The linear view of time is perhaps the least productive and healthy way to experience time. It usually involves anxiety, pressure, and friction, and a division of awareness between the present job and concern with the future--there's always wasted mental and emotional energy. But how does linear time get set up?
The process can be summarized this way:
Some feeling begins to arise in awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy of the heart is lessened and we feel somewhat pressured.
Excess energy flows to the head and a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies as our thinking skips about the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience.
Energy in the area of the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. There's a dissatisfied sense of self trying to seek satisfaction via various objects and activities.
The "time" that is operative in such a lower, constrictive space exhibits some of the characteristics associated with contained gases--the number of interactions increases with a decrease in volume. So our time is characteristically too short and too pressing. We always have to move on. (p. 8, Interview of Tarthang Tulku by Steven Tainer)
Exercises
To check out the single best exercise I know to take the pressure and anxiety out of the way we 'normally' experience time, click here: Breathing exercise. The Clock Watching exercise can show the difference between clock time and our sense of time passing. Lightening Thoughts is a relaxing, slow head rotation exercise that can slow down compulsive thinking and anxiety about time. To break up and slow down the momentum of linear time, try Turn Time Around, or Mental Event Counting.
Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises or readings, please send email to or call Steve Randall at 510-690-0490.
An excerpt from Results in No Time provides some examples about how the American-European perspective of time gets created:
"Timelessness is a natural perspective. Little kids have no feeling of time passing. We learn the habit of experiencing time a certain way, depending on which culture we grow up in. Most of us in the West are so addicted to linear time that we don't know it. Some Western cultures, however--for example, some Native Americans--don't learn to experience time the same way as the rest of us," said Jed. (See Linear vs. Timeless Views.)
"This suggests that our perspectives of time are at least somewhat flexible." Michael leaned back and adjusted his napkin. "Do you have any idea of how our sense of time passing is created?"
"I can give a couple of examples that shed some light on the process. My wife Becky and I were at the end of a wonderful weekend at a lake in Wisconsin. We had both slowed down to the point where we just timelessly looked out on the lake as the sun went down below a cloak of color. But she had to leave on a business trip that evening. After she packed her bags, we said goodbye. I felt very sad. But rather than deal with the sadness, I started thinking about when we'd be together again, a week later. As we put her things into the car I said, 'I miss you already.' And I actually did feel a bit as though she had already left. Time slipped by quickly as I unsuccessfully tried to savor the last moments with her."
"That's very much like the change from timelessness to linear time that I felt when finishing my report a few days ago."
"I think what happened was that I avoided the sadness, and then the repressed sadness energy showed up as my intensified feeling of time passing."
"So the sadness was somehow transformed into a feeling of time?"
"I believe so. It seems that repressed energy like sadness doesn't just disappear, it changes form."
Unwitting Creativity
Jed continued: "Your example of procrastination while writing a report some days ago is probably another good example of how we create or intensify our SOTP."
"SOTP?"
"Sorry, sense of time passing. Our group uses the phrase so much we abbreviate it to SOTP."
The waiter brought their coffee to the table, and Jed continued. "Did you say that before you procrastinated you were timelessly involved in your report writing?"
"Right. I was engrossed, and there was no sense of time passing at all. No conveyor and no sense of past, present, or future."
"Then what happened?"
"I realized that my favorite TV program was coming on soon, and decided to finish the job after the show."
"What happened right before you started thinking about the TV show?"
"Not much. I got to a point in my writing where I was stuck."
"How did you feel?"
"I guess I was confused."
"So it's possible that rather than feel confused, you got distracted and started thinking about the TV show."
"I think you're right."
Then Jed summarized. "So in my case it was sadness, in your case it was confusion, but in either case there was some feeling that we didn't want to feel and attend to. Rather than face the feeling, we started thinking about 'the future', a better future. And soon we ended up being anxiously aware of time passing in the background."
"With a divided attention unable to fully appreciate what was right in front of us," Michael added.
"Before you procrastinated, there was no SOTP at all. There was no conveyor belt at all, no feeling of past, present, and future. By procrastinating you created the conveyor of time, or at least intensifed its flow." (For a more detailed example of how procrastination intensifies our feelings of time flow, see "Turning Procrastination Around.")
"So the energy of the feeling that we don't like is pushed away, and it changes into the experience of time passing between past, present, and future?"
"Yes. The energy isn't lost, it's just changed to a different form."
"Can you say more about this change?"
