This semester, I have chosen to enroll in the course “Texture of time”. Not only have I always been curious and puzzled by this thing we call “time”, my relationship to it is deeply dissatisfying: I obsessively check the clock when I go through my day, I have all sorts of scarcity thoughts (“there isn’t enough time”, “I’m running out of time”, “I need more time”), and I often feel the stress of racing through each moment to catch-up with it. My hope was to understand time so deeply through the rigor of science and the wisdom of philosophy that I could radically transform how I perceive, treat, and move through it.
Right off the bat, I discovered that time was nothing like I had assumed. Quantum mechanics show that time is factually relative, elastic, and profoundly subjective: it can dilate or shrink into nothing depending on one’s relative speed, it can reverse itself, influence the past, and even visit the future (Fraser, 1982). The more I tried to dissect and analyze time with the tools of empirical physics, neurobiology, and cognitive sciences, the more time seemed to fade away into a mere mental concept: an intermediary term created and defined by human thinking, inexistant in nature, and weirdly ungraspable (Welch, 2010).
In addition, studying ancient cultures showed me that one can move through time in a very different way. For example, time was perceived as cyclical for the Maya peoples and its passing was honored and even celebrated in joy and reverence (Pete, 1994). They did not race through the day, lived with the seasons, and were attuned to the circadian rhythms within and without. As a result, time was relegated to the background of their experience, not center stage of everyday living. I could imagine they would be puzzled as to how we treat time in our modern-day civilization: focused on gaining, accumulating, saving, and killing time all at once. I have come to the observation that these ancient cultures, though honored and celebrated time, were not focused on it. Time was a means to organizing their lives; a means to an end just like the invention of money for commerce and trade. However, along the way we have come to confuse the mean to be the end: in this case time and money which are the biggest obsessions of our modern-day civilization.
Besides, and through a spiritual retreat I attended in the previous month in which time completely disappeared from my daily experience, I have come to conclude that feeling time in my life is simply a symptom. It is the result of a misguided focus: to live life at the surface. The more I stay at the surface of my everyday experience: constantly checked out, distracted, and racing through the day doing things while being inattentive to them, the more I feel time. In contrast, the more I live every moment at its depths; undistracted, fully present, engaged in whatever I am doing (as was the case at the spiritual retreat), and the more time takes care of itself: quietly yet entirely disappearing from my experience and proving quantum mechanics right.
But how can I dive into the depth of every moment and be fully present? Is that even possible? How can I get away from the checking-out and endless modern-day distractions that pop me right back up to the surface? Why aren’t I naturally living at the depth like my ancient elders did? In this paper, I explore what I consider to be three main ingredients for depth living. Above all, I believe every individual must, through their own life circumstance and personal journey, find their own ingredients and recipe for depth living. Here I unpack my own.
Various philosophers have, in their own way, pointed to depth living. Steiner says: “It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what we would otherwise do unconsciously (Steiner, 1920). I interpret “consciously observing” the decision and act of staying fully present in the moment and the movement of life. With undivided attention, unjudging mind, accepting and in fact living whatever arises (i.e. phenomenology), he is pointing to embodying the experience and not staying with the mental concepts that may surface. This diving in, and staying with, the present moment is, in my view, the first important ingredient to depth living.
Observing my nieces and nephews (ages 5-8) shows me they do not need any lessons in this: they are fully present, engaged, and playing in the moment all the time as if there was no other way of being. They are not conceptualizing anything because they are embodying every gesture and fully alive to whatever life gives them. As adults, however, we may have weakened this muscle out of the incredible amount of doing that is required and the incessant distractions that call out to us. I posit that a practice that allows us to strengthen this muscle is especially needed in our twenty first century western way of living. These practices can remind us to be in the moment and stay in conscious observation, teach us not to checkout and go back to our worries about past and future, or reach for distractions and dopamine hits. This need not be a spiritual practice that enlists us sitting on a cushion in a lotus pause: a workout routine, a writing practice, a walk in the park, playing music, and even diving into a math problem can be a gateway into present moment conscious observation.
As we strengthen this muscle to staying present, we may find ourselves increasingly able to dive into our inner experience. Here we may start to find all sorts of experiences arising within us: our anxieties and worries may surface, we may encounter our deepest fears, face our engrained belief systems, encounter repressed memories, and much more. In short, we encounter our shadows or, in our modern parlance, trauma (large and small). As Carl Jung said, “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely” and that includes our traumatic experiences buried in our unconscious (Jung, 1933). This, I believe, is why most of us either reach for escapism or start to run coping mechanisms in the background since encountering our shadows is no walk in the park. Thus, I posit that the second ingredient to depth living is continuous trauma work: bravely encountering our shadows, consciously and kindly processing them, and wisely alchemizing their outcomes.
Many modalities have been developed and are known to be effective at trauma work especially the ones that are embodied (e.g. Inner Family Systems, Hakomi, Somatics, hypnosis, and many more). Through careful titration, accompanied by qualified professionals as needed, and participating in compassionate healing circles (live or virtual) can be practical modern ways by which one can tackle trauma. As trauma layers are excavated and alchemized into learning and strength, one is then more able to stay with whatever arises in the moment no matter what inner experience is taking place.
