We have got something very basic the wrong way round, and it confuses us.
Movement, as Nagarjuna showed, is impossible to explain exactly. Of course it works fine if we don’t look too closely, if we’re just natural and let things happen. But our idea is that there is an object in one place, and in the next instant it is in another place, and so on. In effect this is like seeing movement through a strobe, broken into separate images, so that the object appears in one place, disappears, then reappears in another place. If we speed up the strobe – the succession of instants that we are imagining, we get closer to continuity – but we never get there. If there is an instant, then it is separate from the next instant, so our notion of time being a series of instants does not work.
We made this problem by our way of thinking. Our assumption is that there is a still object, which can then move through space and time. We begin by assuming stillness exists. This is how we conceive of objects. It’s also how we interpret time, as a succession of still points, present moments, which succeed each other. And it is how we conceive of space, as a series of still points, a still space through which fixed objects may move.
Our experience, however, shows the complete opposite of this. There is no stillness: awareness is intrinsically a “flow”. That’s in quotes because even our language only works by our stillness assumption: that there is something which flows. A river, for example, we imagine as a body of water, moving downstream; but there is no unchanging “body of water” which flows – everything is “flow”, “change”, “impermanence”. Or rather, there are no things which could flow, change or be impermanent, we constructed those ideas from not seeing how awareness truly is.
If we start from our experiential truth, of awareness never becoming a still object or an instant of time, but always in flux, our thinking problem disappears. We need to question our idea of stillness, of unchanging objects. When we meditate by electric light, objects can appear still and continuous through time, but we ignore the constant “renewal” (to express it in time terms) – until the power goes off! It’s like thinking there is such a thing as a candle flame, when again there is a different flame every moment (to use stillness language again). This why experiencing an eclipse of the sun is such a shock. We make the “flow” of a changing experience into still concepts: objects seen in electric light or sunlight, a single “flame”, even “a thought”.
“Time” is a consequence of our thinking, we imagine a time which constantly flows or moves. This is wrong-way thinking, since awareness is inherently not an unchanging appearance. I don’t even know if we can reverse our way of thinking, but we can glimpse the truth of this “unstillness”. We can often function well using our present thinking, but it does give rise to the whole notion of impermanence, an idea which only arises through our stillness-thinking. And impermanence brings us loss, decay, birth and death, and a whole world of suffering.
Pieces of Five 