Time and the Emptiness of Time

Time is one of the fundamental aspects of existence we usually take for granted, leaving its seeming 'reality' unquestioned. But Dharma practice and inquiry can puncture and shatter our belief in the real independent existence of time -- both the past/future and the present/the 'Now', and, in so doing, open awareness up to a truly inconceivable and immeasurable liberation.

This morning I would like to talk about, to explore a little bit, the theme of time, time and the emptiness of time. If we, in a way, step back a little bit from our life, so to speak, and bring some contemplative reflection on it, we actually see that the sense of time, the experience of time, is absolutely fundamental, appears absolutely fundamental to our sense of what's real. Our sense of the world and our sense of reality, totally bound up with the sense of time, so much so that we take it for granted. And if we, in a more mundane way, reflect on our life, look at our life, have an honest look, we notice different patterns of relationship to time. This is very common, very normal. What do we notice? We may have specific predispositions with all of this, or not. We notice maybe there's a tendency, a common tendency, to want things to end, to want things to be over with, or events, or responsibilities. We want them to be over with, to be through with, to be done with. Or work -- get through the working day. Or even interactions, certain relationships, wanting them to be done with, over with. Or the tendency, or at other times in one's life, it might be time feels like it's going by too fast. It's going by, slipping through our fingers, going by too fast.

How often do we look to the future as if the future is going to give us something, there's something in the future for me? Or looking to the future with fear. Maybe the future will give me something I don't want, something difficult. Or/and we wish to preserve things in time, certain things, things that we love, value, appreciate. We want to keep them going in time. We put a tremendous amount of effort into preserving things in time. And the whole notion, also, of the spiritual transformation or growth and psychological transformation or growth, all that is wrapped up with the time-sense as well, very much. So how I was in the past, and I measure that with how I am, and I project into the future how I will be. Or this thing, some thing, how it was, how it is, how it will be. Past, present, future.

And we seem to be caught up, at a very, very fundamental level in our lives, with this sense, almost inescapable sense of time. It's unquestionable, wrapped up in the fabric of our existence. But all this struggle we have to preserve things in time, to measure ourselves, and to want something to be over, etc., all that that I've just gone through, we struggle with time, we get involved and entangled with the time-sense in that way, and again the question: the more I do that, am I missing something else? Is that closing the eyes, closing the doors to something else? Suffering and time go together. They go together. Where there is time, there is suffering. Where there is suffering, there is time. To see beyond suffering, which is what the Dharma is all about in the end, to see beyond suffering is to see beyond time, in the end. And to see beyond time is to see beyond suffering.

In a way, our basic experience of life, just being born, living, and dying, just that fact itself, that basic, existential fact, we feel to be prisoners of time. So I want to look at all this. On one level, there are certain conventions of time that we just have to look a little bit at and it's quite easy to see that they're not really inherently real. So, for example, every April and October in this country, the clocks go forward and back one hour. We have British Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time. It's just a convention, nothing real about that. And then we have time zones, and this country is on one time zone and Spain is on another, etc. I don't know if it's still the case, but if you've travelled across the border from India to Nepal, and the Nepalese government say, "We're going to have a different time. We'll be fifteen minutes different." [laughter] I'm not quite sure what that's about. Just to say, "Look, we're a different country." I don't know if it's still the case. Just convention.

There weren't always twelve months in the year. In the Roman times, there were ten months in the year -- September, October, November, December, seven, eight, nine, ten. There were ten months in the year. And then two emperors thought they would name months after themselves, so you've got Julius and Augustus, July and August. Convention, convention. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day -- what does it mean to say it's 11:09 now? What does that mean? All of this is convention. We only need to probe it a little bit to see it's just an agreement that we have. There's nothing inherently existing, inherently real about that.

But there's another sense of time. There's another sense, a much more intuitive sense. And actually, it was Isaac Newton, the great physicist, who kind of summed up this sense of time that we, in a way, believe in at some fundamental level. In his words, we believe time is something absolute. We have the sense that time runs by itself in an absolute way. His words, "Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature," of itself and from its own nature, it "flows equably" -- that's a word I had to look up in the dictionary; it means steadily, it flows steadily -- "and without relation to anything external." So that's the sense that we have of time intuitively. It's just flowing by, so it doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's just whatever happens there will be time flowing by.

