Aponia & Ataraxia
Experienced
- Jun 24, 2018
- 233
"Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life — we may call this "clock time" — but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with. In this way, there will be no buildup of "psychological time," which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.
Clock time is not just making an appointment or planning a trip. It includes learning from the past so that we don't repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals and working toward them. Predicting the future by means of patterns and laws, physical, mathematical and so on, learned from the past and taking appropriate action on the basis of our predictions.
But even here, within the sphere of practical living, where we cannot do without reference to past and future, the present moment remains the essential factor: Any lesson from the past becomes relevant and is applied now. Any planning as well as working toward achieving a particular goal is done now.
The enlightened person's main focus of attention is always the Now, but they are still peripherally aware of time. In other words, they continue to use clock time but are free of psychological time.
Be alert as you practice this so that you do not unwittingly transform clock time into psychological time. For example, if you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and "mine": You make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity. Non-forgiveness necessarily implies a heavy burden of psychological time.
If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment. If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored." --Eckhart Tolle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic#Flow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_horizon :
"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man." --Ernest Becker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_problem#Popper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_block_universe#Criticism : "Forrest (2004) argues that although there exists a past, it is lifeless and inactive. Consciousness, as well as the flow of time, is not active within the past and can only occur at the boundary of the block universe in which the present exists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specious_present
"Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?" --Lee Smolin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question : the arbitrary sociocultural era/climate (where/when one's 'embedded view' is located) as a mere frond/branch/outgrowth of temporal fallout --akin to a "cloud of complexity" (regardless of however inconceivable (to the human mind) the complexity may seem ; see video below)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrownness#Overview
"The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations" --Seth Lloyd
"A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind." --Susanna Kaysen
Clock time is not just making an appointment or planning a trip. It includes learning from the past so that we don't repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals and working toward them. Predicting the future by means of patterns and laws, physical, mathematical and so on, learned from the past and taking appropriate action on the basis of our predictions.
But even here, within the sphere of practical living, where we cannot do without reference to past and future, the present moment remains the essential factor: Any lesson from the past becomes relevant and is applied now. Any planning as well as working toward achieving a particular goal is done now.
The enlightened person's main focus of attention is always the Now, but they are still peripherally aware of time. In other words, they continue to use clock time but are free of psychological time.
Be alert as you practice this so that you do not unwittingly transform clock time into psychological time. For example, if you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into "me" and "mine": You make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity. Non-forgiveness necessarily implies a heavy burden of psychological time.
If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go, but you honor and give your fullest attention to the step that you are taking at this moment. If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored." --Eckhart Tolle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic#Flow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_horizon :
"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man." --Ernest Becker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_problem#Popper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_block_universe#Criticism : "Forrest (2004) argues that although there exists a past, it is lifeless and inactive. Consciousness, as well as the flow of time, is not active within the past and can only occur at the boundary of the block universe in which the present exists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specious_present
"Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?" --Lee Smolin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question : the arbitrary sociocultural era/climate (where/when one's 'embedded view' is located) as a mere frond/branch/outgrowth of temporal fallout --akin to a "cloud of complexity" (regardless of however inconceivable (to the human mind) the complexity may seem ; see video below)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrownness#Overview
"The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations" --Seth Lloyd
"A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind." --Susanna Kaysen
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