The Constructs of Past and Future

4 Responses to The Constructs of Past and Future

1. David says:

   November 10, 2012 at 1:00 pm

   This is interesting Michael, I don’t remember using the egg analogy before. So strange. The not-known of the moment I was writing that ‘eggy’ response to you apparently included my lost memory, a different past, if you will from your recall. Selecting what we remember, the present shapes the past we carry into the next moment. I might remember a past detail, I might not, my present follows a structuring. The video of the underwater egg in that moment helped shape the next few moments of composing my written comment. Had I remembered I used that egg analogy before I might not have written the comment. The present could have unfolded in potentially different ways. Interesting to contemplate Time’s dynamic this way. :-)
   David

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2. michaelg says:

   November 1, 2012 at 10:21 am

   Blaird and David, thank you for your comments to my post. They make my “present” reflections more interesting and alive. Jack’s four pages, which are now available in”phone calls and orientation”, are as well very stimulating. They make me look forward to the next six weeks with lively anticipation and with the hope that we can indeed form the supportive group for inquirying into Time, which Jack envisions.
   Blaird, looking quickly through DTS chapter Nine I didn’t see the phrase “vanishing moment”, so perhaps I imagined it or projected it, or perhaps Jack was engaging in a timely poetic impulse of his own. Meanwhile, the meaning of the image for me is that the present must logically be as small as a Euclidean point, if it vanishes the instant it arises, and the future, in order to remain the future, can never arrive. I often feel, while reading the TSK books, that it is valuable to have this absurd situation pointed out (that there is nowhere to live in linear time, if the past is dead, the future not yet arrived, and the present moment infinitely small). It helps draw my attention to the reality of the greater, more accomadating, and more integrated time, in which I actually live.
   David, I liked your image of the egg when you first shared it. And it remained with me while reading Jack’s Orientation notes. Both explore the felt environment in which we live and swim: that sense of being surronded by and perhaps contained within some kind of sphere–in terms both of time and of space. One little fact about an egg may be pertinent here. I’ve heard it said that between the white and the yoke of an egg, it is the transparent egg white that becomes the living chicken when fertilized, and the yoke ends up in the stomach of the chick, where it provides sustenance until it becomes possible to break the shell from inside. If we are like that chick, encapsulated within the shell or our own projections, our self-images drawn from the palette of the already known, then inside us, hidden in places we have not yet learned to look, we might discover the sustenance we need for a new relationship with Time. — Michael

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3. David says:

   October 29, 2012 at 11:01 am

   Hi Michael,
   I really liked how you put this, inquiring into Time can seem difficult, but putting the inquiry on a personal level as you have done seems to make the inquiry more accessible. It seems to me, an essential understanding of the present moment involves recognition that if it is crowded with thinking – what I want, what I anticipate, what I’m afraid of, etc. – then can there be room beyond these concerns? Can the moment feel greater than what our thoughtful concerns fills and plugs it up with?

   The other day a watched a short video of what happens when you crack an egg 60 feet underwater? Except in boiling water, we’re used to seeing an egg and yoke conform to what it is contained by; its shell, a bowel, a pan, a cup, etc. As shown in the video below, the egg conforms roughly to a sphere in a liquid medium, as long as that medium is relatively still and not frothy.

   http://www.aol.com/video/cracking-an-egg-underwater/517516215/?icid=maing-grid7|maing8|dl12|sec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D225405

   It occurred to me to look for parallels, and I paused – what is the shape of my sense of self as I move through time? Of course, there are times when I’m not focused on a sense of self, but when I do is there a shape to that moment? So as I observe “I” feel something like a convergence, like an egg contained in a medium of consciousness, if you will. There’s a kind of floating in mental space that extends only so far back in space and time, and only as far ahead in space as I imagine, constructing a future.

   But within the relative immediacy of the present moment there is a felt sense of “me” as a working body, a breathing and sensing system that is situated within an environ made real by sensual input, and also by historical contexts that I can call to mind and link together by a self-describing narrative. And in each new bubble of a moment, an egg-like self-awareness keeps reconstituting and holding together based on a feeling of ‘I am here’, and a self-referring story of who I am by way of identifying memories, desires, fears. This process is constantly repeating, almost like blinking, as if each blink reveals a new moment of constructing the egg.

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4. blaird says:

   October 28, 2012 at 7:02 pm

   An uplifting and hopeful comment, Michael. I appreciate the sentiment :)

   Interesting — I didn’t get that part about being somehow ‘sentenced to occupy a vanishingly small present moment’ from today’s call. That makes it sound like a punishment. Perhaps that’s a reference to experience in ‘lower time’ (as opposed to ‘higher time’)?

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