A Breakdown of the Centers
"We can look at it in terms of the head, throat, and heart energy centers. Avoiding the feeling of confusion creates an imbalance in the flow of energy through these three energy centers. (See Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part I (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1978), pp. 36-8.) The energy flow through the heart center decreases, so we lose some contact with our sensations and feelings. As a result we no longer have the natural fulfillment of full contact with feelings of the heart."
"So I don't enjoy the TV show as much as I could?"
"Right. And in my example, I have little success appreciating the last minutes with my wife."
Jed continued. "The energy flow through the head center increases, showing up as a lot of labeling and thinking about our experience, trying to live in our heads."
"So I'm watching TV, but once in a while I think about getting back to my work."
"And I am thinking about the next time my wife and I will be together."
The throat center becomes agitated--then we have the experience of time with a dissatisfied self in the foreground.
The waiter brought the bill to the table, and Jed picked it up and went on with his explanation. "The energy flow through the throat center, which is closely associated with our SOTP, becomes agitated. So we then have the experience of time flowing in the background between past, present, and future, with a dissatisfied self in the foreground seeking some kind of satisfaction."
"Perhaps by watching TV."
"A good example. The self reaches out for satisfaction, looking to other people to fulfill desires, or seeking out special things and activities. The self looks forward to things, but then has difficulty fully appreciating them."
"So the commonly perceived structure of time is actually a transformation of energy that we don't like."
SOTP Stops Us
"And I would go so far as to say that that repressed energy is all that constitutes the common experience of time. The sum total of our SOTP seems to come from having previously resisted these energies."
Jed put his credit card on the table and continued. "It's quite a remarkable creation. Something that feels so real, yet is fabricated one small feeling at a time."
"That's all there is to it? There's no part of our SOTP that matches a standard external flow of physical time? Isn't our internal flow somehow tracking a 'real' flow rate at which external events occur?"
"I don't believe so. The idea of a fixed or constant rate for time is simply part of the linear view that we teach each other, as we discussed earlier. Scientists have never discovered anything like a standard flow of time in nature. ("The flow of time is clearly an inappropriate concept for the description of the physical world that has no past, present and future." Thomas Gold, "Relativity and Time" in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, ed. R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith (New York: Pergamon, 1977), p. 100.) In fact these days they say that time is relative to the observer."
Michael was silent awhile. "That's very interesting. I guess I've always thought that my SOTP somehow reflected the 'real', constant rate at which all events happen."
"Yes, that's what we learn. Then we go even farther and teach that if our SOTP doesn't closely match some imagined rate of events, it's faulty and 'inaccurate'."
"I know what you mean. We use the phrase 'losing track of time' to indicate a kind of negligence when our SOTP doesn't 'accurately track' the imagined external flow of time."
Michael recalled the previous point. "So the sum total of our SOTP is repressed energy from having resisted things."
"And unfortunately it's carried forward to whatever we're doing. So I think we can say that our SOTP is a measure of how much we're holding back from whatever we're doing, how much we feel separate from an activity."
"Is that another guiding principle?"
"Yes. 'SOTP measures how much you're separate from what's happening.' Whenever we find ourselves living out a scenario where time seems like a threat or a drag, the principle can remind us of other possibilities."
A Psychoanalyst's Interpretation of the Origin of Our Perception of Time
"The experience or sense of time, and later the perception of time as an attribute of objective reality, is a function of consciousness. It grows along with consciousness, beginning with the differentiation of the self from the object world.What gradually establishes the sense of time as duration, and more or less coincidentally as temporal perspective, is the felt inadequacy of the self in terms of growing unpleasure and the awareness of the possibility that the need-fulfilling object--mother--may or may not come." (pp. 5-6, Time and Timelessness, by Peter Hartocollis. International Universities Press, Inc., New York, 1983)
The Ending of Pain and Time
In this edited dialog between J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm, Krishnamurti explains how the flow of time starts, and broaches the possibility of ending psychological time:
K: Now how am I . . . to be free of time? . . . Can time as thought come to a stop? The memory of experiences, hurts, attachments . . . can come to an end when the very perception asks, what is it? What is hurt? What is psychological damage? The perception of it is the ending of it. Not carrying it over, which is time. The very ending of it is the ending of time. . . .
Trying to understand Krishnamurti's proposition, David Bohm focuses the discussion on a specific example of being hurt:
DB: The first thing is that there has been a hurt. That is the image [of 'me' being hurt], but at first I don't separate it. I feel identified with it.
K: I am that.
DB: I am that. But then I draw back, and say that I think there must be a 'me' who can do something.
