Being with Being
Philosophy, contemplative practice, and the physics of nature's flow — for finding your own way. For those who don't need the added pressure of another's way, but are curious about ways of understanding, perceiving, and living that mesh with each other — and that only you can make your own.
Each episode is a complete live recording — typically around two hours — opening with a 15-30 minute inquiry into the session's theme, moving into an hour-long guided practice, and closing with comments and discussion. These explorations grew from years of my own searching — trying to fit into practices that promised relief, never quite finding home in any tradition, and stumbling upon a rational basis for getting traction on ways I don't have to try.
As your fellow explorer, I'm Mackenzie Hawkins — researcher in philosophy of physics, contemplative practitioner, and co-author of several books with physicist and Tai Chi Master Dr. Wonchull Park. Drawing from his nowflow philosophy, these series-based explorations use philosophy and physics as ways of understanding and perceiving what's here already.
Not ways to follow, but ways that might help you find your own — for anyone looking to explore beyond the pressures we put on ourselves.
Being with Being
Innumerable Clocks, Innumerable Times - No Time, No Problem?
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When we look at the clock and think it is telling us THE time, then there’s the time, this abstract time that’s passing us by, and then there’s this clock. We almost don’t even think of that as a relationship. It’s almost like the abstract time that’s passing us by is driving this clock. This poor clock. Maybe driving us all. But when physics is telling us how clocks behave, and how there’s not one clock that we can say is the true time, then we’re left with this clock relative to the other clock. This particular changing thing, and that particular changing thing, and a relation between them. There is no truer time. There are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is more “the real” time than the other.
The clocks really do run at different speeds—the faster a clock is traveling, the slower its time goes—and we couldn’t even use our GPS without accounting for that. We can’t perceive that in our own experience. That web of relations amongst this multitude of times is not something we need to usually pay attention to as we go about our daily living. But there’s such a habitual sense of checking the clock and feeling that I’m looking at “the” time—and maybe that we can begin to dismantle. Maybe this fact about clocks in relativity is something that supports us in reclaiming the flow of time into each particular changing thing that’s affecting and being affected with each other. Everything and anything can be a clock, and there’s no one clock that’s telling “the” time. Maybe everything is, in a way, its own time.
So we might come to feel the breath itself as a clock. I’m not going to say that this is the best clock ever. But this rhythm of widening and coming closer together is a kind of clock. We get to be a clock. That might not be the most inspiring thought you’ve ever had. What—I’m just a clock? Maybe feeling into the effect of getting to own “being a clock.”
What if that rhythm is only in relation to other rhythms? What if that rhythm is only in a web of other rhythms? There’s no one time that our breath is happening in.
I’ve been so struck at how much flow time has been stealing from me. The flow of time has seemed to monopolize flow. What’s it like to feel the flow of breath in itself? A flow in this web of flows. All relative to each other. All interacting. And then in an exploration like this, it’s like this small explosion, blossoming of all these particular flows, reclaimed from the abstract sense of time passing us by.
No Time, No Problem?
An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living
What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering?
Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji—to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries.
Thank you for Being with Being.
beingwithbeing.org
mackenziehawkins.substack.com
So welcome. Welcome to this continuation of no time, no problem. I'm a bit late. So let me even just set up my my clocks here so that you can you can see the clocks that part of the question that we're coming to here is uh what are these clocks measuring? And so last time we in a way were reclaiming reclaiming from a sense of time as something that passes by. That the flow of change belongs to time. We even brought in some good old Newton and his abstract mathematical time can even revisit his principia. I promise. There's Newton and then we'll return to Aristotle in a moment. Flows uniformly, and by another name is called duration. And it's quite possible, uh might be our default way of relating to time. We we look at the clock, especially with our clocks these days that can be all linked up to some kind of uh atomic clock at some special headquarters somewhere. It's it's the time, right? So we look at the clock and we can tend to expect to uh yeah, what is this clock doing? It's it's measuring the time now. Maybe this particular clock, um, yeah, I mean, this is just I think when its battery runs a little low, it runs a little slower. So we're not, you know, uh saying that this is a is a perfect clock, but the feel of it is we look at the clock, the clock tells us the time.
