Where do you stand in this debate?
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| The Persistence of Time by Salvador Dali 1931 |
How do you approach time?
What is time to us? How does time feel? How is it measured?
How does the body keep time? How do the senses record it? How does the mind perceive it?
Buddhists define time as the measurement of change.
Past, present and future. Birth, life and death. Then, now and when.
All occurring in each moment and not just in one lifetime.
The past no longer present. The future yet to come. All that exists is the now.
Challenged as the human being is to live in the present, it seems to be the goal of many spiritual practices.
Science claims the specialty of a human brain is its capacity to unhook from the present and transport to different points in time.
How is it possible to live in the now with lag time between collecting information from our senses and processing that information in our brain?
Our conscious being lives in the past by about a half a second.
By the time we process all the info about a moment that moment is gone.
Einstein demonstrated that time is relative.
Shamans who straddle the worlds between ordinary and non-ordinary perceive time as elastic.
When bound in space physical time runs at a fixed speed as it does here on earth.
Yet time and memory are entangled depending on our recollection of it.
Our observation of time - backward or retrospectively, forward or prospectively - changes how we perceive time.
The intensity and amount of emotion we invest or divest each moment with also changes how quickly or slowly we feel time passing.
No wonder measuring our lives has shifted from the number of breathes we take to the moments that take our breath away.
We look forward to grasping enlightenment and understanding with gasps of wonder and delight.
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