Then along comes Einstein a couple of centuries later and sort of blows all that out of the water, really, and the relativity of time, etc., special relativity, general relativity, which probably very few people understand. But despite Einstein and all that, still the fundamental, intuitive sense of time -- so we cannot actually go back and blame Newton and Descartes and all these people; it's actually intuitive. Our sense is past, present, future, and time is somehow flowing, past, present, future. That's the intuitive kind of deep down sense of time that we have. This is what I want to look at. Herein lies the problem. I want to explore that. I want to question it. I think it's actually very important to question it. We can have a sense, "Well, I don't know, you know. It seems a little abstract. I'm just struggling with this or that. I just want to be. That's what the Dharma is about." Well, that's nice, but actually it's not what the Dharma is about, and the Buddha never said that. Or we can feel, and quite understandably, we're very busy, caught up in the difficulties of our life and the complexity of our life. I know we all know what that is. "I just want a little less stress." But again, the Dharma is about understanding this. It's about freedom from suffering. Freedom, release from dukkha. It's not just about being.

And to be released from suffering means that we have to understand, we have to question. It's possible to question our sense of self, our sense of other, our sense of what this event or thing is, situation, question all that if we want to be free from suffering. And actually question even things that seem so basic and so taken for granted as space and time. So this isn't abstract. I hope that comes across as something real. As meditators, what can quite often happen or how we can progress, in a way, as meditators, we get a sense of being in the now, and that becomes a very beautiful and precious sense. And we can see, we meditate and we bring mindfulness to our experience and our lives, the past and the future seem like -- the more mindfulness we bring to the moment, the more the past and the future seem, at one level, kind of just conceptual abstractions. They're built up by thought, and we can kind of let them go and come more and more into the present moment, into the now.

Now, this is a very, very important thing. Not to undermine or underestimate the significance of that. Dropping it all and coming into the now, and the beauty of that, in a way the pristine radiance of that sense of Nowness. Really, really precious. Very important. But it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not the point of the path. The Dharma even goes to question the sense of now. Past, present, future -- all three to be questioned. We can have a sense sometimes -- and it does have its place; it really does have its place. I don't want to just sweep it away. But a sense of the preciousness, the beauty, even the holiness of now, of the present moment. But actually that's not, in the end, what the path is about. It's a very important sense, but it's not what the path is about. It's not a final resting place, to be in the now and to make something sacred or holy out of being in the now.

And we might also [have], as I said before, this sense of progressing in time: "I was like this. I am like this. I will be, I hope, like this, like that." And we can sometimes hear teachings, and I'm sure I say it myself, "Let go of that. Drop that. Drop all the comparing. Drop the measuring. Drop the evaluating." And sometimes that's really helpful, just to drop that sense of past to present to future. Sometimes extremely helpful. Come into the now and forget all that. Sometimes that's very helpful. Sometimes it's not helpful. Sometimes what's more helpful is to have a very concrete, real, tangible sense of progressing from the past into the present and hopefully into the future. That way of looking at one's life, at one's practice, is actually more helpful in a certain moment, in a certain period of time. They're both just ways of looking.

The problem with this "just let go of the evaluating, just let go of the measuring," is that, it's okay to a certain extent, but it's so deep, this measuring/evaluating goes so deep into the nature of perception and how perception works. So deeply entangled, bound up with the nature of consciousness that to just say "drop it" is too glib. It doesn't actually reach down to the depths, the subtlety of what's really going on there. But this is an important point, so a little bit longer on this.

Meister Eckhart, one of the really great Christian mystics, gives a symbolic interpretation of the incident when Jesus went into the temple in Jerusalem and upturned the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. Jesus, with all his fire and his passion, his love, just goes in there and upturns these tables. I can't remember his exact words but, "What are you doing in my Father's house?" And Meister Eckhart says the symbolic meaning of that is if you pray or if you meditate for something, to get something, even to get close to God, to ultimate truth or whatever, you actually move away from God. If you pray or meditate to get close to God, you actually move away from God, because you're bringing in time. You're bringing in time. And to know God is to know what is not of time. So you're using the temple to get something, to exchange, to make a profit with the moneylenders. It's actually, I think, a really beautiful interpretation of something, and a real teaching on non-duality, actually. But we have to look very carefully at this, very carefully.

