Time Travel

From Menletter May 2011

By Tim Baehr

In the Russian fairytale "The Firebird and Princess Vasilisa," a young huntsman is put through one trial after another by a king who wants him to find first the firebird, then the beautiful Princess Vasilisa, then a wedding gown for the princess. He's finally told he has to jump into a cauldron of boiling water. With each challenge, the king threatens the huntsman with beheading if he fails. And with each challenge, the huntsman goes to his horse, weeping and grieving about the impossible task before him. And each time, the horse says to the huntsman, "Stop your weeping and grieving. The trouble is not now. The trouble lies ahead." And each time, the horse helps his master succeed, and in the end the huntsman wins the hand of the Princess.

I've been thinking about time lately - past, present, and future. We all live in a jumbled mix of all three. We relive the past in our memories, sometimes relishing a certain nostalgia for the good stuff but more often, I suspect, regretting the bad stuff or the loss of the good stuff. For some of us, the past has such a strong pull that we spend much of our time in it, nursing old wounds and insults, engaging in the wouldacouldashoulda of lost opportunities, lost loves, lost youth.

The future can also imprison us in endless rounds of anticipation - good stuff perhaps but more likely worry and dread. Like the hunter in "The Firebird," we weep and grieve in anticipation, as if the troubles that lie ahead have already arrived. The irony is that, when the present moment does require action, the thing we anticipated is far more manageable than we had imagined.

The past and future may seem very real to us, but they're not. Some philosophers have said that they are illusions - tricks of memory on the one hand and tricks of projection or prediction on the other. "Illusion" seems a pejorative term, however, implying that we have no control and are duped by our silly attachments to illusory non-events. I prefer to think of our perceptions of the past and future as constructions. Based on the evidence we have amassed in our minds, we construct memories of past events and predictions of future events that take on a palpable reality.

So we are counseled to live in the "now," in the "present moment." There are three problems with this counsel. First, most of us just can't do it. Second, even if we could, consistently and well, we'd devolve into a bunch of grinning hippies, without a care, in a world that we expect to support us in our selfishness. (Or we might be zombies, living with no past and no future, no memories and no predictions.) Third, the "now" is in itself a construction. The "now" is a razor-thin slice of imperceptible time, the non-dimensional juncture between future and past. An instant before now, nothing yet exists. An instant after now, nothing exists any longer except in memory. As I type, there are uncountable nows between the impulse to aim for a key, the motion of my finger toward the key, the downward press on the key, the clack as it hits bottom, the appearance of a letter on my screen, my seeing the letter, and my verifying that I hit the right key. As inevitable as any keystroke may seem (assuming I hit the right key!), none of these phenomena existed until the instant they happened. And they exist now only because I remember the impulse, the motion, the press, the clack, the appearance, my seeing it, and my verification. If I had no memory, I could never be sure that any of the phenomena existed beyond the instant they happened.

Where does this all leave us? We construct our past and future and present out of memories and predictions. We do sense a continuity among all three, and from that continuity we conclude that what is happening in the Universe right now is real and that we have a real self that participates in that Universe and is an entity separate from everything that is not-self - including the rest of the entire Universe. The continuity feels at least as real as a movie does - 24 little pictures going by every second that our brains construct on the spot into a moving image.

Here are some things we can do with the reality we construct from the endless string of instant moments.

With the past: Memories can be so powerful that we can live in them, get lost in them, to the detriment of our having a life in the present or an ability to plan for the future. When we are in the grip of such memories, they have also become our present and future. The actual present becomes something that we cannot fully experience. So the question we can ask is, "Given that the past exists only in what I remember, what is the best thing for me to do right now?"

With the future: Predictions can be so powerful that we can live in them, get lost in them, to the detriment of our having a life in the present or an ability to learn from the past. When we are in the grip of such predictions, they have also become our present and past. The actual present becomes something that we cannot fully experience. So the question we can ask is, "Given that future events may or may not match my predictions, what is the best thing for me to do right now?"

With the present: Present concerns can be so powerful that we can live in them, get lost in them. When we are in the grip of the present, we ignore the lessons of past memories and fail to account for future possibilities. So the question we can ask is, "Based on what I have constructed in my memories and predictions, what is the best thing for me to do right now?"

A final thought: Sometimes, through meditation, or confronted with the great beauty of a sunset, landscape, or a child's smile, or when absorbed in work or play, we lose all sense of time. All notions of past and future seem to drop away, and the string of now-instants flows infinitely in all directions. The boundary between our self and the rest of the Universe dissolves. The eternal now has become the only reality. We can't live permanently in this eternal now, but we can savor it in our memories and be open to it in the future, realizing that the eternal now, the ultimate reality, is often just a breath or a glance away.