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Practicing with Time

Introduction

Warm greetings, everyone. I am happy to have you all here. Before the pandemic, we used to broadcast these Sunday morning talks on YouTube, but I never thought about the people on YouTube. But now I do; now clearly they're right there where the camera is. Thank you to those of you logging in today.

The topic that I want to talk about today is time. It has been on my mind lately. I want to tell you a story from my time at the monastery. I was the kitchen manager, the person most responsible for the production of the food and the meals. There was a crew of anywhere from four to sometimes ten people that I supervised, depending on the time of the year. During the retreat time, we had three months of retreats.

In Zen, things are highly choreographed; the schedule is really clear and set. It is kind of like time is one of the teachers in a Zen monastery because you have to do things on time, and you also have to stop on time. One of the great challenges was our 15-minute cleaning period—raking the grounds, sweeping, or doing something else. When the bell rang to end it, you couldn't just keep going to finish the job. When the time to end happened, you were supposed to stop. It took training for people to learn that it is okay to stop, and the next day you could do it some more.

Everything is choreographed on time. One of those things was meals, and meals basically had to be served up in the meditation hall at the exact minute they were supposed to be there. There was this ritual beforehand where people are chanting and bowing, and then sitting in the meditation hall just waiting for the meal to come. For it all to go smoothly, the meal had to be there right on time. I don't remember exactly when lunch was, but maybe the food had to be ready and at the door of the meditation hall at something like 12:15 or 12:20.

It was hectic to get everything ready. But one of the practices of the monastery was that when you worked in the kitchen, at exactly 12:00, all the cooks had to stop what they were doing, go in front of the kitchen altar, and chant the Heart Sutra^[1]. Since I was supervising, I would regularly be aghast. "No, we're never going to get done! We have all this stuff to do, and it's just 15 minutes before it's supposed to be served up!" But you had to do it. So we chanted the Heart Sutra, and always, when we finished chanting, there was more time to get it done without fail. The meal was always ready.

Somehow, my sense of time was very much tied up in how busy my mind was, and how much my mind was concerned with desires and complications. My mind was crowded. But after chanting, my mind got calm and settled. There was more space in my mind, and it just seemed like, "Oh yeah, we have time." I don't know if we naturally worked faster or if it was all an illusion in my mind, but we always had time.

In the years since then, there have been times when I feel like I'm running out of time. I feel too hectic, with too much to do, and I don't know which foot to stand on. I learned that if that happens, I just do one more thing that seems impossible: I sit down to meditate. I'll meditate for 10 minutes, and when I get up, suddenly there is time. I'll do this now, I'm still here, and I've survived. It is remarkable how this always works out, though I had no one waiting for me—I wouldn't take ten minutes if people were already in the car ready for me to come!

The Nature of Time in Modern Society

Our relationship to time is a fascinating and important topic because a lot of the suffering that people have is directly or indirectly connected to it. If we consider the nature of time and how we live in time—often in subconscious or unconscious ways—we'll start seeing our life in a different way.

Some people are time poor, impoverished in time because time is constantly slipping away. They are running out of time, or they didn't have enough time for whatever they had to do. Their time has deadlines, and they have to finish before a certain point. People are struggling with these notions about time.

Part of this comes from the nature of industrial society. When things started getting regimented and organized, people had to show up at factories at a particular time. Teams of people had to be organized into shifts. With this industrial idea of scheduled time, there arose the idea of school time. My understanding is that school time was modeled on what happened in factories, and so it became very regimented. A lot of people didn't go to school before that, or education happened in a less time-centric way.

I remember in high school, when the bell rang to leave the classroom, there was this sea of humanity in the hallway jostling for their way to the next room. But if you left to go somewhere during class, it was really peaceful. This was the temporal rhythm that we were living.

I don't know if Zen monasteries in Japan and America were always so time-centric. In ancient times in Zen, they knew when to end the morning meditation when the person who could see the bell could look at their palm and see the lines in their hand. That is a different kind of time than waiting for the clock hands to be in a certain position.

