A bit hard on the head!!!

I guess what you guys are saying (as was I in my convoluted way) is that as Einstein figured out ages ago - how you perceive time and space depends very much on your viewpoint. Arguably the viewer in C1 is fixed in the now, and reality (both space and time) moves around him/her.

But alternate states of consciousness bring into play (maybe through quantum effects an creativity of the mind) the possibility of many more viewpoints in terms of scale, speed of time, location, additional dimensions and heaven knows what else.

The one thing that's fairly clear is that while it's nice (mind/consciousness expanding) to speculate it's important to stay light and open on this stuff - forming rigid views (beliefs) as to what's out there is likely to be counter productive - to become just another belief system we need to free ourselves of...

recoverer wrote on Oct 1^st, 2007 at 12:18pm:


  I don't fully agree with this though..  As in the example you gave, you have both the Whole of the painting, and yet the individual brush strokes that go in to make up the whole.   Both of these are equally and simultaneously real and 'true' aren't they?   If you didn't have the individual brush strokes, you wouldn't have the whole of the painting, and if you couldn't see or focus on the whole of the painting, it wouldn't be as enjoyable or as complete an experience.

  Maybe the knack, or getting the whole enchilada, is being able to perceive both simultaneously?

  I believe time is relative, relative, and slightly different or experienced so in the various dimensions.  Particularly relative to the dimension one is consciously concentrating their conscious awareness in.   

   Time is both a continuum relating to a whole, or all time, and relative to the individual choosing to change perspective within that continuum (somewhat like Vajra talked about).    As in everything, it all relates back to the two basic truths, and principles of Creation, there is the Whole, and the individual, both being equally true and eternal experiences in an objective sense.   And everything is related to, or relative to the dance between the two.  When one concentrates more on one, at the expense of the other, imbalance is fostered and our overall perception and understanding becomes limited.

  In general, the West has over emphasized the individuality and active, individual creating aspect of Creation, and the East has over emphasized the Oneness, passive, and 'void' aspect of Creation.   One is the archetypal Masculine, and the other the archetypal Feminine.  Neither is better or more true than the other, yet they are different, and yet they are part of a Whole.   
   Argghh, this is what happens one i don't eat breakfast or lunch, over long and boring preaching sermons.   

Thank you.

Quote:

   No problem Alysia, and thanks again.

I tend to agree in principle that the issue is balance of a sort, but I am a bit skeptical whether it is in this specific world that we'll find it.

Most of the above thread has looked at two different aspects of time. One aspect is experiential, which is ultimately valid to the subjective, so long as we attach to this universe, and so long as we attach only to our present role as inhabitants, rather than creators.

The other aspect is time-in-itself, which is a construct, and has no ultimate existence in an absolute sense. This latter aspect bleeds off into our own experience through Special Relativity, which suggests a role as we begin to get creative - although I believe that this is just an artifact, personally. The idea is that as something moves faster and faster, it experiences a reduced rate of passage of time, until at the speed of light the moving object experiences no time at all, while the other parts of the world seem to be involved in passing time at an infinite rate. This, however, reduces to the idea of a universe with specific properties.

We often view time as a "dimension". In this sense, a "dimension" is usually thought of as one of the collection of vectors that locate something in a continuum. Further, all the "basic dimensions" (literally the basis vectors) lie at right angles to one another, by which we mean that what we do to dimension X has nothing to do with what happens to dimensions Y or Z. The two are incommensurable, can't be brought together as correlates.

We view dimensions as spatial because of our fixation on visual effects. However, my evening at a restaurant recently brought forth two enchiladas and a chile relleno who had dimensions of peppery to taste, high temperature, and an appetizing tomato sauce color - all three being dimensions that are incommensurable. We could add the background music as another dimension. Thus, not all dimensions are spatial, even when we use spatial terms to describe things.

Time is certainly incommensurable with all spatial measures, and just about everything else. In that regard it appears dimensional. However, it appears as a direction, and not as a continuum in which we measure the space by walking back and forth along the stretch of a century or two with a tape measure.

If we look at the causes of time, things look different. Logic demands that aggregates be composed of substituent parts, and these of further substituents, all the way back to the Beginning. As Bishop Berkeley argued, were this not true, then the stuff arriving ex nihilo would occur outside our continuum of experiences because it would share nothing with us. In this sense, time is the "distance" between formation of the predecessor terms, and the formation of subsequent aggregations. Thus, time has an absolute ordinal nature. It is an expression of causal seriality.

The reason that I view our experiences of time as artificial, as locally composed opinions, is that motion through our universe alters the appearance of the passage of time according to a ticking clock. As I drive to work, I am experiencing time at a slightly slower rate than the guy standing on the corner. But the airplane flying overhead experiences it at still another rate.