So what can we see? What can we see for ourselves in our practice? If we pay attention to our life, to our practice, we will notice, can notice, the time-sense goes together with craving, with grasping. So we're in a queue, in a traffic jam, at the post office, there's a queue -- how strong, how prominent in consciousness at that time, waiting for something to happen, especially if we're in a hurry or if we're impatient. The time-sense itself feels stronger to consciousness. It's more prominent. Or we're waiting for something but it's a kind of dreading, when I have to do this thing or this thing will happen. There's a dreading. Again the time-sense feels more prominent. It stands out, becomes more substantial, more significant. Or one is sitting in here on this retreat and it's not going well, the mind is playing up and the body is playing up, "When is the bell going to ring?" And someone's got the bell, and you don't know who's got the bell, and heaven knows if they've fallen asleep or whatever, and the whole time-sense gets very built up. And then the bell rings and it's all over, and then suddenly we can sit for hours (that's a separate thing!).

Craving and grasping build the time-sense. We can notice when there are hindrances around, restlessness, aversion, greed, whatever the others are, doubt, etc., the more they are there, the more the sense of here and there, of now and later. The more the restlessness, the more the mind moves to comparing now with later. "This is terrible. Wait till later." Or aversion or whatever. So they build the sense of now and later. Now and later, here and there, stand out more when the mind is restless, etc. And the more that I believe in now and later, here and there, the more I am inviting restlessness, aversion, doubt, etc. The two build each other, they feed each other.

Now, it can seem at first sight that all that is pointing to the now, to being in the now. But actually I think it's going beyond that. Actually even going beyond the sense of now, Nowness, the present moment. What we can really see, and I touched on this in the talk on silence, is when we enter this journey of relaxing the pushing away of what we don't like and the pulling towards us of what we do like, when we begin to relax that, the time-sense begins to fade, in a way, to dissolve, right down, down, dimmer and dimmer, to a sense of timelessness. This is a real possibility. But the general point here is that the time-sense is dependent on craving, on grasping, in one form or another, and we can see that. We can begin to see that even outside of meditation. No great, deep, 128^th^ jhāna thing, samādhi. We can begin to see that outside of our meditation, as well as in the meditation.

So we talk about past, present, future. The notion of the present actually depends on our notion of past, and it depends on our notion of future. These three, they're like left, right, and centre. They're a unit. They're mutually dependent. Present has no meaning without relationship to past and to future. Future has no meaning without relationship to present and to past, etc. So we can have this sense sometimes, or we can hear in teachings, or we can come to believe, "The past and the future are illusions. They don't really exist. You can't find them." But the present is dependent on past and future. So to make too much out of the present and say that's the reality, that's the holy reality ... If the present depends on the past and the future and we're saying they're illusions, then it means the present depends on illusion. And what depends on illusion can only be an illusion. Which makes the present an illusion as well.

I should say the purpose of this talk is not to baffle. [laughter] This is actually -- I'm not just making a joke here. It's really not to baffle. Not to befuddle and not to bewilder. That's not the purpose of insight, that's not the purpose of our practice, not to arrive at any sense of kind of existential confusion or reeling at things or anything like that. I will say I don't think Dharma talks are for one listening only, and certainly not a talk like this. You have to reflect quite a lot, listen quite a lot. This is quite a difficult topic. The point is not -- I certainly don't want to befuddle and bewilder and titillate like, "Oh, wow!" That's not what I'm interested in. This is supposed to be leading to freedom, and we can understand this or understand the contradictions implicit in our notion, our intuitive notion of time, understand them in a way which brings freedom. That's the point, not befuddlement and kind of bafflement and bewilderment and any other word beginning with B that I can't think of. [laughter]

So what's going on here? What is going on? Simone Weil said:

Time strictly speaking doesn't exist.... But our submission to it exists. We are really bound by unreal chains. Time which is unreal casts over all things including ourselves a veil of unreality.^[1]

Now, I don't know exactly what she meant totally by that. But what is going on here? And even when we come to the Dharma, how much of the Dharma is couched and conceived in terms of time? How much does the Buddha and we as teachers, and how much do you read, etc., and you hear about impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, and the power of the contemplation of change and impermanence? But that very notion of impermanence is something bound up with time. So sometimes our very practice of Dharma is actually reinforcing this time-sense. We're looking at it through the lens of time. There are other places where the Buddha says, "Do not cling to the past. Do not cling to the future." You know what's coming next. [laughter] "Do not cling to the present." What does he mean? In the depths of what he means is do not cling to the past, the future, or the present as something really real, as something really real. That's what it means in the deepest sense to cling to something -- to regard it as really real.

