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A
BRIDGE TO THE BODY OF TIME
Tarthang
Tulku
Imagine past,
present, and future as three spheres or atoms, nesting within one another. In
one sense, each
has its own nucleus; in
another sense, they share a common nucleus but maintain their own independent
qualities. In either case, there is no fixed order to the nesting: As past,
present, and future interact in nuclear time, they exchange places with one
another, expressing the dynamic rhythm of interactions that remain non-dimensionalized.
The spheres
are not static, nor are their borders circumscribed. We could imagine their
movement as an ongoing rippling outward in waves. This movement is itself
nuclear, going nowhere, defining no direction. Yet it also expresses the
transmission through space of the emerging energy of an 'originating' point.
In the
shifting interaction of the spheres, each affects and reflects the others,
contributing to the originating energy they all manifest. This energy in turn
reflects their inner connection, unfolding as a nuclear force. As this nuclear
force radiates outward, the trinity transmits forward, becoming a dynamic
unity. In the truth of this transmission through time and space, one point is
all points, one time all times.
Conventional
experience invites us to look past the beauty of this interweaving intimacy.
To accept this invitation is something like focusing on a particular pattern
established by the waves as they ripple outward. A specifying knowledge takes
hold: The mind forms impressions, gives meanings, marks out points, designates
dimensions. Mind to mind we pass on what has been seen, and in time the seen
claims to be the real. But this is only one possible conducting. We could also
see it differently.
Magic
of Manifestation
Although
conventional consciousness excludes the inner dynamic of nuclear time,
knowledge of impermanence invites it back again. Our usual understanding of
impermanence is rough and undeveloped, but a deeper understanding emerges when
we focus more closely. If we are sensitive to the instantly disappearing
compound nature of time past, time present, and time future - ' gone again'
from moment to moment - the strong awareness comes that experience is its own
compounded transition. Without undermining what appears, reality exhibits
its insubstantiality. In one sense the rational structures of time collapse
into incoherence; in another sense they are unaffected. We can let go of our
attachment to the rational together with the wish to reject or
transcend
the rational; let go of old forms together with the impulse to reject old
forms.
Once we
let go of the substantial, we are left with the magic of manifestation.
Marvelously we interpret and experience; mysteriously time exhibits and
projects. Engaged with this dynamic mystery, this inexhaustible openness, we
are close to nuclear time.
Time
reveals mystery whenever it presents appearance. This is the truly special
magic of time: The mystery can be fully revealed and still remain mystery.
Nothing must remain in hiding; nothing insists on obscuration. Knowledge is
honored in its appearing without being reduced to something less than the
unknown. Presence requires no deeper absence as its source. Time's 'going on'
also 'goes beyond': It is simply so.
We can let
this present mystery of time pervade experience; let it color each moment and
call into question every claim. We can invite a knowledge that condenses and
enriches the mystery that is living reality. We can extend mystery into the
mystical.
Imbued with
mystery, knowledge can know the energy body: the being of appearance toward
the future. Here 'forward' and 'back' are the same: What was will be and is.
In this unity, energy ripples, space vibrates, and sky reveals. As in
art or dance, music or drama, an emerging dynamic accumulates and disperses,
going different ways, pursuing no goal. Heading nowhere, rivers return to the
ocean. The drama is acted out, an expression of knowledge and time manifesting
through space.
Only
ordinary understanding is mystified by this 'ongoing' mystery play that enacts
and informs our being here; only the structures of consciousness insist on covering
over the mystery with the familiarity of the previously recorded. Inward
knowledge cuts through the mists of mystification. It rekindles the light of
the phenomenal within phenomena. It offers the mystical as wholly available,
rejecting incomprehensibility and ineffability for the sake of
knowledgeability. Alive in time, inward knowledge allows experience to project
forward as an instant of intimate images, wholly communicable without having
to be communicated: the direct experience of time itself. In this ongoing
going on, mystery itself is rededicated as the truth of experience.
Knowing Interacting
Mechanisms
Inward
knowledge of time is also the 'inward knowing outward' of eknosis: knowledge
not bound by the field communique. Eknosis departs from the surface and its
rhythms of friction. Instead of moving within the structures of linear time,
it joins freely in the conducting of those structures.