SPEAKER_01There is this time passing, flowing by.
SPEAKER_00And then last time we kind of went back in time in a way. So I think it's easier to have more of that sense of yeah, this clock is measuring the time when we feel pretty confident in uh standard time that we we share. Like we have time zones and these kinds of things, but we yeah, we we feel like we've got a handle on on time. It seems to match up pretty good in our daily lived experience. And so it's it's interesting to go back historically to uh Aristotle thinking about the nature of time when you know time was at most. I mean, really, it usually came down to the celestial motions.
SPEAKER_01There was also some water clocks that they would use. Maybe some sundials.
SPEAKER_00It seems like it'd be easier to look at a you know a sundial and not necessarily feel like oh, that's the time. Because it it stays a little more connected to what Aristotle says, and this is something I shared last time, but keep coming back to it. He says, now the most obvious thing about time is that it strikes us as some kind of passing along and changing.
SPEAKER_01Time is passing, time is some kind of flow.
SPEAKER_00But if we follow this clue, we find that when any particular thing changes or moves, even for example, this clock, the movement or change is in the moving or changing thing itself.
SPEAKER_01And occurs only where that thing is. So on this view, I see this clock more as a changing thing.
SPEAKER_00Apparently, when I turn my head, my my microphone gets off finicky. See if I can adjust this.
SPEAKER_01So even just watching the second hand as a changing thing that is particular.
SPEAKER_00And that's only changing right where it it it it is.
SPEAKER_01Now you all can't see.
SPEAKER_00And so for Aristotle, these, you know, numbers around the edges and the standardization of using a clock is so that we can put numbers to changes, that time is the measure of change, which would mean that if there's no change, there's no time. And even though, as he says here, whereas uh the passage of time is current everywhere alike and is in relation to everything, so there's this interesting way, at least in so far as we knew in his day, we can we can pick a passage of time, a measure of change, that is current everywhere alike, and is in relation to everything, and so that time can feel like a like a more general kind of flow, even though it always is just changing, happening right where it is occurring.
SPEAKER_01Not an abstract changing.
SPEAKER_00So this is kind of the exploration that led us to uh Dogen, Dogen uh Zenji's Sobogenzo, and being time to take back that sense of instead of the flow and this passage of time, is time passing us by that it's the changing of clocks of bamboos of everything our own body, our own mind, and all of that is a form of being time. And so in a way that was uh a fun exploration and to see what shifts for us in our experience when we get to reclaim the flow of time for ourselves, and since but I also kind of cheated in a way, right? Because part of this uh whole exploration of no time, no problem is not only seeing what different perspectives of time have on us and our experience, and picking one that you know feels good, we can be part of it, or being inspired by ancient texts like Aristotle or even Dogen, but to be like, wait, wait a second, are we just picking something that feels good for us? Or is it really not a problem for there to be no time in this sense of this clock measuring the Newtonian time? Abstract, uniform, independent, absolute, pure, true, and mathematical time.
SPEAKER_01Is that is that legit? And so today we'll bring in uh other giant.
SPEAKER_00We have uh Aristotle on one hand, time is measure of change, no change, no time, and Newton really advancing so much of our understanding of the physical world with this sense of yeah, absolute time, absolute space, that we can abstract something that we're never going to encounter. We never encounter this flowing time, but yeah, it can seem like there could be some good reasons to to think that, especially since it was for sure highly fruitful. Until until there was a patent office clerk of the name of Albert Einstein, and he over a hundred years ago now made his uh landmark papers on special relativity and general relativity and really forever changed the way science, way physics conceives of time with his relativity. And in another session, we might go more into the even for Einstein's relativity, some of the various interpretations that can be laid over it. It can, for example, I'll just touch on this briefly, it can seem to take you know 40 space time, and then it becomes this inseparable thing where you can't even say, you know, which is the special time dimension, because the mathematics is such that time and space are interrelated, and even that this you know 40 space-time bends and warps depending on uh really the distribution of mass. So it kind of it might even take our sense of oh yeah, well, Newton, Newton had one kind of time dimension axis of absolute time, and now we have an even more abstract sense of time with 40 space-time. And that would be, I think, fun to to explore a little bit more in terms of how um how science gets interpreted and how we read even the mathematics of of physics and interpret its meaning.