Ancient civilizations knew this well. Though they did not use the same vocabulary or may not even frame it in the same way, they knew that processing difficult life experiences were a natural part of daily living. A Burkinabé elder and author Malidoma Patrice Somé discusses unresolved individual and ancestral trauma and how that shapes behaviors: “All these white people who came here to make trouble for us are possessed by the troubled ghosts of their ancestors. This is because where the white men come from people don’t grieve. Because their dead are not at peace, their living cannot be either […] The spirit that animates the whites is extremely restless and powerful when it comes to keeping that restlessness alive. Wherever he goes he brings a new order, the order of unrest. It keeps him always tense and uneasy, but that is the only way he can exist. It took our community a long time to come to understand this. The white man is not strong, he is scared” (Somé, 1995, pp. 177-178). Unfortunately, we may have accumulated layers of individual trauma on top of ancestral and cultural traumas without the balancing organic acts of processing and alchemizing them. Ancient traditions, through their ceremonies, sweat lodges, individual and collective habits and rituals have embedded trauma resolution processes directly in their ways of life. As we evolve, I believe that we will need to not only perfect individual trauma resolution but also ancestral and societal too so that they are not onetime ad-hoc events and instead a way of life.
With a strong muscle to dive into the present moment and a freed capacious receptacle of inner experience, I believe that the last ingredient of depth living is the union of inner and outer atmospheres. Most of us are predominantly aware of our outer life: sense perceptions, interactions with our environment, processing external events, acting and speaking, etc. We generally become aware of our inner lives only in extreme cases: blissful joy or incredible pain. With the first two ingredients firmly in place, one starts to live their rich inner life a lot more. At some point, it becomes a challenge to live both at the same time, rarely able to link the two together. Perhaps we don’t even know that such a thing is possible. This, I posit, is the third ingredient of depth living: yoking our inner and outer lives.
I believe that is what the original yoga term meant: to yoke inner and outer life in every moment. The famous line from the ancient text of the Bhagavad-Gita says “Established in yoga, perform action” (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1969, 2.48) is my interpretation of living this yoking. Modern day philosophers put it in different ways. For example, on says: “I shall no longer grasp the movement from without, remaining where I am, but from where it is, from within (Bergson, 1903, p.1). He is pointing, in my interpretation, to the inner current of life within and without; the heart of depth living. Awareness and embodied practices are helpful, though everyday life situations are the main theater of this third ingredient: a disagreement with our partner, a child throwing a tantrum, or a medical diagnosis are all entry points to this yoking practice. As our instrument becomes stronger and more sensitive, it becomes an incredibly rich way of living: watching how the external moment influences our inner atmosphere and how, in turn, our inner atmosphere impels us to influence the outer environment in action, speech, etc. I believe this is how we are meant to be and live, though we may have fallen way out of practice somewhere along our modernity journey. This too is my reading of CIIS’s fourth goal and inevitably participates in producing the first goal of becoming an agent of change.
As these three ingredients come together and strengthen one another, we will change how we see ourselves, live our lives, treat each other, and literally change the world (CIIS’s first goal). Through this journey of evolution as individual human beings forming a global family, I suspect our ways of knowing will also evolve and reinforce this evolution. Away from the exclusive left brain conceptual way of knowing, we will likely start to include other faculties that may currently seem silly, archaic, fantastical, or even superstitious: imagination, intuition, embodiment, feeling into, experiencing and trusting visions, etc.
Life is always evolving, changing, introducing novelty, as well as chaos, which if we were trusting of life and ourselves should impel us to rise to the occasion, be creative, and joyful in our response to the moment. But we cannot trust life or ourselves if we don’t even know ourselves. And we cannot know ourselves if we stay at the surface of life. Thus, depth living is also the answer to a bold, creative, joyful life.
It is the privilege of a lifetime to walk our personal journeys individually and together in full consciousness and presence. Some practices or ways of doing are important to orient us to the quality of life we want to have. As for myself, living in this fast paced, highly distracted, and largely (and ironically!) disconnected world I have lived both at the surface and at the depths. In the former, I feel dull, out of breadth, and despaired for meaning. In the latter, I feel alive, creative, joyful, and completely at one with the currents of life. I know this is where I want to live and strive to always be.
References:
- Bergson, H. (1903). An Introduction to Metaphysics. Felix Alcan Publications.
- Fraser, J.T. (1982). The Genesis and Evolution of Time. The University of Massachusetts Press.
- Jung, G. (1933). Psychological Aspects of the Soul. Princeton University Press.
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1969). Bhagavad-Gita: A new translation and commentary with Sanskrit text. Penguin Books.
- Pete, D. (1994). Blackfoot physics. Wider Books.
- Somé, M.P. (1995). Of water and the spirit. Penguin Books.
- Steiner, R. (1920). The Boundaries of Natural Science. Anthroposophic Press.
- Welch, K. (2010). A Fractal Topology of Time. Fox Finding Press.