Explorations Beyond Time

Popular Mechanics did an ostensibly scientifically serious piece recently that asked, “What if time is just a concept that exists inside your mind?” Apart from personalizing time to an absurd degree, it’s a question for which methodless meditation provides a non-conceptual answer. 

Conflating cosmic evolution with entropy, much less human experience with scientific fact, the PM of popular science asks: “Does time meaningfully exist apart from our experience of it as everything moves toward the disintegration of entropy along its irrefutable arrow?” 

“The disintegration of entropy” is not a given. No one knows the ultimate fate of the universe. New discoveries are being made every month, some calling into question long-held consensus about such things as the stability of cosmic energy as the universe evolved, or when carbon, the basic building block of life, first emerged (much earlier than previously thought). 

In physics, entropy is defined in terms of the degree of disorder or randomness in the system, given that “the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time.” Generally, entropy implies “a lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder.” 

The universe evolved from lesser order to higher order, not from order to disorder, or from disorder to order. But apart from the “gradual decline into disorder” canard, most people know that time is relative to speed and gravity. That is, the closer one comes to the speed of light, the more time slows down; and the greater the mass of an object, like a star or a black hole, the more effect it has on time. 

Ironically however, quantum physicists, who traffic in all kinds of weirdness such as entanglement and “spooky action at a distance,” need to “nail down” time. For them, “everything in a particular time, defined in some objective way, is knitted together through quantum interactions until it forms a capture of the entire universe -- if you zoom out enough.” (Italics mine.) 

Such notions are rather hilarious to people who enter states of timelessness during meditation. The terms “nail down,” “objective,” and “capture of the entire universe” are irrefutably concepts and projections made by the human mind, superimposed on phenomena that scientists observe in the universe. 

That isn’t to say they are made up willy nilly, only to point out that knowledge, however extensive, cannot “capture the entire universe.” 

Time is a necessary construct, both for living in the world and for doing science. But time, which is synonymous with the movement of thought from the past through the present into the future, is at best a useful illusion, at worst an enslavement. 

So is time what keeps us from experiencing the beauty and sublimity of life, including the truth of death while fully alive, much to our detriment and decay? 

The illusion of time upholds the illusion that death is separate from life. With the ending of time in non-volitional awareness, the age-old separation between life and death dissolves, and the ever-present actuality of death draws near without fear. 

Setting knowledge aside, and leaving the stultifying stream of the known, the mind/brain enters the infinite realm of beauty and essence, the source of immeasurable, impersonal love. 

The creek at the former periphery of town is running low, and in the 40C heat recently, its days are numbered until the rains come again in December. Behind me a diverse habitat has been destroyed, overtaken by a huge, cheap and ugly development. 

But it was good to sit beside the softly lapping stream as the day ended on the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, and gaze upon the hills beyond the brown, wheat-like grass along the bank dancing in a faint breeze.

The meditation was challenged by the discordant sounds of a band playing in “The Barn” about a half a mile away in the new development. The mind automatically started to resist the noise that competed with the music of the stream, but that soon became an exercise in futility. The only thing to do was to listen to both the noise and the music, without choice.

It’s always unexpected when a meditative state ensues. A telltale sign that meditation has spontaneously ignited with the flame of attention is the ending of time, and with it, thought’s separation between life and death. One cannot seek such states of “samadhi;” one can only passively observe the inner movement of thought/emotion as one observes the outer movement of nature. 

Given the noise coming from The Barn hundreds of meters away, at times superseding the soothing sounds of the creek, listening without the reaction of resistance was difficult. But asking open-ended questions (such as, can meditation occur amidst noise and ugliness?), and remaining with what is as the only discipline, a strange thing happened. 

The noise suddenly receded into unimportance, even as the volume seemed to increase after sunset. The first things were the stream that lapped by at my feet, and a lone merganser that foraged a little downstream. Time stopped with the cessation of thought, and the actuality of death drew near without fear. 

The complete stillness of the leaves of the new sycamore overhead after the sun went down intensified the feeling of timelessness. It wasn’t an emotion, or a peculiar and idiosyncratic state of mind. Thought and time had actually stopped, and the primordial separation between life and death dissolved.

Without the separation of the observer, one had simply watched as bright sunlight faded into the last swaths of light on the tall grasses and in the canopies of the trees. Then dusk descended, and as it deepened the ineffable mystery of the earth was palpable. 

A young buck waited on the path as I walked in reverence back up to the paved bike lane. It stared curiously, big ears up, before slowly ambling and then bounding away. 

Martin LeFevre 

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