SPEAKER_01We're today going to bring in Einstein through uh Carlo Ravelli's way of taking very seriously the insights that Einstein had on what nature is uh pointing towards here in this idea of what do clocks actually do? What do these particular changing things actually actually do?
SPEAKER_00And so I'll begin with um so yeah, uh I'm on page sixty-five here, and uh the battle of Newton and Aristotle is well described here. So who is right, Aristotle or Newton? Two of the most acute and profound investigators of nature that the world has ever seen are proposing two opposite ways of thinking about time. Two giants are pulling us in opposite directions. What if anyone's feeling the feeling the tension? Time is only a way of measuring how things change, as Aristotle would have it. Or should we be thinking that an absolute time exists and flows by itself independently of things?
SPEAKER_01So let's uh take our clocks and go on some journeys.
SPEAKER_00So first we can take a clock and well it's very fitting since Artemis is uh in outer space, traveling very fast, gonna be circling back around to us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so there's say my clock here, and then there's a clock on Artemis. And the clocks are going to run at different speeds.
SPEAKER_00We're actually gonna need to account for that difference. Same thing happens for the clocks on the satellites that give us our GPS.
SPEAKER_01The faster a clock moves, the slower its quote unquote time goes. And so that's just an experimental fact.
SPEAKER_00It's very interesting that Einstein was able to come to this before we had the precision of clocks to be able to notice that discrepancy, but now it's it's a well-established fact. We couldn't even use our GPS without without accounting for that.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so then which is the time?
SPEAKER_00My time or the time of the astronauts on Artemis. Which clock is actually reading the absolute chew? The true the real time, the real time. Where where which one is is is getting the real time?
SPEAKER_01Let's see.
SPEAKER_00Um everywhere is that what I just described, how the what is it, the passing of time, or just the way that a particular changing thing changes depends on its velocity. So usually we do not have to account for this because usually we're not uh going at speeds that are relatively all that different. But what Einstein's special relativity does is enables us to know, yeah, okay, if my clock is here is reading this, I can actually know what the clock, I can use relativity to know what the clock that's moving at a different rate uh would be reading. So that's special relativity that the the velocity of anything can imagine a clock, but our body is also a clock. So the even the twin paradox, the twin that comes back is younger when that one has gone maybe even much faster, much much faster than Artemis and uh has returned. And another aspect that maybe even helps us see more how time according to what we can measure, it's well, it's not uniformly flowing, but it's also not independent of what's around it.
SPEAKER_01And this is this is wait, time is interacting with what's around it. That's the it's not our typical conception of time.
SPEAKER_00And so Rorelli says, let's begin with a simple fact. Time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level. The difference is small, but can be measured with precision. Time pieces that can be bought today on the internet for a few thousand dollars. If you have a few thousand dollars to spare, you can give it a try. With practice, anyone can witness the slowing down of time. With the time pieces of specialized laboratories, the slowing down of time can be detected between levels just a few centimeters apart. A clock placed on a floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table. It is not just the clocks that slow down. Lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later. The one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, and the mechanisms of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold. Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude. Messing with our sense of time. Time passes more slowly in some places more rapidly in others. The surprising thing, perhaps, is that someone understood the slowing down of time a century before we had clocks precise enough to measure it.
SPEAKER_01His name, of course, was Albert Einstein.