With the
availability of eknosis, we can trace the substance and certainty of
conventional experience - for example, the world as given through sense
perception to the operation of certain temporal mechanisms, such as cause
and effect or the interaction between the mental and the physical. Instead of
taking these mechanisms and the temporal structures they presuppose at face
value, eknosis turns their presentation 'inward'. As the
present
presents itself, eknosis 'goes' in the direction of its 'presentness'.
Ultimately, there is no going at all. We discover that time's transmission is
not movement in this conventional sense.
Eknosis de-dimensionalizes
time, collapsing linear. ity into the unity of the nuclear. The temporal
mechanisms that give order to appearance appear 'alongside' the things
or events they purport to order. We can still speak
of the usual mechanisms, but our statement will no longer 'carry weight' or
establish the actuality of the mechanism designated. It is something like
analyzing the spatial relationships portrayed in a painting: The analysis can
be fruitful and illuminating, but the 'space' being analyzed has no existence.
The Appearance of Time
As an example
of such analysis, let us look to the 'underlying' mechanism of recording
through which the past projects forward the 'happeneding' of the present. We
soon discover an array of particular mechanisms in operation, accounting for
specific kinds of knowledge. The retina records and transmits light; the mind
records and transmits thoughts; chemical reactions in the body record and
transmit the interaction of various molecules; the subject records
interactions with independent objects. As these recordings play into one
another, fixed forms of cognition and specific events arise, giving us the
world that we know.
Knowing
through eknosis, we do not engage these forward-projecting recordings. We see
that whatever we
point to as the source
of a specific recording is more accurately understood as the prerecorded
content of other recordings. Instead of recording 'something', recordings
point only to one another.
This
pointing back and forth is itself a mechanism, appearing 'alongside'
everything else. As we look from within nuclear time, we discover layer upon
layer of such mutual pointings. Investigating this layering in turn, we
discover still more mechanisms, each active 'alongside' the events they claim
to account for. Eventually our inquiry leads us to the mechanism of linear
time itself.
Seen as
a mechanism, linear time does not present experience at all. Appearance arises
through the intricate interplay of interacting mechanisms, but this interplay
is itself another mechanism. There is no causal structure that accounts for
appearance. Events do not appear in any order: They 'pop up' almost
accidentally, together with the rules that claim to govern their arising. Not
only cause and effect, but also persistence 'over' time, transitions 'in'
time, and changes 'through' time cannot be isolated out as pre-existing.
Instead, they are a part of appearance. There is no time of creation, no
presenting, no enduring, and no decay. Even 'appearing' appears alongside of
what appears.
From this
perspective, we could say that appearance, together with the underlying
'order' that sustains appearance, could be different in the next moment. But
even the claim that there will be a next moment is the outcome of a particular
interpretation. In its alongsideness, time has no opportunity to situate and
measure out. As the temporal order develops and appearance plays out
variations, nothing is established. Existence cannot come into being; time
cannot 'make its point'.
The Infinite Unique
If there is
nothing to engage with, no product of a process, how is linear time itself
established as a governing principle of experience? One possible answer is
that time is not established at all. There is simply the random alongsideness
of all that appears - including the mechanism that presents this appearance as
changing from moment to moment.
We could also
offer a different description. With no established appearance, there is the
infinity of the universal unique: a wholeness without a beginning, an
appearance without a source. Within that whole, various rhythms express and
move, giving both possible and impossible and the distinction between them:
presenting without limitation.
We could name
this unlimited 'rhythm expression' the Body of Time. Alive with different
qualities, the Body of Time transitions the appearance of what appears.
Without confirming division, it allows for the conceptual separation into past
and present and future. It enacts the experience that confirms these
distinctions, quantifying and measuring.
Measuring
itself is an expression of this rhythm energy. Experienced inwardly and known
outwardly, the
Body of Time 'remains'
pointless, yet presents all points. There is the locating of subject and
object, the activity of observation and prediction, and the availability of
knowledge as data for specific purposes. Past and present and future give form
to the whole, allowing it to emerge in accord with specified mechanisms.
