Space and Time

Space and time are core aspects of subjectivity, so central in fact that they appear like background conditions for our entire lives.

Well-known philosopher Kant identified them as the two "a priori transcendental forms" of sensate experience—meaning he viewed them as universal characteristics and structural preconditions or "containers" of sorts, that pre-shaped all experience, meaning there can be no manifest sense experience or phenomenon without a spatial or temporal extension.

Yet many EPEEs involve novel or distorted spatial and temporal perceptions, or suppressions thereof, with e.g. slowing or acceleration of of time-perception, modulations of the sense of space (sometimes radical), etc., which range from mild and transient to profound and enduring. In fact, in seeming contrast with Kant's claims, it is worth noting that "object permanence" is an aspect of experience and cognition that is acquired during the early years of development, as demonstrated by Piaget, and that spatial and temporal continuity have been argued to actually be constituted aspects of our lived experiences, requiring various cognitive faculties like memory and core logical structures like subject-object distinctions.

Along these lines, Husserlian phenomenology viewed time-consciousness as constituted by swift memory traces as the past (retentions) and projections into the proximal future (protentions). These are seen as co-present, continually fluxing aspects of immanence: “what Husserl calls our ‘living present’ […] is a field of actuality endowed with (i) motivation and (ii) a twofold tension, out of which the subject constructs her own biography. The living present is the unique field in which experiences perceived as barely past, and experienced projections into the future, take place. […] Present experience is composed of presence and motivated expectations”. This conception of the present-moment as a “stream” (à la William James), a “field of actuality” within which temporal perceptions are constructed, depicts impressional consciousness (sensate consciousness not yet constituted into past-present-future or here and there) as atemporal and somewhat aspatial: Husserl called this “the absolute” (Husserl, 2019).

Contemplative traditions usually have a profound interest for these deep aspects of experience. Questions of the nature of space and time and experiences of temporality, eternity, atemporality, deconstruction of space and time are central to deeper mystical practices and insights. "Those who dwell in God, dwell in the Eternal Now", said Meister Eckhart — after all one of the names of the Abrahamic god is "the Eternal". St Augustine’s meditations on the nature of time are notorious:

“if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. […] If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we can call ‘present’. And this time flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration. […] How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity. […] Who will lay hold on the human heart to make it still, so that I can see how eternity, in which there is neither future nor past, stands still and dictates future and past times? Can my mind have the strength for this?. […] [In God’s eternity] nothing is transient, but the whole is present” (St Augustine, 2008)

Within Buddhism, a few of the names given to the goal of the buddhist path are "the ageless and the path leading to the ageless… permanence and the path leading to permanence … the undecaying and the path leading to the undecaying … the deathless and the path leading to the deathless". Many Buddhist meditative practices are designed to challenge our usual sense of reality, and often rely on repeated direct observation and logical reasonings to negate the universality and substantiality, or even possibility of time and space (e.g., Madhyamika, Eleatic School). Rob Burbea, quoting Buddhist texts:

“ In some suttas that you come across, in some discourses, you hear things like this: "Things, all things, do not arise. They do not abide. They do not cease." Or another text: "Whatever is dependently arising" -- which means everything -- "Everything is unceasing, unborn, unannihilated, not permanent, not coming, not going, without difference or sameness, and free from conceptual construction." These are designed to challenge our sense of reality.

What's more important than an experience is understanding an insight, a very deep insight. That understanding is much more important. Usually, our relationship with experience is pushing away what we don't like, and pulling towards us what we do like, at all kinds of levels -- either strongly or minutely. Got a pain in the back, got this, got that -- aversion. And what I like, I try and hang on to it. This is going on every moment of consciousness. There's a push, pull, push, pull, tug of war.

As practice deepens, we actually begin to let go of that at more and more subtle levels. And a person can notice, begin to get the sense of time falling apart at a very deep level. You can actually see something of the same insight at a much grosser level, even now in the retreat like this. You're sitting, and you're sitting, and "When is the bell going to ring? When is the bell going to ring?" And in the notion of time, and the resistance or aversion or impatience or leaning forward, the sense of time gets more and more kind of solidified. It gets more and more prominent. So time is really taking on a big -- it's very loud in consciousness. As you let go of that -- someone can ring the bell, and then suddenly, it's all gone. That's a more gross manifestation of the same insight. Time, the sense of time, is built. We think it has an independent existence. It's actually built by our pushing and pulling and tugging with experience.”