In some of the Tibetan traditions, particularly the Gelug and the Kagyu schools of the Tibetan tradition, they approach meditation a little bit differently. And what they do is study philosophy and logic quite rigorously -- I mean, really, really rigorously -- for a while, and convince themselves, understand certain reasonings in relation to things, and then take that reasoning into their meditation. So I want to borrow a couple of those reasonings in relation to time and adapt them in relation to time and, in a way, offer them. But I have to say something first just about intellectuality and the use of the intellect. This tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, is actually a tradition where we kind of, to a large extent, sideline the thinking mind, the reflective mind, thinking through, the place of logic and intellectuality. And that has its place, and it certainly has its beauty. But there are other traditions, and in fact the Dalai Lama, his root tradition is the Gelug tradition, where it's the opposite. There's a really strong sense of intellectuality, of rigour of logic, and taking that into the meditation.

What happens for many of us when we engage the intellectual mind, the thinking mind? It's a bit of a, like, "Whoa," for many people. We think in terms of head and heart. What happens to the heart-sense for many of us when we engage the head? Does the heart-sense atrophy? Do we lose access and connection with our heart-sense, our sense of compassion, etc., of openness, of tenderness? I think for many people that's actually the case. But need that be the case? I don't know. I actually don't think so. What's going on there? I remember years ago with a group listening to a beautiful old Trappist monk, a Catholic monk, explaining how he saw the spiritual path and how he saw healing and that process of healing in relation to prayer and meditation. And it was quite interesting, after he spoke, with this other group of people, how some in the group felt that it was so dense and so intellectual and it just totally turned them off. Others in the group felt very much -- could understand what he was saying and listen to it, but it didn't at all close the sense of how much heartfulness and how much beauty there was in what he was saying. The space between the words, the sense of emptiness there, the sense of love there. Just interesting. And to remember, the Dalai Lama, brought up on this, and how much compassion, tenderness, openness of heart he manifests. So is there necessarily a contradiction? Does one door shut the door on the other?

So all that's a bit of a preamble for ... [laughter] The piece is pretty intense logic. They're intense from my point of view. My ... pretty thick. [laughs] Okay. This present moment, we conceive of time, this present moment, and we say, is what I'm calling this present moment one or is it many? Is it one moment, or is it many? If it's one, then either that one moment is divisible into a beginning, a middle, and an end, or it's not. Either it's divisible into beginning, middle, end, or it's not. If it's divisible, then actually that one moment has become three moments, because when time, so to speak, is at the beginning, it's not at the end, or it's not in the middle. The beginning of that moment must precede the middle and the end. So what was one moment has become three moments. We can't say it's one moment.

If I say, okay, we can get down to a moment that's indivisible into beginning, middle, end, actually that moment has become so small as to not exist. Or you could say, how will we then arrange moments if they're so small as to not have a beginning and an end? How will we know which way round they go to make a continuum of time? In other words, the end of one moment has to connect, has to lead on to the beginning of the next moment, but if this moment has no beginning and end ... Do you understand? You can't make a linear chain of time moving in that. So that doesn't work either.

If we say, all right, the present moment must be many moments. It can't be one. It must be many moments. But it can only be many moments if that's an accumulation of one moment. And actually we can't find one moment. So I say, well, it can't be one, and it can't be many. It has to be one or many; what other option is there? This present moment has no inherent existence. It doesn't actually exist, really.

I'm not sure whether to go over that again. Very briefly. Again, for those that this is interesting to or seems relevant or seems important, the tape is there, and also you can find these particular reasonings in books and things. This present moment is either one or many. If it's one, it's either divisible into beginning, middle, end, or not. If it's divisible, it's become three moments, so it's not one. If it's not divisible, you can't say it exists, and you can't make a continuum of moments to make our sense of time. So it can't be one moment. If you say it's many moments, there can only be many moments if you can find one moment and accumulate those ones. So it can't be many either. If it's not one or many, what else is it? Doesn't exist inherently.

