Hi, This discussion is about time. what is it? Is it real? because when you really think about it at one level, as I was just waking up today I had this idea that maybe it is not exactly real, because really when you think about it, the earth spins , as it spins freely you have day and night, depending on where you are when one side of the earth is facing the sun, then things react to the sun. The plants do photosynthesis and as we have seen much of life depends on plants and cyanobacteria, the life flourishes and everything gets activated and then night approaches, the energy of the sun installed into earth in various forms persists until that side of earth faces the sun again and life flourishes some more... everything gets activated again, and then night falls then like a battery powered engine, the life keeps going at night- only at a slower rate. It happened a million years ago, it is happened yesterday and it is happening today , and it will happen tomorrow, whats really changing?
Time does not exist. There is no past, because that moment is gone. There si no future, it has not come yet. The present alone is. And when there is no past or future, the term 'present' loses its meaning, because time ceases to exist. Al that exists is existence itself.
Bhaskar, your comment made me think of the lyrics from RENT: "The heart may freeze Or it can burn The pain will ease If I can learn There is no future There is no past I live this moment as my last There's only us There's only this Forget, regret Or life is yours to miss No other road No other way No day but today I can't control My destiny I trust my soul My only goal Is just to be.... There's only now There's only here Give in to love Or live in fear No other path No other way No day but today"- "Another Day"- Rent, Jonathan Larson
::nods:: That play has great lyrics...they def. have much wisdom and hope between the lines. Here's another bit of wisdom from Jonathan Larson: "525,600 minutes 525,000 moments so dear 525,600 minutes, How do we measure a year? In daylights? In Sunsets? In midnights? In cups of coffee? In inches ? In miles ? In laughter? In strife? In 525,600 minutes? How do we measure a year in the life? How about love? How about love? Measure in love. Seasons of love. 525,600 minutes 525,000 journeys to plan 525,600 minutes How do you measure the life of a woman or a man In truths that she learned? Or in times that he cried? In the bridges he burned? Or the way that she died? Its time now to sing out, Though the story never ends Let's celebrate, remember a year in the life of friends Remember the love Remember the love Remember the love (Measure. Measure you life in love!) Measure in love. Seasons of love. In diapers? Report cards? In spoked wheels? In speeding tickets? In contracts? Dollars? In funerals? In births? In 525,600 minutes? How do you figure a last year on year? Figure in love Figure in love Figure in love. Measure in love. Seasons of love."- "Seasons of Love, A and B"- Rent, Jonathan Larson
I think time is synonymous with change; if nothing ever changed, time would stop. And measurements of time in hours and minutes is just the observation of a localized change on a clock.
Only in an unreal or illusory universe could time be thought of as an illusion. It is one of the basic conditions of all existence. It's easy to say there is no past or future, but actually, is there a present? It seems impossible to pin it down. Jedi, you say everything is as it was a million years ago, but that's just not so. A million years ago there were no humans for example. In somewhat less than another million, humans may well have disappeared again. The sun too has lost billions of tons of mass since those times. Looking at a smaller timescale, once there were vast subterranean caverns filled with mineral deposits such as crude oil, the formation of which proceeded over millenia. Soon all that will be gone. When that day arrives it will be useless to protest that time is an illusion, or that nothing really changes. Same goes for our own forms - the body and mind are continually changing and evolving. Nothing is static. What changes? Everything.
Actually time is the enemy of existence. Anything ruled by time ceases to exist. Try to follow me here: 1. A property of an object is something that is always with it - all times, all places, to all observers. 2. As you yourself put it, the world is constantly changing. Things take form, things shed form. They come in and out of existence. There is nothing within time that has always existed and will always exist. 3. From 1 & 2 he logical conclusion is that existence (or reality) is not an intrinsic quality of any object of the world. However, that does not mean that it is illusory or completely unreal. The world borrows its existence or reality from existence itself, just as any object that is visible is not visible by it's own right, but only visible because of the light that falls on it and is reflected. This would indicate the presence of a higher entity, which is of the nature of existence, of the nature of reality, of the nature of truth, a causeless cause. Brahman, Buddha nature, the Tao... these are names men have given the infinite, albeit the infinite is beyond names.
Strange logic if you ask me. Reality (as I understand the term) doesn't mean eternally existing. A thing can be real and only exist for a nano second. Fixity is unreal - process is real. And the universe is one vast set of processes. But point #1 also makes me wonder - I actually disagree that a thing will always seem the same to all observers, for several reasons. Firstly, the act of cognition is only partly a result of sense perception. The percept is only rendered intelligible by being 'decoded' by the mind. There is no reason to assume that all spieces, or even all humans, would see the same object in the same way. Even in the everyday universe one can see for example that a human and a fly must have a very different perception of the world. (partly because although both are within the flow of universal time, the inner tempo is different). To say existence itself is the reason for each separate object existing is obvious. But is it any more than a mental abstraction? And where does it lead us? To the experience of un-conditioned being, might be one reply. But we can't be in the universe and wholly submerged in un-conditioned being at one and the same time, because once it enters the field of manifestation, all being is conditioned. One can say that objects derive their existence from un-conditioned being, however, I can't see that in any sense that means the objects themselves are not real. (there are other questions here too - such as Plato's notion of a world of archetypes existing on a higher level from which things here derive their being and form - I seem to recall something similar in Prabhupada, where he says everything here is like a dim reflection of a higher world, a kind of second rate copy) If there were no universe, there could obviously be no objects. And since all objects are on closer investigation found to be actually processes, it seems that without time there could be no existence at all, other than un-conditioned existence in a timeless eternity, which is patently not the experience of life in the world. Because a thing derives it's being ultimately from God, doesn't mean that only God exists. Nor does the total reality of this world mean that God doesn't exist. Both God and the world are realities, and in the world, time is absolute king, or even dictator.
well, the idea i was trying to propose or bring up is that on a large scale, nothing really happens. You can say universe expands and collapses again and then expands... like Steven Hawkings tries to speculate in "Brief history of Time" ... still it is just a continuous cycle. and it will go through it over and over and over and over again. Maybe there are minute changes, but do they really matter at the end, when you start over again? but then you have karma... I don't know, this entire thing is confusing.
I'm not surprised you think it's confusing - it's really not very useful to imagine that nothing really happens, since both you and I are part of that 'nothing' which isn't taking place. Hence, if you really believe that, what value can there be in anything we do, or indeed in our supposed existence? Hawking's ideas are interesting, but I don't think he means to imply any lack of reality in the universe. If you say none of it matters because we'll come back again in a new body, that seems to me to be a misunderstanding, because it won't be 'us' who will come back, but something within us. Thats obvious. But actually I don't believe in an endless round where the universe simply repeats itself ad infinitum. Such a scheme is purely speculative. The generation of new galaxies etc doesn't seem that minute, but also, one of the minute changes would presumably be the appearance of humans on the earth, and their disappearance in due course. It ought to be clear enough that prior to the emergence of humans, there could be no chance of incarnation in a human form. It is possible too that in time, a higher spieces will evolve here. In effect, what you say seems to me the basis of an anti-life philosophy, which regards human existence as meaningless or inconsequential. Even from the viewpoint of the earth itself, that isn't the reality. In fact our actions affect all life on earth. We currently stand in great danger of destroying our own existence through polution etc. Thus humans impact on the cosmic order in real ways. If we render the earth a barren desert incapable of supporting life, that would surely, by logic, be the end of any further human incarnations here. My own view is that we were created for a purpose - guardians of nature or something like that. In that we have, as a spieces failed so far miserably.