K: Yes, can operate on it.
DB: Now that takes time.
K: That is time. . . . Let's go slowly into it. I am hurt. That is a fact. Then I separate myself--there is a separation--saying, I will do something about it.
DB: The 'me' who will do something is different. . . . It projects into the future a different state.
K: Yes. I am hurt. There is a separation, a division. The 'me', which is always pursuing the becoming [In this dialog, the word 'becoming' refers to the ego trying to become something], says, I must control it. I must wipe it out. I must act upon it . . . . So this movement of separation is time." (p. 72)
DB: . . . A person is thinking that the hurt exists independently of 'me', and I must do something about it. I project into the future the better state and what I will do. . . So I am hurt and I will become non-hurt. Now that very thought maintains the hurt.
K: That's right. . . .
DB: Now if you don't maintain it, what happens? Suppose you say, I won't go on with this becoming?
K: Ah, that is quite a different matter. It means I am no longer thinking, no longer observing, or using time as an observation.
DB: You could say that is not your way of looking. It is not your theory any more.
K: That's right. . . .
DB: Because you could say time is a theory which everybody adopts for psychological purposes.
K: Yes. That is the common factor; time is the common factor of man. And we are pointing out time is an illusion . . .
DB: Psychological time.
K: Of course, that is understood.
DB: Are you saying that when we no longer approach this through time, then the hurt does not continue?
K: It does not continue, it ends--because you are not becoming anything.
DB: In becoming you are always continuing what you are.
K: That's right. Continuing what you are, modified . . .
DB: If man feels something is out of order psychologically he then brings in the notion of time, and the thought of becoming, and that creates endless problems. [This last statement is from p. 23.]
Excerpted from pp. 69-73 of The Ending of Time, by J. Krishnamurti & David Bohm (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).
Another Explanation of Time
In the following quotes from Dynamics of Time and Space, Tarthang Tulku uses the word time in a broader sense than just psychological or linear time, as the word is used in the above excerpt from The Ending of Time. With this provision, however, one can see remarkable similarities in content.
When we lose contact with time, we have cut the dynamic central to our lives. . . . Subjectively, there is the sense that time is flickering, like a film not properly adjusted on its reel . . . . There is strain that goes nowhere. . . .
These structures are in place before consciousness fully forms. . . . they give rise to nervous agitation or uneasy pain . . . .
If the momentum of time's forward conducting persists, the agitation and its underlying 'flickering' intensify. Suddenly there is an abrupt break, as if the reel of film . . . had snapped. Everything freezes--movement vanishes. . . . Pain has been transformed into the fixed and rigid structures of linear time. Consciousness emerges into a temporal order in which time is a hostile force . . . . Time in its pastness grinds us down . . . feeding us the lifeless recordings of the past and the seductive fascinations of the future.
Caught in this fabricated past and future, we are divided against ourselves. Our knowledge and energy are spread across the linear length of the temporal order. Thus, when we set a goal, we assign a part of our constructed identity to that goal. Now it is as though a part of us was 'out there' in the future along with our projection, pinned against the temporal horizon of the present moment.
Increasingly confined, we find it deeply disturbing just to inhabit the successive moments of our lives. . . . The specific 'point' of time that we occupy lacks all capacity to hold time's dynamic. Life goes out of the present, drained away 'across' time.
We may respond by withdrawing into a dull numbness that has a quality almost like being shocked or stunned. . . . In our worn-out dullness, we are like a baby that has cried itself into exhausted sleep.
If we could awaken at this point to the feeling of pain, we would actually be close to the original dynamic of the time that we have lost. But this alternative is not available, for we are too closely identified with the pain. As 'I' merge with 'having the pain', I become the victim of what objectified time has presented. I possess the pain and am possessed by it; in this feedback I repossess it, tightening its hold. Awareness arises only in the wake of recognition, and so can lead only in the direction of further identification.
Accepting the reality of the pain assures its continuation. (pp. 295-7)
Through a direct focus on the painness of pain, this ready interpretation can be recast or re-projected. If there is no 'I' as subject--no one making efforts with regard to the pain--there will be no pain to be identified. As pain enters experience and is projected into awareness, it is received without labels and identifications and reactions. There is nothing to be conditioned and no one to be caught. Without the subjective framework, pain is stripped of its solidity.
. . . In this new arriving of what time presents, the logic of temporality defeats itself. The past is gone, the future not yet arrived, the present too short: 'I' am nowhere. (p. 305)
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