Whenever we have an experience it happens in time. It takes time to know anything. Without time, nothing can be. To be able to refute the inherent existence of time we need to know what it is. But it is hard to define what time really is. So subtle and pervasive to every experience, we cannot get out of time while still having enough time to really taste it. Yet, as we can have a sense of self appearing to ourselves, and a sense of knowing can be known, so too, a sense of time can be sensed in time. If like awareness and self, time also turns out to utterly depend on other conditions for how it appears, it will appear to not have its own nature. Things without own nature are empty of inherent existence.

Story Time

We have two stories about time in our heart-minds. Their narratives conflict in ways they can't both be true. Both contain limitations, and both project an independent reality onto time we will have to question. There is a kind of eternalism story, wherein the past and future are really significant, and alive for us. They feel so real, we might even live more for our future or past than we do for our present experience: maybe choosing to suffer now for a better future, or using now to go over the past, perhaps hoping to change it. The second story is a kind of presentism, wherein the past is completely gone—non-existing, while the future never arrives—that time that is always not yet here. In this view there is only now: the rest are illusion and fantasy. Both stories make sense when we're in them, and yet don't when we investigate them.

Eternalism, with its time-travel like nature, can be experientially refuted by presentism's and mindfulness's proposal that now feels much more alive and real. Yes, we were absorbed in past or future thinking, but it was only imagined in the present. When we recall an early memory, like interacting with an elder in our community as a infant, or think about an important appointment we have in the future, we create a sense of time that disappears when we come into contact with body sensations and sounds here and now. Now feels more real. A presentism evangelist might proclaim, too soon, we've stepped out of time. Presentism, although highly regarded in some spiritual circles, is not without its limitations and exaggerations. Do we really want a life where the past doesn't matter? Is that not implied by saying it doesn't really exist. Likewise, without lending value to our future, then all processes like opening, awakening, liberating would all be meaningless. Additionally, the present moment cannot be understood without reference to the very past and future it is not. If we state past and future are mere imaginings, we must own that the present depends on things which are not real. How can we claim a real present while depending on falsehoods?

Now Is Not The Time For Something Like This

Take a moment to look at this present moment. The length of this moment is not fixed, it is determined by the perceiver, both by conceptual framing, and attentional acuity. A lens that looks at the inconstancy of a breath's movement, may deepen into rarefied subtlety of vibrations. The more refined our attention, the more moments we find this moment is made of. This has infinite regress, until perhaps our capacity to attend ceases, and the world of apparent things might drop from perception at all. We cannot get to the bottom of momentary refinement via attention or conception. The boundaries of past and future are not fixed, when we look for a clearly defined now, we can find it cramped into a sliver so thin no thing can actually happen in it.

Have you ever wondered if anything really happens in the present moment? We need more moments than one present moment for movement, even the vibration of light needs more. How much of what eternalism's seemingly imagined past and future will we need to import into presentism's 'only real present' for anything to actually happen?

Neither eternalism not presentism are true, but they can be useful. A certain freedom is made accessible for us by having these two different stories of time to pick from. Hopefully we already feel a degree of freedom just knowing that this sense of time we experience is dependent on a story I am telling. But, an additional freedom comes from wisely changing time story in times of dukkha (stress and suffering).

Time Flies, Dukkha Drags

The most common experiences of dukkha are often called the 5 hindrances, I like to call them drags, it's a mnemonic (DRAGS) that feels right—they are a drag on the heart's freedom, and they cause time to drag.

DRAGS

• Doubt in freeing possibilities
• Restless energy
• Aversive pushing
• Greedy pulling
• Sluggish energy

When there is a lot of greed or aversion in the heart, more time is fabricated. More fabricated time has more pressure and urgency in it, and it often has more duration too. By the time we feel a pain we are actually already being with it. Yet the idea of it lasting, that co-arises with aversion to it, makes it much less tolerable. What's more, the greater the imagined duration, the more time for the Aversion to land: increasing the fight of Restlessness or freeze of Sluggishness. Likewise with Greed, imagine we're in a queue for something we really want and we feel it's not moving as fast as the other queue, or people are jumping into our one delaying it: the sense of this lasting longer makes the dukkha more pronounced as the demand of greed gets intolerably loud. Time is a key component in the amount of distress and suffering we feel, thus ways of draining that pressure out of the experience are immediately freeing.

Both time stories we've discussed can work some magic here, changing the experience time frame and easing dukkha. Eternalism can help us see this DRAGS moment is actually happening in a vast expanse of time. In our whole lifetime, or the lifetime of all, this is a small moment. A sensibility towards eternity adds spaciousness, easing the contraction as our entanglement in dukkha opens. Additionally it can give us confidence. It can't be the first time this has ever happened, if not for us, then for someone. We can accommodate this, meet it well, find ease and freedom with this. As we bring wisdom, and bring something more wholesome, we dissolve the Doubt. Alternatively, presentism's inconstancy lens allows us to see what appeared as a substantial experience as much more dynamic and fluid, even barely here at all. With less solid ground for DRAGS to settle the heart can unbind. Even more, we don't need to meet the future of this now, there is only this sliver we need to work with, and notice the heart-mind is already mid-embrace with it, and ready to letting it go. As long as these perspectives are tuned to dukkha lightens, as we return to time-pressure perspectives dukkha returns. This also applies in the other direction, as dukkha eases time lightens, and as dukkha increases time becomes more heavy. Time and dukkha have an interplay. They depend on each other. In meditation we can attend to the build up, and fading of our sense of time, and notice the correlation in our sense of dukkha. Inversely, we can play intensifying and softening any sense of dukkha reactivity, and notice the freedom we can bring to our sense of time. If there were no dukkha, would there be any time?