As
'compartments' of time, past, present, and future cannot be engaged
separately, even though we imagine that this is what we do. Their rhythms form
a unity that echoes the universal unique - a rhythm infinitely divisible
through the operation of concepts and experience, yet never departing from
unity into manifestation.
If we think
of the unity of time as being like a sphere, the temporality we establish is
like slicing through the sphere. The first layer that the slice reveals will
invariably be the past, but the slicing will always be threefold, giving the
present and future as well.
In this
'dimensioning out' of what is unitary, time shifts its shape. It stretches
into a linearity that can communicate the recorded forward, and it presents
the past as a storehouse for the patterns from which we will construct the
whole. But this reshaping of time is an artifact of the act of dimensioning.
The unity of time suggests something quite different.
Emerging into
time's wholeness, we discover a world infinite in its measured-out
manifestations - far richer in its possibility than we have ever imagined. But
the infinite unique cannot be measured. It is the activating medium of
measurement: the heart of time. Since this is so, time itself can also not be
measured. When we measure out time and specify time's manifestations, this is
not the Body of Time.
For each
apparent mechanism that unfolds 'in' time, there is a fitting knowledge. Then
what is the knowledge suitable to the Body of Time? Since nothing is
established, knowledge cannot inquire into lineage. Since nothing develops, it
cannot trace the processes that have brought us to this present moment, or the
future that is yet to unfold. It cannot link to concepts, properties, and
distinctions, all of which are products of the 'lower-level' mechanisms in
operation.
Perhaps the
question is wrongly framed, for it presupposes established distinctions. The
Body of Time does not establish, but rather invites. Whatever we imagine the
possibilities for knowledge to be, the Body of Time envisions and expands a
fuller understanding.
There are
questions that can activate this expansion: active agents of the Body of Time.
What is beyond the cosmos? What does light reveal when there are no objects to
reflect it? Where can we go if 'from' is fused with 'to'? What properties do
we discover when nothing appears? What meaning does our life assume when there
are no more stories to tell?
Pointless Body
When the
structures of linearity collapse into nuclear time, we inhabit the inwardness
of time. Its dynamic and aliveness, its capacity to measure out and to allow
for measuring are all equally accessible - as though we
could see on every level
at once. In the universal unique, this active dwelling in availability
is specified as the Body of Time.
'Pointless',
without limitation, the rhythms of the Body of Time pulse with a dynamic that
does not need to be shaped or structured. The world can be revisioned as a
rhythmic interacting of past, present, and future, no longer rigidly divided
by linear temporal sequencing. In this new vision, distinctions come from
wholeness and remain within wholeness. A magically divisible manifesting is
freely open to the constructs of concept and experience, to the relations we
infer, the positions we adopt, the ways we organize and distinguish. Past and
present and future are reconfigured - varying sensitivities or modes of
responsiveness to the rhythms of the Body of Time.
Experience
within linear time can become an opening to the freedom of this revisioned
reality, for the Body of Time remains undisturbed by our propensities toward
structure. Since its rhythms pronounce no truths, it rejects no claims. Time
itself, even structured in accord with linear rigidities, remains pointless.
When we learn to look through time, the countless manifestations
that shape and express 'experience simply exemplify time's unitary power.
The less
we insist, the closer we draw to the invisible energy of the Body of Time: the
creative impulse through which appearance itself manifests. Allied with this
creative force, we approach each challenge with new resources. Nothing is
strictly impossible, for nothing is firmly established. There are new
interactions, new connections: an unrestrained play of emerging arisings.
A Vision of Projection
As a vision
of time's active engagement, we could imagine a nameless arising: waves of
energy propagating through a field. Nothing is specified - not energy, not
field, not arising. Even the naming we use to point out is provisional.
Through their
magnitude and amplitude, the spreading waves project the structures of the
known universe. Waves and microwaves embody space and involve time,
communicate sensory capacities, and sense the data that is made available. The
power of their projection encompasses the one who feels and senses, the acts
of touching and thinking, and the content of the physical.
