Hi all,
I just had the unfortunate experience of having my fairly extensive comments lost by my computer. So I will recreate them, but they will probably be shorter this time. I go in reverse order, mostly. I’m glad to see lots of activity.
Marcia You ask if the subject creates linear time out of the need to control. This seems right to me, but we have to ask more precisely: how does the self do this, and how does linear time help it to create. I think it has to do with identity. For the self to assert its own identity, it has to assign identities to objects, and for this, only linear time, which denies the dynamic of time, will work. Here is an image: If objects appearing in each moment (or the contents of each moment) are like beads, linear time is like the string that you thread through the beads to hold them together. But the string has to be very narrow to fit through the small hole in the center of each bead. What is this hole? Perhaps it is the place we leave open for the dynamic of time. No wonder, then, if we feel very restricted.
Arthur When the body decays after death (or also before death), it is like any object in time. But how does this kind of time relate to the time we experience? This is one of the biggest questions, isn’t it? Perhaps it is a mistake that we use the same word for both kinds of time, and yet in some way they must be connected.
In your description of the theater, you bring up many different kinds of temporal experience. The link between time and the body is important. Certainly the body is ‘in’ time, is ‘time-ful’ as you say (it’s not a word we have in English). But German has two words for body: one takes us back to the body decaying after death; the other is the body as lived experience. Again, perhaps it would help to have different words for the two.
I’m not sure about the image of the hourglass. You put the present at the narrow “mouth” of the hourglass, and this makes sense. But the present is also the place that is most open rather than most narrow, the only really ‘time-ful’ part of our experience. Don’t you agree?
Ted I’m glad that you focus on the specific text. The idea here seems to be that there may be a hidden temporal dimension to experience, but that we cannot get at either in ordinary experience or in non-ordinary experience. You ask, “Well, what other choice is there?” But I think the answer is suggested: we cannot arrive at time by focusing on being in a specific state. Perhaps that is because ‘states’ are related to the identity of the one that has a state. The book suggests looking at Part Three for a further discussion of this very point, so I can only repeat that.
You make an important distinction between time in I-centered experience and time in experience when you are focused on “tasks at hand.” But are we really free of the I when we are focused on the task at hand? Or do we experience it as a certain anxiety, a wish to get on with it? One of the ideas that the exercises will bring out more as we go along is that time in its usual past-present-future structure operates at more subtle levels than we usually notice, so this is a good place to look.
Peter (Ludwig) Be sure to post in the “tsk online” “category. I moved your comment there myself. You are right to link linear time to thinking. This is really our starting point for investigating time. But almost as soon as we look, we realize that this view is not adequate to our experience of time from moment to moment. It is what TSK calls the “indexing” function of time. Describing this, you write that you feel it in the belly. This is a good clue, and a direction to explore. Do we feel time differently in the head, the heart, the throat, the belly? In this kind of inquiry, I always try to ask the question in the very moment that I am expressing it in words, or as close to that as I can. My response in this very moment is that I experience time going on around me, as though I am the still point at the center of a revolving universe. But I also feel it inside me as a kind of pressure, because I am feeling “time-stressed” at the moment. It is my mind that makes the link between the pressure and time, but it is also something more, a knowing that the pressure is in some sense time.
David You raise themes similar to Ted’s when you write of the self ‘getting out of the way’. The same question applies: does the self perhaps go into hiding when it gets out of the way? Are there different levels of being aware of the flow of time? Your hint to look at the future to see more of time’s dynamic is one that will come up later in the program.
For myself, I was struck by how when I remember something from the past, it necessarily is something that unfolded over time, and yet it’s time has now in effect been flattened, and is available for me in a different way: I can move to any part of the memory, and in fact it is both unnatural and perhaps impossible to play it out in a strict linear sequence.
Jack