The Past and Present of the Self

Notes on a conversation with a friend ...

The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference.

On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of the brain - mostly the result of (unknowable) past influences on neurons and synapses in the "past" (going back years or more), plus the magical ability of the brain to factor in future events. Picture, for example, the state of consciousness of an outfielder as he tracks a fly ball.

The idea of "living in the present" (what most people think "Zen" is about) is certainly good advice. We should certainly train ourselves to do this as much as possible and to have that frame of mind available to offset our usual obsession with re-writing history or dreaming about the future. But I resist efforts to turn this advice into claims that there is some special, ultimate state of mind that is only available to special people after years of training. As you know, Buddhism has a "middle way". The essence of that is to do what you can and get on with life.

There is a related core idea we see gurus pushing, "no-self".  The self, like the "present', dissolves when you look at it too closely. Again, it's very useful to cultivate the ability to "stand back" and subtract your "self " from the way you experience the world. In some cases, we should be able to do this at the same time as we focus on the current moment, but we can do it in a wider sense when we make decisions and attempt to understand the world. The same is true of "time". It is useful to shake off our obsession with "now" and sit back to observe the sweep of history. This also applies to "here", where our "self" seems to be. We need to cut down the amount of time we spend on "current events". Perhaps I can coin a term to put up against the idea of "timelessness": we should seek to be "timeful" - aware of the richness of the past everywhere in the Universe as well as the possibilities the future holds. In such a state of mind, we see the individual "self" is nothing but a snowflake. I do like Wilber's that we have a "self" that extends beyond the individual. We can thus apprehend the past and future of our own culture, humanity itself, all life on Earth, and the Universe itself.