SPEAKER_00And so in Einstein's general relativity, there is that can no longer separate the gravitational field from space-time itself. So the 40 space-time and you know many analogies, it's it bends, it warps. The closer something is to a big mass, the slower the time goes. That's why you might hear some stories if you get closer and closer to a to a black hole. Some very interesting things happen on multiple levels. So stay away from black holes. But if we were thinking that this was measuring time, suddenly this sense of this it I mean, it now depends on how fast this is going relative to the the observer.
SPEAKER_01It also depends on how close it is to something with a strong gravitational field. It's making our sense of time more on a level in a way with other things that interact with and that depend on how you're looking at it. The frame of reference you're in.
SPEAKER_00One one real time. Unfortunately, we don't or maybe fortunately we don't get to do that. So Rivelli says it has long been in the convention to indicate this time in equations with the letter T. The word for time begins with T in Italian, French, and Spanish, and not German, Arabic, Russian, or Mandarin. What does this T stand for? It stands for the number measured by a clock. Stands for the measure, the number measured by a clock. The equations tell us how things change as the time measured by a clock passes. But if different clocks mark different times, as we have seen above, what does T indicate? When two friends meet up again after one has lived in the mountains and the other at sea level, the watches on their wrists will show different times. Which of the two is T? In a physics laboratory, a clock on a table and another on the ground run at different speeds. Which of the two tells the time? How do we describe the difference between them? Should we say that the clock on the ground has slow has slowed relative to the real time recorded on the table? Or that the clock on the table runs faster than the real time measured on the ground? The question is meaningless. We might just as well ask what is most real, the value of sterling in dollars, or the value of dollars in sterling. There's no truer value. They are two currencies that have value relative to each other.
SPEAKER_01It's just right there.
SPEAKER_00When we look at the clock and we think it is telling us the time, then there's the time, this abstract time that's passing us by. And then there's this clock. This poor clock.
SPEAKER_01But when science is telling us how clocks behave. And how there's not one that we can say is the true time, then then we're left with this clock relative to the other clock.
SPEAKER_00We're left with this changing thing, this particular changing thing, and that particular changing thing, and a relation between them. There are two times, and they change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. And then my favorite part, but there are not just two times. Times are legion, a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time, there is a vast multitude of them. The time indicated by a particular clock measuring a particular phenomenon is called proper time in physics. So if I carried this clock around with me, this would be my time, my proper time. What it read. Every clock has its proper time. Every phenomenon that occurs has its proper time, its own rhythm. Einstein has given us the equations that describe how proper times develop relative to each other.
SPEAKER_01He has shown us how to calculate the difference between two times. So we're not just saying, oh, anything goes. It's all kinds of time.
SPEAKER_00It's this relation between everything that has its own proper time, its own rhythm, and that the physics of relativity is what lets us know how these all interrelate. The single quantity time melts into a spider web of times. We do not describe how the world evolves in time. We describe how things evolve in local time and how local times evolve relative to each other. The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It's a network of events affecting each other. This is how time is depicted in Einstein's general theory of relativity. They have innumerable times. Between two events, just as between the two clocks that are separated and then brought together again, the duration is not a single one. Physics does not describe how things evolve in time, but how things evolve in their own times, and how times evolve relative to each other.
SPEAKER_01So maybe everything can maybe even in a way licensed by empirical evidence of physics. Our best theories.
SPEAKER_00And that web of relations amongst this multitude of times is not something that we need to usually pay attention to as we go about our daily living.
SPEAKER_01And yet maybe it is something that supports us in that sense of reclaiming the quote-unquote flow of time into each particular changing thing that's affecting and being affected with each other. We bring it into the web.
SPEAKER_00And so as much as I would, yeah, it'd be pretty fun to be able to do you know experiments where we uh go half the speed of light and see what happens, we're not gonna be, you know, able to perceive, well, I'm not gonna be able to create that experiment for us, and we're not gonna be able to hear uh perceive relativistic effects. So but what we can see for ourselves is if this story from physics and our best theories are our best, you know, current stories of how the world works that have empirical basis. You know, it's not like we're having to go back to Aristotle, we're not having to rely on the Kohen-like writings of Dogen Zenji. We could actually for ourselves see what it's like to feel that sense of instead of one time more innumerable.
