I want to share a passage from something I’ve been reading, and then relate it to our program.
The passage is from Martin Heidegger, a 20th century German philosopher that most people find very difficult to read. But in recent years, since his death in 1976, publishers have been bringing out his lecture notes on various topics, and these are often easier. I have always thought that Heidegger’s understanding is as close to that of TSK as any Western thinker I know.
In this passage, from a book called “Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” sec. 23, Heidegger has been exploring the topic of boredom, and how it is that when we are bored, we want time to pass more quickly:
Yet ought time to pass more quickly, then? What speed is time supposed to have? Does it have a speed at all? Time evidently takes its regular course, unfurls almost like the regular pulse of some unassailable monster: sixty seconds in every minute, and sixty minutes in every hour. Yet does time consist of hours, minutes, and seconds? Or are these not merely measures in which we entrap it, something we do because, as inhabitants of the earth, we move upon this planet in a particular relation to the sun? . . . Or is time not really of a highly temperamental essence? Are we merely persuaded of this calculable time in the face of which that time which cannot be calculated sinks to the level of an illusion and is merely subjective, as our banal cleverness is able to tell us? . . . What is reality here, and where does illusion begin?
This quote in itself mostly sets the stage for the point I want to raise, which has to do with boredom. Heidegger discusses boredom at some length, and my first reaction was that I am not often bored. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that in fact I am often bored, in the sense that I am often not wanting to be in the moment I am in, and wishing I were in some other moment of time. That is a broader definition than Heidegger uses, but I have found it helpful to look there.
That is where I would like to point us. In your own experience, look to see whether you are content to be in this experience right now, or whether a part of you would rather be somewhere else along the expanse of linear time. That is what i would call “being bored.” but you might also call it “being restless,” because you are not at rest in time, not at ease with what is happening. Noticing that can be very helpful.
This applies also to doing this exercise, or in fact any of the TSK exercises. After all, we are looking into our experience in time, which is the very heart of who we are. So why do we find it difficult to stay focused on this kind of inquiry? Why do we find ourselves caught up in something else, some other happening? Why do we get ‘bored’ with asking these questions, and find some other way to pass the time?
Jack