Wherever we go, there we are

Hello everyone, happy holidays. Talking of which, I was contemplating this prayer the other day, one of the four immeasurables:

May no one ever be separated from their happiness.

This is often explained as referring to the happiness of humans and gods, but it struck me that it also refers to the indestructible source of happiness within us, the natural peace of our own mind that, once completely uncovered, spontaneously transforms into the supreme inner peace of enlightenment. Everybody has “their happiness” inside them already; we are just separated from it by our dualistic appearances. We spend day and night chasing happiness outside of ourselves, but that is not where it is. If we follow Buddha’s advice to get rid of our delusions and mistaken appearances, we will end up no longer cut off from our happiness but one with it.

The deeper story

Here I am (albeit at the time of writing last freezing January) in yet another café, where, in a testament to how New Yorky I am becoming, I in fact asked to squish in next to two strangers. So nice these two guys are too, they arranged their coats on the seat around me, ‘We are building you a nest!”

One is giving advice to the other, who has just joined their workplace in a potentially stressful role:

Get to an anchor point. The world will shift and turn but that is where my energy really lies. It works for me. I hope it works for you.

Is he referring to connecting to our naturally peaceful heart-mind?! Or perhaps just finding a decent apartment?! … for that flash of wisdom has now been replaced with a conversation about real estate in New York and how much they’d love a bigger apartment but it’s never going to happen. Ah, back to some philosophy, this time from the other guy:

“Do I know what’s going to happen in a year’s time, or even tomorrow? No, obviously. We just have to take it day by day. Things have worked out, though. It blows my mind.” And the other one: “We are going to be knocked down and get back up again. That’s life. We may never be millionaires, that’s ok.” They’re in a grand old mood! And, once again, I want to let these guys know that there’s a Buddhist Center just around the corner as I’m pretty sure they’d enjoy it.

Fighting against time

Time can feel crushing if we don’t have enough of it, if we feel we need to be in multiple places to avoid failing in our responsibilities, or, alternatively, if we are enjoying something that we really don’t want to be over. Space can also seem to compress us for similar reasons. Back to the original article that started off my musings on addressing the sometimes overwhelming sense of time and space, I like the way Klein and Burkeman discussed this:  

Ezra Klein: For most of human history, a quarter or more of infants died. Half of everybody died before they were 15. Or, when you look at, say, my great-grandparents fleeing pogroms, it’s fair to think: Who cares if you have a lot of emails? I’m sure you hear this a lot. How do you think about it?

This reminds me of the constant need to retain perspective by panning out to human history and society. Has there ever been a time or is there ever going to be a place in which humans have no human problems? Namely birth, sickness, ageing, death, not finding what we want, getting what we don’t want, and an underlying dissatisfaction? If we pan out, we can see the wood for the trees and develop renunciation, as opposed to worrying about one disruption after another.

Burkeman replies with one modern take on these timeless human sufferings:

Burkeman: [Laughs.] “I don’t think I’m making the case that on every metric life is worse today — or even on almost any metric that life is worse today. But the sense of fighting against time, the sense of being hounded by or oppressed by time — that is a very modern thing. I think it’s a thing that people in the medieval period, for example, just wouldn’t have had to trouble with. This specific sense of racing against time — of trying to get on top of our lives and in control — and to make this the year when we finally master the situation of doing our jobs or being parents or spouses or anything else — is a really specific, acute modern phenomenon that has to do with how we relate to time.”

A better way to relate to time

To recap the last article on this subject, Stretchy time, space and time are mere appearances, nothing behind, that arise from the interplay of causes, conditions, and the mind. Therefore, they lack inherent or objective existence – existence from their own side – and exist only as projection by thought. This means that there is in truth no time to race or fight against, no time to control, no time hounding us.

On the other end of that spectrum, feeling that we have too much time to fill and wasting it in meaningless pursuits, Thoreau said:

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Which makes sense in terms of needing to use our precious human life to set up our endless future lives. But there is in truth also no time to waste or kill.

Time and space, like everything, are dependent relationships. To understand how something is dependent-related and therefore empty of inherent existence, we first need to have some general idea of what that thing is. Here are just a few ideas for starters …

What is time?

We divide time into seconds, minutes, hours … days, weeks, years … morning, afternoon, evening …

We divide time into now, later, before … past, present, future …

Time can be a measurement, it can have economical value, it can have personal value.

Time can have subjective characteristics: quality time, waste of time, enjoyable time, ‘time went so fast,’ ‘it seemed an eternity.’ What is a second to the Olympic athlete about to go for gold versus a second to a bored teenager?

Time is interconnected with space, with events (cause-effect), with feelings, and, most importantly, with thought.

We define time as a flow, a progression, a dimension, a parameter. The Oxford dictionary defines it as “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” In other words, we seem to “travel through time and space”, envisaging time rather like train tracks stretching out behind and in front of us.

According to Buddhism, however, time is not like a soup in which things take place but a characteristic of impermanent phenomena. There is no past and future, like train tracks, but there are pasts of things and futures of things – for example, you in this present moment have a past and have a future, although past you(s) and future you(s) do not exist. (More about that here: Ten ways to be in the moment.]

What is space?

One way to define space is as “a boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction.” Space can be associated with matter, time, and other conditions.

Space has 3 dimensions: length, width, and height.

Space can be divided into 10 directions –  the 8 cardinal directions and above and below.

Space can be empty or occupied.

Space can be produced or unproduced.

Space can look light or dark, have color or be transparent.

We can refer to small spaces, vast space, outer space, inner space.

We can divide space into areas, regions.

We have maritime space, air space, interstellar space, intracellular space.

We can talk subjectively about living space, “give me some space,” “that feels spacey!”

Time and space are empty

We can understand from these descriptions that time and space exist in dependence upon countless other factors — and this means that they lack independent or inherent existence. We cannot point at time or space without pointing at something that is not time and space, they are not objectively there, or outside the mind.

Bear with me — contemplating the emptiness of time and space requires some thinking power, but it’s also a really uplifting thing to do! With very positive results in terms of releasing our uncomfortable grasping at time and space. (And for any Tantric practitioners amongst you, it also helps us to meditate on the first bringing.)

We can spell this out to ourselves step by step in the traditional meditation on emptiness called “the four essential points”. Here is more in general on the four essential points for those of you unfamiliar with this meditation: Reasoning our way into reality. And I’ll get onto applying these to time and space in the next article.

Meanwhile, your comments are warmly invited!