Through this
field communique, a continuum of presentation forms, feeding on itself.
Appropriate mechanisms arise to bar all gaps or discontinuities; to assure
that nothing is lost or left out. The field affirms its own modality, shaping
form and content in recording it. A multiplistic language is generated,
comprehensive in its application, universal in its comprehension.
The
record of this propagation founds the genealogy of what appears. At the root
and the outset, in the' genes' that give form to each specification, there is
microscopic projection: the microwaves of the multiply recorded.
Generating
and regenerating, the active projection of recording is itself recorded in
appearance. As genealogy
is established with
perfect certainty, recorded time goes forward - the medium through which
projection can propagate. What is recorded gives a way that works: provisional
at first, but then authenticated beyond recalling. Each topic, each specified
object, is the segregated subject of a seamless instigation.
In this
multiple creation, linear time has already unfolded, its momentum unalterable,
its capacity to measure awaiting application. The time of perception traces in
accord with the recorded genealogy, establishing the realm of what has been
recorded, founding. a certain knowledge. There is no longer time available for
transformation or for a deeper knowing.
Yet in the
forming of the mechanism, the propagation of the wave, another time is active:
the inner time of recording, never itself recorded. To discover this time is
to access the genes of regeneration and empower the refounding of the Body of
Time.
Within
appearance, the time of recording does not readily emerge, but the record of
its genealogy is readily available. Tracing this genealogy, alert to each
arising, we sense that all of recorded time - from beginningless beginning to
endless end - has unfolded without ever touching the heart of time.
In this
emerging insight, time is activated. Our own heart opens, and our mind moves
toward clarity. Now we can trace the genealogy of what appears into unexpected
realms. We can even alter the genetics of its patterning. The power and
potential are present to restore the source without arrangement. In this
sourceless arising, this inward conducting, there is projecting before
projection. In this persistence of the possible, the boundlessly creative
presents.
Inwardly
conducted, time allows for encountering reality before specification. Light
reveals, making available infinite riches to be recorded here and now. Projecting
projects in a magical multiplication, wholly inexhaustible and indeterminate,
not requiring any other force or attribution.
Infinitely
extendable, wholly unlimited, boundless time immeasurable arises and arises,
with no turning back and no possibility for reduction. Creating as it extends,
in its uniqueness it cannot be other than complete. It is at once a source of
founding what appears and a resource for a knowledge deeper than founding.
Light
Bridge into Time
The strong
and rigid structures of linear time are the bridge for crossing over to such a
possibility. To make this 'move', discipline is required. But it cannot be our
discipline, nor can we be the ones who arrive. For 'my experience' is bound to
time's linear momentum, and 'my doing' is bound to all that presents itself in
time.
A
new experiencer is called for - not the self, not mind or consciousness or any
other agent of the self - an experiencer attuned directly to the energy of the
present. A way presents itself: The experiencer can be transformed directly
into light.
We hear
this claim as mysterious and mystical, for we exclude it as a possibility for
ourselves. But there is no mysticism in sunlight, and the light we are naming
now is more accessible than the brightest shining of the most perfect day. It
is light at its simplest and most direct, 'present' wherever there is not
simply darkness.
Each
perception can be a 'light bridge' crossing over to the Body of Time. Light
can loosen and transform the essential character of perception, freeing
perception and the senses from the static and rigid structures so
comprehensively reflected in our consciousness.
Through light
we can reach the other side of time. In the present presence of light, the
bridge to 'presentness' opens. As the voices of our naming fall still, a
silent light leads toward silent time.
Silent light
penetrates the surface of time. Going inward, going 'beyond' inward, it
arrives at the Body of Time. Having crossed over the light bridge, having arrived,
we find that we have also returned. Our journey yields knowledge. We can
experiment in the present and plan for the future with changed awareness.
Silent
light transmits silent time as the operator of different attributes of
knowledge. Time in turn transmits the knowledge of inner silence. A silent
feedback values newly; takes us to the root. We need no longer play out the
same patterns. Our old patterns, our old ways of being, are placed in
question. If we wish - if that is our intention - we can change them freely.
Dynamics
of Time and Space
Mindfire