Медитация может отменить психологическое восприятие времени и преодолеть страх смерти

I once heard a scientist say, “Time is the most stubborn psychological filter we have.” That’s true, but it is a filter that can learn to suspend. During meditation, there are two main filtering mechanisms that are negated through passive awareness and non-directed attention. The first is the separate observer, which dissolves when passive watchfulness allows awareness to grow quicker than thought, thereby ending the ancient habit of thought splitting itself off from itself as the observer. That primal duality is the source of man’s division, fragmentation and alienation. The second is psychological time, which is synonymous with the movement of thought itself. Time ends when the mind spontaneously falls silent, ending the continuity of memory. That enables body and mind to be completely present. One of the main points of contention in physics at present is whether time actually exists at all. With respect to gravity and general relativity, Einstein demonstrated that time cannot be separated from space because gravity warps space and time, which “means that clocks tick slower near heavy objects like planets and stars” — much less black holes! “In quantum mechanics, time is treated as a universal and absolute parameter, differing from general relativity's notion of independent clocks.” Physicists haven’t been able to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics, “the incredibly tiny world of particles and particle interactions.” Even thinking of time as an emergent phenomenon “removes time as a fundamental aspect of reality.“ So if time is elastic, or nonexistent, in the physical world (our understanding of physics ends at the event horizon of black holes), then the question becomes: Is time a purely psychological phenomenon? Conflating what humans do psychologically, with what scientists do observationally and experimentally, some philosophers say things like: “We say that tables ‘emerge’ from an underlying physics of particles whizzing around the universe. But while we have a pretty good sense of how a table might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be ‘made out of’ something more fundamental.” But philosophers enter the theater of the absurd when they state things like: “Trying to get by in a world without tables might be tough, but managing in a world without time seems positively disastrous. Our entire lives are built around time. We plan for the future, in light of what we know about the past. We hold people morally accountable for their past actions, with an eye to reprimanding them later on. The discovery that time does not exist would seem to bring the entire world to a grinding halt. We would have no reason to get out of bed.” Disregarding that bit of blather, let's contrast what happens during inward states of meditation with the outward, scientific investigation of energy and matter. As I see it, it’s necessary to speak of thought/time as one phenomenon, just as science now speaks of space/time as one phenomenon. The first event that occurs during genuinely meditative states is that the separate observer is effortlessly negated in quickening awareness and unguided attention. As non-directed attention intensifies, thought spontaneously stops. And with it, time ends and ceases to have any meaning except functionally. On one level, that’s pretty straightforward. If there’s no movement of memory because the mind has stopped regurgitating the past and fallen completely still, then there can be no experience of time. But that raises another interesting question: Is there movement without time? Before delving into that question, the brain’s capacity to end thought/time has to be elucidated a little further. (We’re talking about psychological time now, not the physicists’ investigations.) It’s necessary to challenge a core premise of modern philosophy. It is the idea that humans are inevitably “hermeneutical creatures,” meaning that we never experience reality objectively because our minds always filter it through past experiences, language, and culture. Even if that’s true 99% of the time, the timeless 1% when we’re not interpreting experience disproves the premise, and potentially makes all the difference. In the same way, the vast majority of people assume that time is a given. But time is becoming, and becoming is essentially an illusory thing. Nothing in nature actually ‘becomes’ anything in the sense we humans mean however; everything simply is, and unfolds from one moment of being into the next. A flower may bloom and die in a few days, a universe in billions of years. But birth, flowering and death are one movement. Only humans don’t flower because we’re continually becoming, and refuse to accept and understand death. So what is the relationship between time and death? We fear death, and so sustain the illusion of time. Therefore, if we ended time, is there death? And if we make a friend of death, does time exist? There is the actuality of animals and people passing out of existence of course. But death is something infinitely greater than that. Death is both an inextricable part of the cycle of life and death, and the ground of all cycles. Everything has its time, and ends. But death makes a mockery of time. The paradox is that that the “stubborn psychological filter” of time has to end for the timeless movement of death and life to be. By keeping the actuality of death at arm’s length, we imprison ourselves in the illusion of time and becoming. Regularly experiencing the actuality of death while fully alive, one ends time, and perhaps, transcends death. In ending thought/time, we come into contact with the actuality of death, which is happening all around and within us every moment. Our very cells are dying and being replaced constantly, and the life is continuously in a process of birth and death. In the stillness of no-time, one comes into contact with an infinitively generative but completely empty ground, from which this and all universes spring, and into which we and everything returns. Experiencing that ultimate ground, which is beyond the cycles of birth and death, is our birthright as human beings. Martin LeFevre