New Look

If you have visited this page before, you might have noticed that the page sports a new look. Instead of the picture of the “horse nebula” that appeared on the previous design, now you are seeing a picture of a desert. This is no ordinary desert, but it’s from Mars. What looks like a mountain on your left is something that is similar to a glacier on earth. I think on Mars it’s made up of solid carbon dioxide. Well, I have to check up on that, but I think there’s not enough water ice on Mars to form an ice glacier.

The picture is taken from the National Geographic, and I hope that they don’t sue me when I took their picture and posted it here. At least I am acknowledging the source 🙂 I will post more thoughts and diversions here regularly, so please come back often.

When Will Time End?

Right now I am writing this post from the Royal Cliff Hotel in Pattaya. It’s a very upscale place, and the Commission on Higher Education spared no money at all in organizing this huge conference for its grantees. I’ll talk about this later on, but here is a video on a very philosophical and religious question: When Will Time End?

Earth shot

I have already finished my teaching stint at Linköping University. As I said in the previous posts, I have been in Sweden for some time now and though I am quite worried about not being able to go home because Thai demonstrators have seized the airport (something really, really bizarre to the eyes of the whole wide world, I know, but as many people say — This is Thailand), I am enjoying my stay here. Sweden is a peaceful country, I mean literally. What struck me when I came to Sweden and also Norway was how quiet things are around here. How tranquil. Compare this with the hustle bustle and all the noises of Bangkok.

I used the book on Technology, Globalization and Philosophy edited by David Tabachnik and Toivo Koivukoski. This is a collection of papers written by some notable philosophers and political scientists. One of them is Don Ihde, who wrote on “What Globalization Do We Want?,” which to my mind is one of the strongest chapters in the book. Ihde talks about the phenomenon of globalization, which in the past was something rather abstract, and when we talk about the phenomenon as something really directly perceptible and tangible, he mentions the ‘earth shots’ that astronauts abroad Apollo 8 first took when they traveled outside of  the earth’s orbit and looked back at it from very far out. Here is such a shot from the NASA website:

Very beautiful, isn’t it. Ihde’s point is that this is the very first time that people can view their earth from way out. Before Apollo 8 it was not possible to have a real look at the earth, except through some representations such as a map or a drawing of it. But not directly. The point is that, when we talk about globalization, this is it. We are looking at it, the very phenomenon of globalization itself. Ihde is asking what kind of globalization we want, and certainly this gives much food for thought, for here is the kind of globalization that we can perceive directly.

There are thus many layers of meanings in the shot. Three astronaust were on board Apollo 8, a product of the Cold War and intense competition among nations. It was a product of high technology at that time, and certainly a product of immense amount of manpower and funding that went behind it. And beyond that the picture itself represents a new age of humankind. I think this is even more important hermeneutically than Armstrong’s landing on the moon. The earth shot is the first time we humans have a reflective image of ourselves in the midst of the void space. What came after that, such as with Apollo 11, was rather an afterthought.

So we are looking at ourselves. The earth as a “pale blue dot” hovering in the vastness and blackness of space. This is it. This is where we are, and for the time being we have no escape. It is almost spiritual. It IS spiritual. The blue sea, the white cloud, the green and brown landscape. We can’t see people from that far up of course, but we know we are all there, all of us.

Time is empty.

One point that attracted quite a lot of attention during the class on Nagarjuna last weekend was about time. Basically what Nagarjuna is saying is that time itself is empty. What this means is not that time itself has no content of its own, nor that time is in the Newtonian sense of being a steady flow moving ever forward, but that time itself is empty of any inherent characteristic. The flow that one imagines in conceptualizing time is nothing but our own imputation on reality. In this sense time is not different from other results of conceptual imputation, such as individual things and so on.

This points to a startling conclution that time, considered on its own, or “from its own side” as the Tibetans are wont to saying, is nothing. Ultimately speaking there is no such thing as time in reality. As individual objects have already been found to be empty of their inherent characteristics, so is time. Nagarjuna’s argument here is quite similar to that advanced by Leibniz in his characterization of time and space as being relational and dependent on things and events. For Leibniz time and space do not exist on their own, and here is one of the main differences between him and Newton. If time could be thought of as inherent existing, for example, as a “place” wherein events take place in such a way that one event can be classified as being earlier or later, then there must already be some coordinates by which these events could be so classified, for how else can we know which one is earlier or later? But if that is the case, then time itself must already have within it some means to measure the positions of the events. This, however, contradicts Newton’s own assumption that time is shorn of any marks and is nothing more than something that flows absolutely.

This also seems to be Nagarjuna’s point. Time, as does everything else that is conceptually constructed, depends for its very being on other things. Without the things that compose events, time is nothing at all, not, of course, in the Newtonian sense of time having nothing in it, but time itself is nothing. We have time because we do have things in it, and we have things in it (and space) because we already have the concept of time. Time, space and things and events are totally inseparable from one another.

If time is empty in this sense, then it does make sense ultimately to hold that there is the past, the present and the future. For all these are but relations within time. Moreover, the past, present and future derive their being from the relation to the consciousness of an individual. We feel that the time “right now” is the present because this is what we feel, this is what we are consciousness of at the moment, and of course we feel taht this “now” is forever moving. This is only a fact of our consciousness. Since all of us are moving inexorably toward that end, we have the sense of time as something ever moving onward and something that absolutely cannot be recalled or repeated. Once time is lost, it is lost forever.

However, a startling thing from the teaching of the Buddha is that that feeling that we all have is but an illusion. The relation between past, present and future holds only if there is a reference point, a point at which the present can be determined. If the present couldn’t be determined, then both the past and the future would make no sense. The present can only be determined with reference to the self, or the thinking consciousness. One feels that the present is nothing but one’s own present. But if we were to take a more general position and detach ourselves from our own individual mental continuum and our body, then the present does not have to be what we ordinarily take to be here and now, but could in fact be anywhere, that is, any time.

Perhaps this is what is meant when it is said that Buddhas and highly attained Bodhisattvas are above time. They are timeless, and once it is totally, fully absorbed in the mind of a being like you and me that time itself is empty in this sense, then it is possible that we can be timeless too.