Buddha & Absolutes: Hindu Thought & The View from Nowhere

I found an interesting article at the Skeptic site, called The View from Nowhere or Somewhere?  Maja Caron reviews a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for The Existence of God. ( I read her book Plato at The Googleplex, and it is a tour de force.)  In the review Caron brings up Thomas Nagel's classic work, The View from Nowhere, discussing Nagel in terms of the views of Cass Seltzer, Goldstein's protagonist.

Somewhere in her very interesting and good article Caron says this: 

"If the universe is both personal and universal, as both Seltzer and Nagel suggest, and it’s not possible for an individual to wrap his/her logical thinking process around the notion, one should neither assign mystical significance to this nothing, nor should it seek to empirically dissect it as a 'thing in itself'."

I have this to say about that.  Of course. The central tenet of many of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Buddhism is that the universe is both personal and universal.  But. The difference between Hindu teachings and Buddhism--as I understand them--is that India goes metaphysical with Brahman while Buddhism does not go there with anatta, or no-self.  India took the next step. Buddha, a son of India, did not delve into metaphysics.

Both Hinduism and Buddhism argue that the universal/personal cannot be understood by mind.  But Advaita--to use an example teaching--took a leap of faith while Buddhism--in its non-dogmatic teachings--says you are that, you are both personal and universal, but it's only part of your experience and to be realized empirically.*  What lies "beyond" your experience cannot be known by the human mind and there is no point in taking a leap of faith because any statement of faith is only an assumption. *(Realized in human experience that is not claimed as metaphysical revelation and as stated in The Heart Sutra: "Form is emptiness; emptiness form.")

Buddhist teachings go on to say that the so-called awakening experience, because it is not metaphysical and only a non-conventional possibility of experience, should not be exceptioned as beatitude. It should not be regarded as special because it is only another experience.  It is liberating but not magical, not other-worldly religious, and certainly not revelation from God.  Buddhism is agnostic about any absolute.  "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him; if you meet a ghost kill the ghost," goes an old Zen koan. (Attributed to  Zen Master Linji, founder of the Rinzai sect.)  In short, don't follow mind in its old tricks about absolute/not-absolute.  The ultimate trickster is mind and its musings that keep ego involved in trying to find a "groundless ground."

Yeats said it well: "Like a long-legged fly upon the water his mind moves on silence."  With its attendant experiences the silence is as far as we can go.

What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Answer

Tell me what time is. You cannot. The future does not exist, nor does the past. Nor the present. You cannot live in the present. Snap your fingers and it is gone. By the time you say "now" it is already past.  You cannot apprehend any part of time you talk about. All you have are words to explain something that eludes you and the words only confuse you all the more.

In 1908 John McTaggart wrote The Unreality of Time, and using his A and B series of time he argued that our perception of time is an illusion. Of the A series, he argues this:

"If time exists it must be explained by the A series, which is how we normally think about time. This is a tensed series, as in past, present, and future. A cup of coffee was hot in the past, is lukewarm in the present, and cold in the future. The United States was created in the past, exists in the present, and will no longer exist in the future. In this series are three distinct instances."

McTaggart juxtaposes a B series against the A series.  This series is relational, or durational. One way to think of it is as events before the now and after the now. A cup of coffee had hot temperature, is colder temperature in the present, and colder after the present. Put in another way to think about it, the United States was founded in the past, exists after its founding, and will no longer exist after its founding. From both perspectives the instances are not distinct, but relational, enduring from one into another. The B series can be likened to space.  The wall is there, and a window elsewhere. They are spatially related. The B series as relational is not inherently separate (distinct) from other time-moments, just as space has no difference in it. As the wall is there, the window elsewhere, so events in the B series can be located as before and after.

Many rich and profound complications arise from thinking about the two series but the central point is that they are contradictory.  One is tensed, the other tenseless. The A series depends on personal experience and perspective.  "I am drinking hot coffee today." The B series does not. The experience and perspective are not there. "I recall drinking hot coffee today."

Because they are contradictory, McTaggart says time is not real.  His legacy is that he left A theorists and B theorists debating which kind of time is true, continuing a discussion traced back to Parmenides (reality is timeless, unchanging) and Heraclitus ("You can't step into the same river twice").

So what is time? If nobody asks, I know.  If they ask and I try to explain, I do not know. (St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 354-430.)

In his book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics, Julian "Barbour asserts that time simply doesn't exist." Barbour starts with the notion that time is just a way of describing change. He means that to measure time you have to have something that moves. How long does it take to get from point A to Point B?

~ "There's only change, not time. Things move around; time may just be a way of noting that. But Barbour goes further. He says there's no such thing as motion either. Instead, Barbour sees a universe filled with static instants -- instants that contain 'records' that fool any conscious beings who happen to find themselves encased in one into believing that things have moved and time has passed."

~"This common-sense view was one of many forever altered by Einstein's theories. We see time this way, he made clear, only because we move so slowly. If you could peddle your bicycle at something almost in the neighborhood of the speed of light, relative to an observer, your watch and your aging process would appear -- to that observer -- to slow. (From your own perspective, time, unfortunately, would still keep chugging along at its usual dispiriting pace, which makes it unlikely that anyone will figure out how to turn this phenomenon into a wrinkle cream.)"

~"Relativity found time a home as one of the four dimensions in something called spacetime. But it hardly settled the question of what time is. And the idea that time slows down in certain circumstances made it easier to imagine that time was just a construct of us observers, not itself a fact of nature."

~"What if, Barbour wonders, we just imagine a kingfisher to be flying? After all, it isn't exactly the same bird at perch A and perch B: Its molecules constantly change; its atoms constantly change. What if our brain has captured a few snapshots of kingfisher-in-flight that it plays -- movie-like -- in such a way that we think we see continuous motion?"

~"What if the instants we inhabit somehow happen to be filled with 'records' -- images of kingfishers with their wings spread, tread marks, 'memories,' fossils -- that manage to delude us into thinking that birds fly, cars lurch, species become extinct; 'records' that manage to delude us into thinking that we are scurrying along some sort of path from the past to the future? Isn't it true that all we know now about the past or the future comes from thoughts or objects we experience now -- in the present?"

~"What if, Barbour then asks, we're always trapped in one moment or another and everything else -- your sense, for example that X number of minutes ago you moved your hand and clicked on FEED -- is a kind of illusion, somehow evoked by the structure of this particular, all-encompassing moment? What if, in other words, our whole sense that things move is an illusion, as -- in another context -- our sense that the earth does not move proved to be an illusion."

~"This is, if it helps any, quite similar to the view of time presented in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, which Barbour has not yet read. ('I know,' he says. 'People keep telling me I should look at it.') Vonnegut describes most earthlings as trapped in moments like 'bugs in amber.' Billy Pilgrim, the book's main character, however, repeatedly comes 'unstuck in time': He jumps, in no particular order (though in accordance with the needs of Vonnegut's narrative), from one point in his life to another. Moreover, on the planet Tralfamadore, which Pilgrim visits, 'all time' is visible at once, as we 'might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. It does not change. It simply is.' That Rocky Mountain-like view of all time is remarkably similar to Barbour's Platonia."

The above comments are excerpts from a  review of his book published in the now defunct Feed Magazine on July 14, 2000 by Mitchell Stephens.  I wanted to link you to the review but the link is dead.  More of the review is below. Or click her for a Nature article on why time is an illusion according to classical physics.