appearance can be described in scientific terms as working with one or more working hypotheses, as we have seen.  How would we characterize such an exploration in more spiritual terms?

Traditional religious images involve a higher power that somehow helps us, taking care of us in some way, often in return for forms of supplication from our side.  Perhaps we can salvage some of that idea, without falling into the trap of reifying such a power in an anthropomorphic form -- whether as a old man with a beard on a cloud, or in more sophisticated forms.

Instead of a God or higher Power, let us consider time, and for good measure let us also capitalize it, as Time, to stay in the spirit of a more spiritual approach.  After all, Time presents everything: our whole world, every moment.  That is how we started our explorations, by recognizing that each moment a new world appears, appearing in time.

Let's play a bit with what this means.  We normally would say: a new world appears in time.  But what does this "in" mean? A stone can appear in a river, lying in the water.  Or it can sit in a box.  But surely the world does not lie or sit "in" time in that way.  Perhaps the typical use of "in" is misleading.

Let us change our angle on the way that everything is "given in time".  What would the world look like if we consider it to be "given by Time" or even "given as Time"?

Let's find out!  We can extend our previous phrase "appreciate the presence of appearance" by adding the aspect of Time, both as what gives the presence of appearance and as what (in some way) constitutes that presence (in a non-existent way).

5.7. Presence as Time

"Appreciate the presence of appearance as Time" would be the simplest notion, that we can explore as our next piece of home work.

Alternatively, we can also "appreciate the presence of appearance as given by Time" or "appreciate the presence of appearance as given as Time".  The last sentence can be expanded a bit more as "appreciate the presence of appearance in the way it is given as Time."

So: many options!  Pick one you like, and taste it, chew on it, hold it in the palm of your hand, and try to apply it to whatever happens, in whatever moment that you have a chance to play with it.  Don't spend too long a time working with it, since then you're likely to lose its freshness.  I'd suggest taking just a few minutes at a time, or even just a few seconds. Then let go of your attempt.  If you can, jot down a few notes, as your `catch of the day' or `catch of the minute.'

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to make notes.  Quite likely, especially when you first try this kind of exploration, your habitual mind will be caught by surprise, and it will let some non-standard experiences slip through, like what happens in a dream where various unexpected things can happen.  But immediately after that, your habitual mind will then get fully into gear trying to paper over what doesn't fit into its framework, and almost certainly you won't be able to retain what presented itself: it literally won't fit in your memory, like a square peg in a round hole.

However, if you write down just a few words, it's quite likely that hours or even days later you may remember in surprising detail what offered itself.  Just a small word hook is often enough to remember what normally sinks outside of our consciousness, whether it is a dream or a non-standard exploration.  So please do keep a notebook handy, or a voice recorder, or a scrap of paper in your pocket or a handheld or laptop computer or whatever can be used to record a few words, as often as you possibly can, when exploring the presence of appearance in relation to Time.  Enjoy!