Sitting at the center of the face of the Cosmic Clock, I am one with the wavefront of the Cosmos that expands at lightspeed, and I have no time. Then, as I move a toe to alter my posture I interact, and a temporal event occurs. Again sitting still, my time ceases, and the world around me  ages at an infinite rate, stopping abruptly when I rise and go off to the biffy for urgent business. While I only have one or two events out of all this, the people in the world around me have myriads of lifetimes. Time is not a very good way to express our relationship. And there is a decent argument to be made that only while we live inside this world will we experience it temporally as we do.

From the "God point", the world is cast forth as a succession of aggregates, each giving rise to the next, so that we have ordinality. But there is no need for time in the usual sense of everyday experience. The causal connection between instants of creation is defined as a sequence. That sequence is defined within a single instant, just as a line can be drawn between two points in a sequential manner, yet is defined as a line in a single instant, regardless of the manner in which it is realized. I have found this to be frustrating in the extreme, as I tried to measure the rate at which God build our world, but in the end, it all seems to resolve into a matter of viewpoint.

Interestingly, it seems that we might totally do away with the notion of both time and space and replace them by expressions of probability. These capture both the sequential nature of dependent origination of events, and the somewhat arbitrary experiences we have as we move our viewpoint through the world. It also gets rid of the idea that there is a fixed, well-defined, collocation of lumpy stuff with equally rigid relationships. Instead, we get Alysia's world, infinite freedom within which we have attached to this or that, but not in any totally absolute sense. (It also leads to some really fascinating equations!)

d

Seems to me, Alysia, that you have it pretty well under control. We get born, and that is both the cause of attachment, and also its result.  Time and space come along with birth because that's how we define being born.  But if we aren't born, then we can have it any way we might find it at the moment.

The image that makes most sense to me personally is that we sit in voidness, our own nature being pure potentiality that has so structured itself that it is aware (as well as myriads of other ways in which it is structured) and through this awareness we watch the play of pretty colors, blinking lights, and wonderful images. Because we simply watch this stuff roll by, we don't get changed permanently by it. Like jumping upwards, we fall downwards again, and everything remains in the same state in the long run. It's only when we get interested (attached) and seek to follow some line of reasoning or experiencing that we are hooked into a "reality". This is a common experience for most of us, as we look out the window of a vehicle and idly watch the scenery flow past. We basically don't give a hoot unless something catches our eye - like a car wreck, a burning building, or some impromptu nudists skinny dipping in a local creek etc. And then we are hooked - back to another rebirth.

This is a very ancient concept. One place we can find it is in an old Chinese folk tale "Monkey", where (in the Wu Ch'ung En rendition) Monkey explains,

I scheme no schemes,
I hatch no plots.
Fame and shame are one to me.
Those I meet along the way
Are immortals, one and all,
Who whisper from their quiet thrones
The secrets of the Yellow Court.

Strange how the most obvious can be the least understood.

d

The "Yellow Court" is a Taoist reference to the Empirial Court of the Jade Emperor who sits enthroned in Heaven where he regulates the motions of the sun and stars, as well as matters on Earth.

At the same time, there is an experience in deep meditation in which one discovers oneself in a situation which is totally self-created - following one's desires to have it this way or that way or any other way. That is to say, the surrounding reality follows one's every whim, as if an extension of the inner mind. The nature of the surrounding world appears to be projected, and at one moment it appears to include all of reality, and yet seems totally unreal, as there is any kind of world one desires to experience. This is one of the forms of sarvastarka samadhi, and for some reason, perhaps because it deals with elemental Earth, it appears as yellow or golden.

The highest meditation, nirvastarka samadhi, requires us to get rid of the "Yellow Court" and all the other trappings of a potentially mundane projection of self, so that we merge back into total potentiality, but about that I can say nothing because from where I sit today, it simply isn't visible.

The "Yellow Court" notion is classical Taoism, which I have never studied. However, the notion of a place from which we project our own reality is very much a part of the whole spiritual process. I'm reminded of Bruce's "little finger bending exercise" in which we get in touch with the power of personal will. Perhaps, as I would argue for it,  the "Yellow Court" image is the distillation  of the causal authority of the soul, which we experience everyday in more common choices.

All of this seems to me to be leading back to the question of freedom. From the point of causality, one certainly seems to be free when projecting worlds and universes galore. While we are conditioned as individual actors within the world, and liable to karma so long as we retain any attachments, we also act as the hands and fingers of the wavefront of Creation, and in that role we necessarily act without limit in locus Deii - even if unaware of it. Viewed in that sense, the "Yellow Court" would appear to be last place we could get trapped. But who wants to be Emperor of the Universe anyway?

I wonder if they could trade dim sum for crumpets ...

dave