Hi Jack and group members,
I am following your discussions with great interest via the podcasts – unfortunately I’m not sufficiently keen to come online at 4am on Monday mornings, Australian time.
Jack has asked us to contribute our own thoughts and experiences of this topic, so here are a few disparate ones of mine:
 – ‘Linear’ time seems a very western construct. ‘Time’ in Australian Aboriginal society is essentially cyclical in nature – sun and moon, seasonal cycles, birth from the earth and death as return to the earth spirits. Gatherings do not happen at any certain clock time, but rather ‘when everyone who needs to be here is here’.
 – Time as motion, and as movement, can be perceived within contexts which would more often be thought to be spatial. I recently attended a lecture about literary Sydney, which alluded to “the natural rhythms of the harbour”, and in which Sydney harbour was described as “the moody, living, ebbing and flowing presence”. To me such flowing presence is TimeÂ
 – our discussions also remind me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discussion of “Flow” – total absorption in whatever activity one is engaged in at the present moment. In such a state of being, for me, linear time seems to almost cease to exist, or becomes extended, stretched out toward infinity. Like the DTS practice Abiding in Thought, one can live one’s life within a moment, or, perhaps, within the moment.
Gaynor
Greetings Gaynor,
Seeing the way that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s patronim contains his given name (I wish my name could be Michael Michaelovitch instead of that flatenned remnant of the color spectum, Gray), it seems fitting that he would write about how time flows through activities in which we are totally absorbed. (I guess our givens march in the footsteps of our forebears). Your description of how linear time is in essence a spatial imposition upon the living character of time, which more often entails a cyclic ebbing and flowing in place, is interesting. And you somehow conjure up that kind of time in the way you express your insights. Like Sydney Harbor’s “Moody, ebbing, flowing presence”, it’s reassuring to think of my own aging body as being the harbor for a cyclic, flowing presence. The insights of TSK help me to appreciate that dimension of my own life, while travelling along for the ride, as in-breath follows out-breath. –Michael