Post eight of ten, in section Buddhism
One of the aspects of the Universe that shapes experience most strongly is time and causality.
There are different shapes that time can take; for example, an eternal present moment, the entirety of everything that has happened and will happen, timelessness, and the flow of time.
Each of these ways of experiencing time is accessed through a different part of experience:
- Embodiment will lead you into experiencing how there is only ever this moment
- Being present in the heart allows you to connect across all spaces and times
- Emptiness practices of the mind will show you timelessness
- And soulfulness will get you into flow states
As you get more immediately in touch with the different aspects of experience, the different shapes that time can take can start to reveal themselves to you. Part of this revelation is how you are not in control of experience in the way that you typically think you are.
Non-Self
Non-self is a deep insight into the nature of reality. Understanding and experiencing a sense of non-self is a lot of Buddhist practitioner’s main practice focus.
Seeing how time constructs experience creates a doorway into an understanding of non-self that works at an incredibly deep layer in people’s fundamental belief systems.
Before I describe that, I want to take a quick detour into the understanding of the concept of non-self. It depends on what you mean by the word self, but from my perspective, it’s always worth clarifying that it is impossible to completely destroy a felt sense of any self. You do have a body that you inhabit, and this creates an experience that is literally separate from the rest of the Universe.
Firstly, this is just obviously true. You will spend your life existing in your body with its natural physical traits. There is no way to escape this, but also if you weren’t somehow separate from the rest of the Universe there would be no experience. You have to have an experiencer for there to be experience. If the Universe was just one thing, it would never be able to experience itself.
The boundary that brings about the separation between experiencer and experience is created by your physical body; matter has physical boundaries that other aspects of the Universe, like awareness, don’t.
This embodied sense of a self is different from the more fixed self that a lot of people’s minds typically construct. It is the latter that most people are trying to uproot through their Buddhist meditation practice.
The vagueness with which people define the word self can be a problem. People assume that everyone is talking about the same strict definition when actually people are generally just waving towards some aspect of experience that typically feels quite unpleasant for them personally.
Some examples of the kinds of things that people mean by the word self are self-consciousness, anxiety, self-critique, self-centredness or obsession, duality, free will, object permanence, essence, a centre of experience, existence free from interconnection, and individuality.
There are all interesting aspects of experience to explore, and there is lots of liberation to be found around all these aspects of being, but it helps when people can be more specific around their insights rather than shoehorning several different things into the concept of non-self.
Time
Back to time. Causality lies at the foundations of your belief system. What you believe causes things shapes the entire story of what you believe is happening and why.
When you experience time in a different way, or time presents reality to you in a different way, then it creates a fundamentally different-seeming reality. It cuts through fixed and calcified ideas of who you are and what the Universe is and opens up a new way of making sense of the world.
Here are some of the ways that time can do this through the different portals of your being.
- Body: When you are fully immersed in the embodied feeling of being present in only this moment, experience becomes a lot simpler. You aren’t caught up in the stories of being a person with a past or future; it’s more like being an animal or an entity, just vibing in the present.
- Heart: When you are open-hearted and connected to the interdependence across all time, experience becomes a lot more epic and a lot less about you and your stuff.
- Mind: When your insight into impermanence opens up into a state of timelessness, you can see that a lot of the things you typically experience as solid, including your ideas about who or what you are, are actually just mental constructs.
- Soul: When you are fully absorbed in experience as a flow state, you don’t feel separate from the rest of the Universe.
These insights and realisations can start to layer on top of each other to give a deep understanding of the way that experience is constructed through these different aspects of time.
With a sense of all of them, you can become aware of how everything is unfolding by itself in each moment, and you can feel connected to what is present without a sense of over-identification occurring.
Presence and Your Being as a Container
The shape of your being is what dictates how experience will flow through you.
It’s as if time is a flow of experience that is being directed through the container of your being; the shape of your being dictates the shape that experience takes.
If experience is like the water of the river and time is the flow of the river, the container of your being is like the river banks that direct a river left or right. Your experience and attention are created from the combination of the flow of time moving through you plus the shape of your being.
Or the container of your being could be shaped like an ocean bed that allows for experience to spread out in a non-dual directionless flow. Or it could be a small glass that holds a specific piece of experience, like a memory. Or there could be a thousand other different shapes you could take in which time and experience can flow through you in different ways.
Through awakening practice, you are increasing the flexibility with the ways in which experience can flow through your being. By doing this, there is less resistance, and you are more likely to be directly in touch with the natural flow of life force that moves through all beings.