We've kind of lived in time. The other day, I was reading about how parts of our society now run on nanoseconds. Many of us depend on GPS devices, which rely on satellites 12,000 miles above the earth. Every day, there is a time correction because there is a nanosecond difference between the time on those satellites and the time that we live in. In order for all their measurements to work, it has to be exactly the same time, so they have to correct for a fraction of 100 nanoseconds. I don't think in the time of the Buddha he thought much about nanoseconds or had to worry about them!

It is remarkable that just in my lifetime, time has become more and more of a pressing issue. It is easy to imagine becoming time poor, wishing we had more time. Part of it is that there is so much available to us, and there is a hunger and an expectation that we should be able to get to everything.

I fondly remember times in my life when I was young, looking back at it now. There was no internet; there were no cell phones. What did I do? I would go the whole day without checking for a message on my phone. Is that even legal or possible now? I have visceral memories of walking around San Francisco with lots of time. The streets were much more spacious compared to the traffic now; the whole feeling of the city has changed.

One of the great values of the different monasteries and retreat centers I've been at is how the relationship to time changes so radically. There is very little time pressure, even though things have to happen on time. There was lots of space, lots of time, and there wasn't so much to do. You weren't supposed to check the internet and the news. My kids watch TV programs on their computers, and I'm amazed at how many there seem to be. You could spend your life watching new TV programs and not get to them all. That would be a sad life, wouldn't it, if you didn't get to them all? [Laughter]

The point is that there is so much we can do that is available to us in a way that hasn't been available until recent times. It takes some care to learn to navigate the world of time and all these possibilities. Today's topic is how to be time rich. If you want to be rich, be rich in spacious time. Live in a kind of boundless time, as opposed to a bounded time constrained by all your concerns, needs, duties, and responsibilities.

One of the things I learned in the monastery was to live in this schedule of things that had to be done at a certain time, but to do it within spacious time. The two don't have to be separate from each other. There is a way to be relaxed, calm, and fully engaged. Sometimes time would completely disappear because of our full engagement in what we were doing.

Meditation as a Reference Point for Time

Meditation is a wonderful reference point for discovering our relationship to time. In many ways, meditation is a time to do something very different than what we usually do in our lives, and that difference is highlighted. If we are always running around being busy, it becomes second nature. What's the problem? That's what everyone else is doing, too. But then you sit down to meditate, and you feel the cost of that running around. You feel the impact it has of a distracted mind and a tense body. Because of the contrast, we can see the busyness in a way we couldn't when we were living in it.

Meditation is a reference point to understand ourselves. This is a different purpose than thinking meditation is just about becoming calm. It's fine for it to help you become calmer, but if that's all it's about, you're not going to become wise about how you operate when you are not calm. If you use meditation to see the contrast and use it as a standard to really get to know yourself better, you'll see what's going on.

When we first sit and meditate, sooner or later most people will notice that their mind is distracted. They bring the mind back to their breath, then they get distracted again, and they come back to the breath. To be distracted, chances are you are caught up in time in some way.

Ask yourself the question when you are distracted from the present moment: Are you living in the past? Are you thinking about the future? Are you actively distracted by thinking about a present that's not here, but someplace else? Or are you thinking in a kind of mythic, fictional time? Fantasies don't exist in time exactly; you might be solving some wonderful problem or writing the great American novel in your head.

Which is your tendency? What is your default? When you get distracted, is it more often in the past, the future, or things happening in the present but not here and now? Or do you get distracted by what's actually happening here and now? You could sit here and meditate with a room full of people with your eyes closed, thinking, "There are a lot of different kinds of masks that people are wearing right now. Let me see if I remember their color and their shape." That is distracted thinking, but it's about the present moment.

Where does your mind go? What does that pattern tell you about yourself? If you are mostly thinking about the past, what are the values, priorities, desires, and concerns that keep bringing you back? If it's mostly about the future, what is the energy pulling you there?