So the point of this, again, not bafflement, is actually, in the way these particular Tibetan tradition meditators use it, is to convince themselves, to go over it in one's head over and over until one is actually completely convinced, and then, in the stillness of meditation, just drop it in, bring it in very quietly, focusing on the present moment with mindfulness and bringing in very quiet reasoning. See what happens. See where it leads you. So it's meditative, not abstractly intellectual.

And if you can stand one more. So again, this moment -- and this is borrowed directly from Nāgārjuna, the second-century Indian teacher, very important in the Mahāyāna tradition. This present moment, does it arise from itself or from other? Nāgārjuna asked, do things arise from the self or the other? How do things arise? So anything, including this present moment, it can't arise from itself, because for something to arise from itself that means it's already existing and it doesn't need to arise. Arising doesn't have any meaning for something that's already existing. So this present moment, you can't say it arises from itself. Does it arise then from other? Not from self, but from other. If we say maybe there's something other in this present moment, some other energy or factor or something that gives rise to it. But hold on. If it's in the present, it's actually in the present moment, and then it's arising from itself, and it can't, it doesn't ... Maybe something other in the past. Something in the past gives rise to the present moment. But the past moment needs to be actually completely gone before the present moment can be here. Otherwise you would have kind of a moment that's actually an overlap of past and present moments in some kind of Venn diagram bubble in the middle that's a sort of double moment. Or you say no, it's the moment of contact, and that's another moment, so you put a third moment in the middle. But actually that has two contact points, and those will have contact points; you can just go on forever.

The past is already gone. The past moment's gone. It has no contact with the present moment. How is it going to give rise to it without any contact? So it can't arise from self, can't arise from other. In the old Indian philosophy from the time of the Buddha they'd say all four logical possibilities -- from self; from other; from both self and other, but that doesn't work because two wrongs don't make a right, and if it doesn't arise from self or other then both the faults apply. If we say it doesn't arise -- a fourth possibility -- from neither self nor other, whatever that might mean, it means it doesn't arise from any causes or conditions. That's clearly not the case, because we have a real sense of the present moment needing other moments to precede it, needing to depend on preceding moments.

So I just want to point -- I'm stopping there with the logic. [laughs] Pointing out certain possibilities. We can actually use this in meditation. It's a real possibility, in the stillness, to get very familiar with these kind of reasonings and actually drop them in, see what happens. It leads to freedom. It leads to something opening up. So if you're interested, they're available. There are plenty of books where you can find this kind of stuff, or listen to the tape or whatever. To be familiar with the reasoning and drop them into the stillness of the meditation, keeping the present moment in one's awareness, mindfulness of the present moment, and just the whisper of the reflection of the reasoning. Something opens up.

Okay. But coming back more to what's more familiar terrain for most of us as insight meditators. This is a little bit following on from what I touched on some of in the talk on silence the other week. We can notice, we can see in our meditation, time, time-sense, is given substance and given significance by giving substance to things. The more we give substance to things, the more we give substance to the time-sense. "We give substance to things" means that measurement and comparison of things from the past, into the present, and into the future, that has become important to us, and we measure this thing, how will it move from past to present to future. Things, we give them significance, and that gives significance to time. Usually in reference to a self, also existing in time and having continuity of time. These three things -- self-sense, time-sense, and thing-sense -- build each other, rest together. They're mutually co-dependent. They arise together.

So I'm sitting and I've got a pain in my knee. How will this thing, this pain, how will it be for me in the future? Giving significance and substance to the thing gives significance and substance to the time in relation to a self. This mind state of depression, of unhappiness, of joy -- will it go or will it last? I want to keep it, I want to get rid of it. Giving substance to things gives substance both to time and to self. They all feed each other. Self-belief gives substance to things and time. This thing, I only give it substance when it's important for this self. I only care about this pain here, me, mine, my mind state. They're mutually dependent -- self-belief, this self-sense, actually requires time-belief or time-sense. Who am I when I begin to let go of the past and the future? I really let go in meditation, really let go of the past and the future, and I see, well, that's all just construct. That's all just thought construct, past and future. And I've come into the present moment. I find actually even the present moment is -- where is it? It's so thin, the present moment, it's ungraspable. It's gone. It's slipped through the fingers. Who am I when I come really in a very alive way into that sense of the present moment? Who can I be? There's not enough room, not enough time, for self-sense to build on. Self-sense requires time-sense.

