Tag: Causation

This post is some of my ramblings/excursions/visions about the nature of time.
Please leave your thoughts in a comment if any of this sparked something in you.

Time is the creator and destroyer of all forms.
Time is the creator and dissolver of all worlds and all beings.
Time is like the great potters wheel,
From which multifarious forms/worlds emerge and dissolve.
Time is not a thing, or anything, it is a no-thing, because all things are transformed in time.
Time is change, and everything changes, so there are no real things in time except as passing phenomena.
Time is like the ultimate player of forms, time can make or dissolve any form as it pleases.
Time is like an LED screen, that can manifest or null anything it desires.

Time is not bound to linearity or process, it just chooses to appear as such.
Time is both continuity and discontinuity, and can abruptly change 100% of contents if it wills it so.
An example of that would be the way a dream spawns itself in experience.
In the dream at night, time makes a non-linear shift in experience and there is a distinct discontinuity.
Though, once the dream spawns it may appear to have somewhat of a linear fluid story,
But the stage and its starting contents emerge instantly.
One experiences a completely different time process when in the dream state vs the waking state, and both have their own sort of linear continuity, but emerge instantly when the shift happens.
All the laws of physics are like specific linear processes that time chooses to manifest itself as.
The appearance of time should not be mistaken as the essence of time anymore than the nature of the movie should be taken to be the nature of the LED screen that shows it.

Gravity bends the flow of time into cycles.
They say, gravity is the effect and not a cause.
Gravity is created by the dips in the space-time fabric.
Like the sun makes a massive dip in the fabric, and therefore creates a large cone of gravity causing all the 9 planets to revolve around itself as a result.
But what created the sun, and what placed the sun in that position, to create that kind of dip to make all the 9 planets orbit around it?
One can regress with a linear story about formation of stars etc.
But this would be an endless regression, a kind of endless backstory, and maybe in reality none of that actually happened.
Like if your long lost school friend suddenly appeared in your dream, and you go on questioning him about his back story, it may sound convincing in the dream, but all that time never happened, the dream simply emerged/spawned all at once with him suddenly instantly standing in front of you.

The deeper I think about it, I feel there is no causation in reality.
The causation back stories we make up are like a projection backwards or forwards from the mind stuff.
That is why stories often begin with “Once upon a time…”, and the elements are simply laid out as facts at that point.
That is the junction point where non-linear time suddenly took on a linear story appearance (like the dream example).

The idea of Agents, Agency, and the Exercise of Agency are all illusions/appearances.
The whole moves the whole, no part moves the whole.
All of these exist when not seeing the bigger picture.
We use these ideas for convenience because the bigger picture is too complex.
Initially there is no self in time, there is only the flow of time.
Then time hardens up its own section forming a Self (the formative years), and the later part of its own flow is experienced as the outside world wrt. that formed self.
So good times create a good self, bad times create a bad self.
Subsequent good times may dissolve the bad self etc.
In the larger picture, the self we think we are is the gathering of a certain time segment.
It is like how we go on trips and carry our video cam with us.
Once the trip is finished, our recorded footage + our own memories become the trip we carry with us in time.
Similarly the Self is the recorded memory of times.
Your gain or loss of anything is not personal, it is the time path that creates those things.
All will power is just movement upstream, and eventually all that is gained through upstream movement is nulled.
Of course even all that is gained through downstream movement is also nulled, but the consolation is at least you did not put any effort to get any of those things.
An agent feels a sense of defeat once the downstream of time starts to work against his dreams/goals/wishes etc.
Like say you admired your older cousin when you were 12 years of age and he was 25.
You wanted to become 25 and possess all that independence, freedom, knowledge, strength, power, pleasure possibilities etc.
Then as you grow to be 25, time may grant you the same stature, you are happy and you have become the self you desire.
But now if you want to endlessly keep growing that, then time will bring old age, infirmity, sickness, death, losses and make that same self suffer.
The same time bestowed those graces and that same time took all of it away too.
The ignorance here is that, the self is taken to be independent of time and subject to it,
While the knowledge is that, the self itself is nothing but a hardened version of a time segment itself.
Even ones becomings/gatherings of personality/memory/possessions/relations etc. also belong to the time path.
A good person is a gathering/aggregate of good times, a bad person is the gathering/aggregate of bad times.
Even ones potentials, proclivities, predelictions, tendencies, possibilities belong to time.

So the self we believe we are is time’s property.
We falsely believe we are that hardened piece of time.
Our true self is only the witness.