SPEAKER_01Everything can be a clock. Everything and anything can be a clock and there's no one clock that's telling the time. Oh Yeah, let's see what it's like to explore this. Okay. Maybe stretch a moment.
SPEAKER_00Ended up. I tried to go a little shorter today, but if I get talking, I just get talking on this. I mean we can strap ourselves in for our exploration and close our eyes and prepare for launch.
SPEAKER_01That a clock at her feet and a clock at our head run at different rates. We're just gonna see if we can't break up a little bit. This sense of a uniform time passing us by. Not that we're gonna feel it. Almost like we can chip away at our expectation. Uh yeah, of course. I'm just sitting, being, and breathing in time. Well, which time? The time at your seat the time at the crown of your head. Between clocks that are just a few centimeters apart, above or below each other in relation to the earth. We can't perceive that.
SPEAKER_00At least I can't perceive that. I don't even want to go there. But noticing the effect that we have with the story we have about time. We're contemplating how there's not just the time at our seat, the time at our crown of our head, but there's the innumerable times all along that length spine.
SPEAKER_01Does it help us in some sense reclaim flow every little part? Every little part of us between our seat and the crown of our head not flowing in a uniform time passing us by, but itself flowing with its own time. Sometimes that helps us to break up some of our preconceptions, but overall, sometimes it's nicer just to go gentle and go with what we actually can touch in on and feel.
SPEAKER_00And for this session in preparation for that, something that I so often so often practice, and for those of you who practice here, I'm on the regular with us, know that I have like this kind of uh foundations, these five-minute intervals that help me to hone in on the immediacy of my experience, I'm a little less thinking about my experience, and more more directly, perceiving, especially the physicality of my own body. We're the experimenter or the instrument or the lab. Or the experiment, and then we bring that more honed instrument into our exploration. So I haven't been doing that, and I think frankly, I've been missing that in these explorations so far. So we'll spend some time just honing in more on the immediacy of our experience and then bring that back into these explorations of all these clocks, all these times, with none being the time.
SPEAKER_01So maybe just starting with a few fuller and deeper breaths, a sense of releasing, releasing on the outbreath and settling more into the support, the ground. Actually rest, lay down into the support. Support beneath. Each one supported up by the one beneath until you reach tailbone, your sit bones. The length that's there in this moment, and that might be expanding and getting a little bit longer as you breathe in. And maybe feeling a little more sense of settling, less space between the vertebrae as you breathe out. And to help with that, we feel the breath going in and out of the nose. This place where we can get in touch with some of the fineness of the way nature flows. At the nose, we can tend to think about change as bigger than it is. Following this flow at our nose, all this changing without a limiting grain size, either in space or in or in time. Just at each moment. Feel the air coming down inside you as you breathe in. And then feeling maybe that downward cascade on the outbreath. And the subtlety of that cascading wave of your body itself. Breathe out. Same for your spine. Breathing out and feeling that. So the underarm area and the space across the chest. Noticing the way that that moves as you breathe. More of a horizontal expansion and release. Sometimes wider sometimes closer together. And now that circumference all around expands comes a bit closer together. The three D volume of your torso. And it fills with a fine free flow of air. And itself is all this fine free flow moving in three D space.
SPEAKER_00One more way to kind of hone our instrument, might like to just flip the hands open.
SPEAKER_01Hands are some of the most sensitive places of our body. Letting each fingertip have a false sense of where it ends and the air begins. Just like when we touch something. We are touching something. It's just very light. We might feel it more as this absence of fingers. There's finger, and then there's where our finger ends, and beyond that finger. Seeing what it might be like to feel how the air is enveloping all of our fingers. Touching all of the surface of our fingers on all sides. The sensitivity they naturally have. And we let ourselves feel them as these flows in space, taking up space they take up right where they are made of free flows just like the air.