Trying to understand oneself more deeply helps you bring your mindfulness to something deeper than the distracted thought. If you are thinking about the past because you still feel hurt about what happened years ago, and you are trying to navigate, negotiate, and figure out who is to blame and what you could have done, that hurt might need your attention. The hurt is always in the present moment, and it is probably not going to be healed by trying to make a better past by thinking about it. Rather, you must really meet the pain and learn how to sit with that in the present moment.

If you are thinking about the future, maybe it's because you are anxious and planning. The anxiety is what needs our attention. Or maybe it is delightful anticipation. I know people who seem to have a joy in anticipating things. One of my sons was that way; he would lay in bed anticipating and planning. As a little kid, he loved building a stage for a play, but the play would never happen. That was beside the point! The building and anticipating were so much fun, and then he would go on to do something else.

Sometimes it is joy that brings us into the past and future. That's nice, but if you bring your present moment attention into the joy and follow that back to its source inside, that is a very different movement. You arrive in the present moment rather than continually batting away distracted thoughts. You are getting to the underlying source from which these thoughts bubble up, which is probably close, intimate, and truly important about yourself. This is one way meditation can be a reference point for understanding what's going on with distracted thinking.

The Burden of Conceiving Time

Another aspect of distracted thinking is that there are probably desires involved that are time-sensitive. How does time operate in the concern itself? For example, being anxious and planning for the future happens because something is time-bounded; I have to get it done in a certain time, so let me think about it ahead of time to be fast or efficient enough. Time comes into play.

As we settle down more in meditation, time can still be an operating concern. It could be that, yes, I am present, but they better ring the bell soon. When is this meditation going to be over? Yes, I've been present, but I've been present long enough! Maybe restlessness is coming up, wanting something to come to an end. Or it could be that we are trying to get concentrated or calm, so there is a focus on attaining something in the future—hopefully in the next minute. You are still leaning into the future, operating on the assumption that you can navigate and attain something. Time is operating again, and we are caught up in it.

What happens if we don't have a future in meditation? What happens if it's just about the present moment? We would no longer be attaining anything, because attaining is always in the future. It is a bit of a fantasy. Sometimes we do attain things—we do get calmer, and good things happen to us—so it's not illegal or impossible, but it is operating in time.

As the mind gets quieter, sooner or later you will notice that any concern about the future is a bit of a drag for the mind. Any concern for the future means the mind is activated with a certain activity of thinking. What is fascinating is discovering how much time belongs to a conceptual world that we create. The time we experience and live in is born in how our minds operate.

The time we live under is not cost-free, like the air that's just always here for us to breathe without thinking about it. There is a big debate in philosophy: Does time exist? Does it not exist? What is time? Independent of those concerns, meditators can learn, as their mind gets quiet, that the very conceiving of things dependent on time takes mental energy. It takes mental work. If the mind is quiet enough, we'll see that work as agitating. If you are super agitated to begin with, the level of agitation about the future is so subtle that it is inconsequential. But when the mind is really quiet, we start seeing that the activity of even being concerned about the future takes work. It creates ripples on the surface of the mind's lake. Thinking about the past is the same thing.

Living Without Past or Future

If we want to settle more, we let go of past and future. In mindfulness practice, you can just let go, but one way is always turning towards what is going on. Where is that work? Where is that pressure? It feels like agitation, a subtle pressure, or a little piece of stress having to do with past and future. Where is it now? Can I hold it? Can I bring my attention to it? Keep coming back and feeling it and sensing it. Following that stream back to the source is fascinating.

As the mind gets quieter, even the most subtle concern is extra. If you are following your in-breath, any idea that there is an end to the out-breath is extra. Any idea that the beginning of the out-breath just happened is extra.

What happens when you are just with the experience of breathing, without a past and a future? It can be very peaceful. It can be very settled. No past, no future, just this moment of the breathing, as if it's forever. Of course, it isn't forever; it becomes something else, but every new thing is just itself, just that moment of experience. Some people will say that the moment of experience and time have become no different from each other. Just this time. Just this.