A self-sense also needs a thing-sense. I need self in relation to some thing, in relation to this pain or some other, self and other in relationship. What significance could a thing have, again, if past and future are let go of and the present moment seems so fleeting, so insubstantial, so ungraspable? What significance could a thing have? It's barely there. So we just said self-belief and thing-belief require time-belief; self-sense and thing-sense require time-sense. Thing-sense needs self-belief, as I said. "What does it mean for me? How's it going to be for me? What can I get from this thing, inner or outer? What's it going to give me that maybe I don't want?" So thing-sense needs self-sense to give it substance, give it importance, make it stand out to consciousness. And also needs time to exist in, to continue in. Why worry about a thing if there's no time for it to be in?

So self, things, and time are like -- if you can see this -- this tripod that the microphone's on. Three legs of a tripod, supporting each other, feeding each other, propping up each other. In a way, bringing each other into existence -- self, things, time. In the Buddha's words, dependently co-arising. Co-arising. What stands on the top of that tripod? What stands there? Problems, suffering, dukkha in all its manifestations, in all its subtlety, stands on the top of that tripod. And they bring each other into existence. They're mutually dependent. They're empty. So we can play with this in meditation. Again, not abstract, not intellectual. We can actually learn as practice deepens to play with this in meditation. We touched on some of this in the talk on silence.

What happens when we really let go of the push and pull? What happens to the time-sense? What happens if we let go of identification more and more, we just regard everything that comes up "not me, not mine, not-self"? We're letting go of the identification. What happens to the sense of things and the sense of time? Can actually both fade, quieten, disappear, to the point where they don't appear. Things and time don't appear. And we say, well, how much self-sense or identification gives the real reality of what time is? A lot of self? No self? A little bit of self? An in-between amount? [laughs] It's empty. It's dependent, the time-sense, the thing-sense, the self-sense. There's no point where you can say that's the exact amount of self that gives the real view of things and time, that's the exact amount of push and pull (pushing away what we don't like, pulling towards us what we do like), that's the exact amount right there, number 5 on the dial, that's the exact amount that gives the real reality of what time is, the real reality of what things are. You can play with it the other way around: what would it be to be in meditation and just let go, let go of the belief of past and future, in past and future? Just let go, let go. What happens then?

I'll go into this a little bit more. The self-sense, we could say, the self feeds on measurement and assessment. The self-sense feeds on measurement and assessment. Not only measuring this self compared to other selves -- am I more or less intelligent, handsome, da-da-da-da, all that rubbish. But measurement and assessment of experience -- pleasant, unpleasant, good, bad, more, less, etc. The self-sense feeds on that. The self-sense feeds on the false, because we inject that process of measurement and assessment with -- we distort it. And again, how much measurement and assessment, how much drawing out these dualities of pleasant and unpleasant, etc., is the real sense of what things are? Can't find that place, that stance of reality. The self-sense feeds on measurement and assessment. The self-sense feeds on the false. The false feeds on the self. More self-sense, more measurement and assessment -- how will it be? More pleasant, more unpleasant? It feeds that measurement and assessment. The self feeds on the false, the false feeds on the self. Self and thing, self and the sense of the world, they go together. What feeds one feeds both, and they feed each other.

We could also say our experience of things, our sense of things, feed on measurement and assessment in the same way. We draw out things with our perception through pleasant/unpleasant, good/bad, more/less. It's just the nature of perception to do that. There's no judgment here. It's the nature of perception to do that. This piece of paper in relation to the background of the carpet ... It's how perception works. Things feed on measurement and assessment. Things feed on the false. The false feeds on thing-sense.

We could say the same thing with time. Time feeds on measurement and assessment. It's built into the nature of perception. Our time-sense feeds on what is false, and the false feeds on time. So time-sense and thing-sense go together. What feeds one feeds the other, feeds both. Measurement and assessment are fed by not understanding, by what the Buddha calls avijjā, delusion. This is very, very -- really no judgment here; it's wrapped up in how consciousness, how perception works. Measurement and assessment are fed by non-understanding and by reaction. Measurement and assessment are not separable from reaction. It's not like we measure and assess and then we react; it's all actually bound together.