SPEAKER_00Not that the air is going in and out there, but awaken that feeling of fine free flow in your fingertips.
SPEAKER_01In your fingers.
SPEAKER_00Take your hands and place them on your torso. Be anywhere that feels good for you. Area, belly area, the lower dantiana a little bit below your belly button, maybe your solar plexus. It really doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01Take a moment and find what feels good for you. And letting our hands be the witnesser. Just to help us where we're not thinking about this thing we call the breath, but we actually feel it. The hands experience through their sensitivity, the movement that happens beneath them. All interacting all relative to each other. If you like and drop the hands or keep them if it helps to not so much think about the breath, we're not even really being mindful of a thing called breathing. Just flows in a web of other flows only. What? I'm just a clock. Maybe feeling into the effect that it has to be able to own being a clock. So all we have is this relative relation of clocks to each other. The web of these rhythms. Or even in all the little changing things, innumerable clocks, all clocking to each other. And if you like taking that further step of not clocking to each other in step to some universal time, since there's innumerable times, innumerable, slightly different rates of clocks, even between the crown of her head and the seat.
SPEAKER_00Flow of time has seemed to monopolize the flow.
SPEAKER_01And then in an exploration like this, it's like this small explosion blossoming of all these particular flows reclaimed from the abstract sense of time passing us by.
SPEAKER_00Not yet, but in a moment. You can I'm just gonna try and prepare this because it's such a shock to the system, I find. So I like it to be gradual. But yeah, so my story was like uh I opened my eyes to check the time and there's such a habitual sense of checking the time and feeling at Feeling that I'm looking at the time.
SPEAKER_01And the way that the time becomes this more abstract tyrant in that moment. Instead of that embodied flow that gets to be mine, I give it back to this sense of abstract time. So to see what it's like for you first just imagine looking at a clock. We'll do so in a moment. And seeing the clock as something that's just not all that different from your breathing. One rhythmic changing thing. And another rhythmic changing thing. Don't even have to be rhythmic, it's just more convenient why we chose the breath today.
SPEAKER_00And that we are just changing together. Neither of us changing in a universal time. So let's see what this is like. Go ahead and open your eyes and let me put the block where it's easy for us all to see.
SPEAKER_01Continuing to feel the flow of your breath. Maybe looking at the second hand as something that is flowing, changing concretely.
SPEAKER_00I raise it up. But we can now empirically have you running a little bit faster.
SPEAKER_01It's not separate.
SPEAKER_00So maybe there's some way here that instead of the sense of time robbing us of more of the immediacy of our experience.
SPEAKER_01A sense of how even this way of exploring time itself with what we know as to what we can know in physics and relativity today can help us to not feel like time is this separate thing that's got the flow. We don't. But that the way of nature is all this flow together.
SPEAKER_00And again, to be really clear about it, because it's not wanting to confuse the experiments here. Whatever we experienced here today uh was not was not due to the relativistic effects of uh uh special or general relativity.
SPEAKER_01But we have these stories.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes we talk about this almost like maps. We have these maps that uh help us navigate and perceive our experience, and for the most part, our default map includes a sense of there's this universal metronome is kind of going along.
SPEAKER_01That's the abstraction of time.
SPEAKER_00I think Newton might get a little unfairly blamed for that, since even Aristotle is pointing that we tend to feel time is passing by, and yeah, Dogan is talking about time passing by, and I don't think he was too influenced by Newton. But for sure, our current day and age tends to have more of that, and Newton can be part of it, even maybe some of how relativity tends to be uh popularized and described as 4D spacetime, uh where here we were really getting at it from that sense of what these dynamic entities experience and what we can empirically measure. So though we you know are not feeling the you know relativistic effects, this is maybe some way similar to uh when we explore the the quantum stories that we can use and use to play with our expectations. What we did today was really to use Einstein's relativity to play with our expectations in our perception, and maybe through that, through letting go of some preconception about abstract time, hopefully licensed by physics, uh, that can be part of it, so we're not feeling like we have to believe something or uh imagine something, but it's really this letting go of a preconception and a letting an arising of for us today a maybe a more immediate experience of the breath, not as happening in time, but as I'll let it be whatever it is that you you experienced, and because I love this one passage so much, I'm going to just reread one thing from Rovelli and go a little further. So this returns to page 65 where time is only a way of measuring how things change, so the Aristotle view, as Aristotle would have it, or should we be thinking that an absolute time exists that flows by itself independently of things? And Wovelli continues, the question we should really be asking is this Which of these two ways of thinking about time helps us to understand the world better?
