Observing my activities reveals I – ‘now‘, relate to everything else ‘then’, which reveals a past-present-future structure of linear time. I constantly attempt to freeze time in order to take up a memory of someone, or a situation, to reference from a position I’ve staked out as representing ‘here’ and ‘now’. I also do this with thoughts and projections of possible future benefits, or alternatively of what damage there might be if ‘I’ act in a certain imagined way back in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. It’s a back-and-forth referral that continuously centers, and supports, this moving spot I feel is ‘me’ that is controlling linear time, and the significance or meaning of the objects that arise, like just remembering words to write this paragraph. And most of the time I don’t even notice I’m doing it.
But when I do notice this process, I begin to see the narrow focus on time that is being allowed. Noticing suddenly reveals there is a wider perspective, as if more space has been introduced. Consider the analogy (from one of Rinpoche’s books) that the back-and-forth referral is like a presupposition or a limited robotic movement only from East to West that continues in a groove, excluding any possibility of consideration of movement from North to South, or toward any other point in between. This linear time trajectory along past to future is ‘self-limiting’, and seems to be under direct control of the consolidating and organizing self.
So how can I tell there are other possibilities than just linear time sequencing? I get a sense of it when the self gets out of the way while I’m engaged in doing something. When there is intimacy or a transcendence of pointings, the subject-self seems to dissolve into the object (be it a memory, or a projected image), yet knowing still unfolds as objects relate and seem to know themselves.
I’ve had ‘the flow experience’, normally hidden at a preverbal level; as objects and events flow while ‘I’ am momentarily positioned at the center as changing objects and events pass. But then, there’s another level of time felt at the leading edge of the present, where the future seems to touch it, when the subject-self position dissolves, and even objects seem to dissolve into events as an active ‘blooming’ as described above, where the message is not observed from a position, but is embodied as a ‘budding’ presence, like the feel of inner fireworks blooming out of nothing in knowing space.
David