You can start seeing this when eating a meal quietly, not talking or on your device. Just lifting a fork up to your mouth. Normally it is goal-oriented; you are trying to get it up into your mouth in a timely way. But what if there is no past or future? There is infinite time for bringing that fork up to your mouth. It is qualitatively a different way of experiencing eating than if a subtle part of the mind is concerned about the result of the action, trying to quickly put another mouthful of food on the fork.

Start being sensitive walking down the steps. Each stepping is not without the past and the future. I don't know if you could ever do it one hundred percent perfectly without past or future, but the point is not to do it perfectly. The point is to use it as a reference point. You get a sense of, "Oh, just getting close to the present, just this," and then we see, "Oh, there is still a little bit of greed or desire operating for something to be different in the next moment, or a little bit of pressure to get to the bottom of the steps." As opposed to just walking down the steps. Just walking. When eating, just eating.

"But I have so many things to do! I can't just walk down the steps. I have all this stuff that has to be done, and I have to get there quickly. If I don't, the sky will fall down!"

Just walking. Just this. You will discover that if you walk someplace without future and past, just making this activity the thing of the moment, when you come to the next activity you are actually in a better space to meet it and care for it. It is better than if you were hurried, out of breath, thinking, "Okay, now I'm here, I have to do this quickly so I can move on to the next thing."

There have been times when I've started one thing, and as soon as I start it, I am already thinking about the next thing I have to do. It is the habit formation of the mind to live concerned about getting to what's in the future. It is rather unfortunate how strongly that can operate in people's minds.

Time Begins in the Present

As we meditate, we get to see all this. One of the opportunities in meditation is to see your mind clearly, to see its relationship to time, and how much you can quiet the conceiving of time that we do. One of the fascinating feelings you can get is the feeling that time always begins in the present.

The past begins in the present because we conceive of the past. In a few minutes, we will leave here, and this talk will only exist for you in how you conceive of it, how you remember it, and how your mind reconstructs being here. When you walk out the door, this talk only exists in your memory. When this talk becomes the past, that past was born here. The past is born in the present.

That is a very different idea than the linear movement from the future that passes behind us, or the future coming towards us. What happens if we understand that future and past begin in the present? If that's the case, the present is the source for all time in a certain kind of way. If that's the case, how are we going to be responsible, intimate, and careful with ourselves at that important juncture where time begins?

Are we creating time as a gift? Are we creating time as something that's useful and healthy for us and for others? We are the creators of time—at least for our own minds. This gives us phenomenal potential to live in the world in a very different way around time.

If you feel harried by time, or in a hurry in the world of time, you have constructed that time in your mind. Is that what you want to have produced in your mind for the world? Is a hurried mind your gift to the world? What happens if you construct a different time? Is there a timeless time? Is there spacious time? Is there a way of holding the events of your life—past, future, and present—in a wide-open time?

I think that is one of the gifts of meditation. To the degree to which we can get calm in meditation, it slows down the incessant rush of thoughts, ideas, and conceivings that the mind does. One of those conceivings is around time. You get a feeling that time has now opened up, is more spacious. That is a valuable place to take care. See it as a teacher, reflecting on what is important to you now.

If you find yourself in a hurry, you have become attached to something. There is no hurrying without attachment. You can do things fast without hurrying, and you can do things fast without attachment, but you can't hurry without there being attachment. As we slow down and become more spacious with time, we have the opportunity to discover what these attachments are.

Why do we give them so much authority? Why do we think they are required, so necessary, and so important? Follow that idea back to its source. Where does it arise from in you? What are the beliefs, deeper feelings, and emotions that give rise to the attachment that causes hurry?

There is time poverty, which I think has been growing in our modern society. More and more people are impoverished in time. And then there is being rich in time, an abundance of time that is only a moment—or a nanosecond—away. It is an abundance of time that is always here.

I hope this gives you something a little different than usual to consider, to be curious about, to talk to your friends about, and to study your mind with. May time become your friend by you becoming friends with time. Thank you.