SPEAKER_01Which of the two conceptual schemes is more efficient? And that's both a question for science is also a question for ourselves. And we'll get more into this next time.
SPEAKER_00Maybe there's ways we can use notesn't have to go all the way to to uh Einstein's relativity, though it's compatible with it.
SPEAKER_01Ways we can use understanding from physics to see that we have options.
SPEAKER_00We actually have options for how we want to uh interpret time, we have valid options, empirically valid options, and then if we have these two valid options according to two physics, then it becomes a question for ourselves, just as Trovelli says, well, which one's right, which one's wrong? Well, the question we should really be asking is this which of these two ways of thinking about time helps us to understand the world better?
SPEAKER_01And that can be meant personally. Which of the two conceptual schemes is more efficient? Or maybe we today even glimpsed a little bit of that for the world of our breathing and how we relate to our breathing. Ah a moment of reflection on your own experience because these are meant to be explorations, experiments in understanding and perception, even the living of time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01How these experiments, these explorations, how did they go for you? Come a bit closer here and see how the time is going over there.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'll begin at the beginning, Elise. Hey, welcome, David. Welcome as always with your fun emojis, Vagabond! Hi, hi, it's good to see you back, Vagabond. Swiss R. Aloha, Mackenzie, aloha, Swiss R. Good to see you too. Vagabond, embarrassing fun fact, I was well into my 30s when I finally realized that the second hand on the clock counted the seconds and was not, in fact, the second the second hand on the clock. Maybe it makes sense. Yeah. So funny languages.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, I'm a genius.
SPEAKER_00It's so interesting. I I don't know if you have memories. I have memories when I first learned to tell the time on uh uh analog. Is that what they called? Watch. And I had they have it like two little characters, you know, like there's the minute hand and the hour hand, and we do just grow up so steeped in uh in time, you know, even at such a young age, especially I think maybe the way school day is uh yeah. I mean, all of our lives are so governed by time. I remember my mom would say, like, 10 more minutes on the playground. Oh, it's up already. Where did the time go? Daddy Red says, uh, thumbs up to Vagabond Tanya, no to self move to the shore.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00So I think that was in response to hearing that. Uh uh time moves moves uh slower. The lower down you go. So yeah. Maybe that's part of the they'll be marketing that as anti-aging uh factors. Nancy, my internal time varies from clock time when injured in a car accident, time moved painfully slow while waiting for an ambulance. A weekend with a dear friend sped by in a moment. Yeah, these are such um interesting observations that we can have about the experience of time, and some of that, and I hope we'll get into it. I don't know how many sessions this will take to explore all I want to explore with time. Some of that is that mixture of our what moments are meaning for us, and can evoke for us even psychologically, and how that may impact our our perception of change. And so while, and this is why I was like saying, like, we're not noticing like the relativistic effects of time here in our meditation. What what I do find so fascinating, and what your comment points to is that we can have so many different perceptions we have options, and a lot of times they kind of we stumble upon them, so we might not necessarily feel that they're options because they're more like circumstance driven, like what you're saying about the. I mean, I'm so sorry that you were ever in an accident. And there's also the things like the flow state, for example, and people feeling uh time disappears even in a flow state, and so like we kind of get these glimpses, like wow, what we usually just take is kind of clicking along can be perceived so variably, and maybe some of that is we can we can begin to practice how well it's not only something we can you know encounter in various circumstances, but there's like this shift in our perspective that we could even practice. I know sometimes when I reclaim the flow of time for my breathing itself as change, as just flow, not flow in time, but just the flow that it is in all these flows, uh it can really seem like time both flies by and takes like a moment of the breathing or a few moments, a small section of the inhale or exhale can seem like a really long time, like it can be both. Um so just always so interesting to explore Swiss or if you ever visit Einstein's home in Bern, capital of Switzerland. Nice. Einstein and the concept of time biographical, a guided tour all about time. Learn interesting facts about the conventional way to measure time and take a closer look at Albert Einstein's insight in the concepts of time. Oh, that sounds that sounds so cool. I uh I live in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein spent um many of his later years at the Institute for Advanced Studies. So there's even like Einstein's home here locally. Ella says everything and everyone can be a clock. Ow. Let me know if I'm saying that right. Is it ow? A H O.