You could even go further: understanding is not separate from not understanding. But to understand this is to know the peace and the freedom of all things. So this moment that we sense, this moment is actually delineated by perception. A moment of this, a moment of that, a moment of seeing this or hearing that, delineated by perception. And the perception of things is empty. It's fabricated by this push and pull, by the self-sense, by different things. So time, the sense of the present moment, is actually dependent then on what is empty.

We can even go a little bit further with this. The most basic building blocks of what we call life or experience -- consciousness, awareness, knowing -- consciousness, intention, and time are also bound up together. They're wrapped up together. They're mutually dependent. It's this jewel of the Buddha's teaching, dependent co-arising. We're always paying attention to something. Even if we feel like we're spacing out or we're just in a very open awareness, we're still attending to something. And that attention needs intention. I intend to attend to something, whether it's deliberate or not. There's always attention, and attention always needs intention.

But intention requires some thing to be known, an object to be known, which requires consciousness, and a sense of time, of this moment and the next moment -- I'm going to attend in the next micro-moment. Again, it's like a tripod -- you can look at it any way. Consciousness, knowing, requires something to be known, and that intention of attention to bind it together, and the sense of something known in the present moment. And time, too, dependent on this. In a way, consciousness is dependent on conceiving of something to be known in the present moment. Even if we can't put words to it, there's just some thing there, some thing in the experience. We're conceiving in the most basic terms. Consciousness requires conceiving of some thing in the present moment, and the sense of the present moment gives rise to intention. They're all wrapped up together, bound up together, feeding each other, mutually co-dependent.

It is possible to contemplate this in the meditation. Obviously talking about, you know, quite deeply, very deeply along the path, but it is possible. And that binding of consciousness and object and time-sense, even present moments, begins to be unbound when we begin to see this. There's unbinding, timelessness. Just realizing the utter groundlessness of all things -- consciousness, present moment, objects, all of it, completely groundless, utterly groundless. Not in a bleak way, not in a nihilistic or depressing way; in a way that's profoundly freeing.

So all of that is actually available to us as meditators. All of that is available. There's actually nothing stopping us. It's available. Love and dedication of practice, it's actually available. The kind of experiences are manifold, this experience of the emptiness of time or whatever you want to call it. A person can have a sense of timelessness, of no time for things to exist in, or a sense that actually all time is here, all the past and all the future is right here, all the present is right here. Can vary quite a lot. A sense of eternity, not in the sense of lasting forever, but just beyond time. But actually it's not the experience that's the primary thing. It's the understanding that comes out of experience. This is always the case. It is possible, in some of the ways I've been talking about and other ways, too -- I didn't actually have time this morning to go into all of it, but -- to gain conviction, heartfelt conviction, moving from the head into the heart, into the being, gain conviction in the emptiness of time. That's really possible.

When one has that conviction, in a way everything must be empty, because every thing exists in time. We feel it to exist in time. No time, no problem. And so it is actually possible to gain that conviction, to see that in meditation, and actually to live from that more and more, to live that understanding more and more. So sometimes, you know, little discussion over cocktails or something, and someone says, "Oh, time is an illusion," and it's very glib, or it doesn't really -- or a philosopher is contemplating it and very clever, or physicists even going into it. I read about some experiment recently, the only way it can make sense is for one particular subatomic particle to be moving backwards in time. So what does that mean? But how much does it begin to really bring freedom and joy and peace and love into the life of the physicist or the philosopher, or whoever else, or the glib conversation, "It's all an illusion, time"?

What we're interested in is living from that understanding more and more. And you hear bodhisattvas vowing to save all sentient beings, to stay in the realm of suffering, to stay in the realm of saṃsāra until all beings are liberated. And you know, they can do that because they realize the emptiness of time, because they are undaunted by this seemingly eternal stretch of time. They've seen the emptiness of time.

What I really want to communicate is this is really possible. We can, more and more, see deeply enough into this, to any extent, that it actually begins to make a difference in our life, begins to transform our sense of life and death and all of it. And I know that can sound unreal or unrealistic or whatever, but it really, really, really, really, really, really, really is a real possibility.

Shall we have a minute or so of silence together?