Past-Present-Future Structure

Do we experience time? And if so, how?

It seems to me that the ppf structure that we think of as constituting time is really something rather different–not time at all. Putting that ‘something different’ into words is rather difficult. It has to do with the structure of stories, which people have been discussing in these posts.

A story (and thoughts can take the form of stories) is a narrative, and by definition it has a ppf structure. The exercises proposed for the practice day mostly invite us to become aware of and look into these narrative structures. When we do, the story reconfigures itself, and space may open up and the dynamic of time become newly available: David explores this in his recent post.

But what does the ppf structure of the story have to do with either 1) the dynamic of time or 2) the ‘reality’ of time (referring to the fact that over time we get old and die, that occasions that were once in the future (e.g., tomorrow on the calendar) become the present and then are gone or past, etc. These are two very different questions.

The dynamic of time. Gaynor speaks to this when she writes of sitting with her cat or having music flow through her. When an experience feels alive and rich, we seem somehow closer to the dynamic of time. This will be an important theme in the next program.

The reality of time. Even though it may sound paradoxical to say this when speaking of ‘reality’, I see the reality of time as another story. Hayward mentioned Freud’s ‘reality principle’ in one of his posts, and I find that helpful: when we become aware of mortality or of the calendar, we are going along with the reality principle or reality story (Buddhists would say, karma). It is a story we had better learn to deal with, or we won’t be able to live our lives. But it is a particular version of a ppf structure, and that suggests (to me) that it really has nothing to do with time at all.

Thinking about this recently, I found helpful a set of terms from philosophy that I hope don’t put people off: the explanandum and the explanans. The ‘explanandum’ is what needs to be explained, and the explanans is what we use to explain it. The link is this: we always think that time is the explanandum, and we tie ourselves in knots trying to explain it. But time, seen as the ppf structure, is actually the explanans: it is a structure we impose to make sense out of the various facts (seasons, mortality, aging, forgetting, etc.) that constitute the reality principle or reality story.  The point this helps clarify is that time in the ppf sense is not real, any more than the tape measure or the number system is real (in respect to what they measure). It is a useful concept for explaining various true facts in our lives.

Let me tie this to an example that Gaynor reflects on. Is she really experiencing the music that flows through her ‘in the present’, when it clearly ‘takes time’ for the music to reach her ears? I would say that the question mixes together the dynamic of time and the reality of time, and in that sense confuses the issue. In ‘real time’, music takes time to reach our ears, so it always happens in the past. But in dynamic time, that analysis just doesn’t hold.

Dynamic time and real time proceed independently. That’s why we can be in the world of our stories and ‘at the same time’ be in touch with the immediate dynamic of time. We don’t have to arrive at some story-free zone of ‘pure experience’. A possible image: it’s like watching a play by Shakespeare and being moved by the beauty of the language while also being fully engaged in the plot.

Jack