SPEAKER_01So Swiss R repeated that. I think that might be the sound effect. Oh.
SPEAKER_00It's very different than thinking about time. I used to think time is what's pushing these things, right? There's this time thing, and it's flowing, and its flow pushes these things called clocks. Rob says Um, is time an illusion, a human construct? A part of Maya.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um I think this is what we we'll get into more when we talk about the intersection of spirituality.
SPEAKER_01And yeah, I mean part of of Maya.
SPEAKER_00I think you're referring to that um is it the the when Buddha is sitting underneath the the Bodhi tree. Maybe you can tell me more and and there's all these tempers and one is uh Maya. You can you can give the correct story, uh Rob, in the in the chat if you'd like. So and this is where you know the language I think can be really tricky, and especially when we get into some spiritual teachings, but even before then, even before then, you know, it's like, well, what do you mean by time? What exactly are you meaning by time? Um and uh so even here today, uh, for example, you know, we we are not necessarily demolishing time. We're not even necessarily saying there is no time. Um we are saying maybe time is not what you think. And maybe time is so much not what you think that it's really even if you call it time, it's it's something that has a very different meaning. And I hope I hope that that'll be something we'll continue to to tease apart because uh there's some fun instances of some uh comments and dialogues where you're like, wait a second, let's back up here and see what it is that we're actually talking about. Donna has uh has a brilliant blue diamond. Emily, I like it. Our breathing can be a clock. I am a clock. Oh, great. I thought maybe it would be like I'm telling you all you're a clock, and it's like, oh, thanks so much, you know. How how evocative and inspiring, you know, you're you're deuced to a mechanistic clock, but it's not not what I'm trying to point towards. Emily, I'm not the most precise of clocks, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I want to come back to that more. I just want to watch the time because we're going on and on. There I go. Watch the time. Uh Ella. Uh, what was the book we read out of? I'm so glad you asked. So, Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. And he is a theoretical physicist at the uh forefront of new developments in physics, and uh just a a beautiful writer, just uh a real joy to read, so can't recommend highly enough. Um, let's see. Uh Swiss R says, Thank you, McKinsey. Thank you, Swiss R. Moraine. After the last session, an epiphany, I can happily move through the world regarding each thing as its own clock. Feels really liberating. Interesting. So the liberation where it's like everything gets to be its own clock. Emily's gonna help me out with the the uh pronunciation uh-oh. Aho. Aho. Uh SwissR is letting me know Aho is Native American language. I need to look it up. Or you all tell me what is its meaning. David, we once had a radio synchronized alarm clock that was always three minutes slower than everything else. I guess I stopped building a time machine now as I appear to already be one. Yeah. Oh, you gave the so one of the um, I hope we get into uh one of the books is I think called Your Brain Is a Time Machine. So we'll have some fun with that. But my goodness, thank you all for uh yeah, just exploring this with me. It's uh it's something I'm just learning to m more put words to and try and articulate and see ways in of exploring experientially uh in in practice. Even though this has been a practice for me for the last ten years or so. And thinking about it so much, but it hasn't been something that I've talked all that much about. Um, so appreciate this opportunity to share. Alright. Everyone, take care till next time.