Feeling Time

We can see and know directly that time is intertwined with dukkha, and we can play increasing and decreasing our sense of time. Although we can recognise our sense of time depends in this way, we may still feel that time inherently exists. Dukkha, that old time builder, brings a tangible level of reactivity, but the reactivity does not come from nowhere. Let's keep digging. The principle of vedanā: the hedonic projection onto contact that gives us a feeling about things, is actually a subtle type of reactivity. Vedanā has many insights to share, and one or two pertain specifically to time. The three types of vedanā projections could be named: this will be hard to bear; this will bring happiness; this isn't worth our time. You may have learned to note how these projections not only do not inhere in the contacted, but we might not have seen how they also project a future time into the present experience. The projection of a future is in the very classification (I've exaggerated the language a bit, as this requires quite a refined attention to attune to). This will be further amplified in the habitual urge to push; pull; or withdraw, respectively. All of which are reactive, and dukkha, and further build dukkha and time with it. Yet, even the making of vedanā is reactive.

It is not possible to have sense contact without a feeling (a vedanā) about them, and it is not possible to have a feeling about things without time being made. By practising, particularly seeing vedanā as empty nature, we may notice that as we release around vedanā, time too is not fabricated in the same way. The more we release reactivity the less time appears. This practice further emphasises time's dependent and empty nature too. If we feel like there is a real way time is, that time has an independent reality, now is a good time for a penetrating question: how much reactivity is necessary to reveal real time, as it really is from its own side?

Vedanā is not something we do, it is something subliminal that occurs in sensing the world. It is not us consciously making the time, yet time appears with vedanā. This whole process is something we share with all sentient beings—all life seeks pleasure and avoids pain. And this very seeking makes time. It goes deeper yet, the future and past are fabricated in attention alone. Even paying attention to something makes time. To attend implies staying with over multiple moments. Likewise with intention, even subtle intentions, even ones we don't even feel we make, we find future and past being created with them. Time for these most subtle happenings are being fabricated in, or we could say woven into the very fabric of what it means to experience. It is now less convincing to say that an experience takes time, than to say experiencing makes time. We have plenty of evidence for the latter, yet the stubborn superstition of the former may be hanging on. There's more to come. But also, seeing this process many times is likely much more significant than accruing more arguments, yet, why not have both.

Can't Get A Moment

Each time we look, time does not stand up from its own side, yet we may still feel that time mysteriously inheres independently. So let's return to the present moment to play with this essential thread in the fabric of time. Because if moments also don't exist in a real way, then time, even our lifetime made of many moments, is not going to really exist either. In case you feel a bit shaky or defensive let's be clear, empty means beyond existing and non-existing, but with that, definitely not inherently existing. Although we have revealed there is no defined duration for a moment, which is fundamentally unworkable when constructing a time sense that inherently exists, we likely don't think there is only one moment for all time. Not least, for nothing could happen in one moment—life would be static—we would not exist.

For there to be the time we know, we need a flow of many moments. This present moment must have begun as the last moment ended, and itself will end as a subsequent present moment seamlessly begins, only to itself momentously end into the next one's beginning. Just like us, a moment has a birth, an ageing, and a death. Yet if that were so, a moment itself, like our life, would also be made of moments. For a moment to begin, it needs a beginning that is distinct from its ending, and it likely has a middle (no matter how slender in between the two). That means the moment is not really one present moment, but actually three moments masquerading as one: a beginning moment; an ending moment; and a middle moment. On top of that, each of those three moments also need beginning, middle, and ending parts to be able to sequence between themselves. Those too are really three independent moments, that are also going to need subdividing in turn. We're back at infinite regress. Both sensitive attention and penetrating analysis reveal the same impossibility of the present moment. (NOTE: read this paragraph again if it doesn't yet make sense—it is possible to see this clearly)

It makes no sense to say that time is made up of moments that are endlessly subdividing. They would soon have no substance. Nor would they ever begin or end—their whole raison d'être. Instead conception of moments are so caught up in dividing they never happen. Moreover, the idea of a moment being made up of many parts each of which are made of many parts, is not what it means to be made up of many parts. To be a 'many' means to be made of many real singular things. To conclude, many moments makes no sense, and having one present moment is equally impossible if not slightly more absurd. We can't have one moment for all time, as time couldn't move and nothing would ever happen. Yet, there is no other way to conceive of time: it must be one or many, and neither is possible. What we think of as time cannot be. This is quite a light run through of a particular and precise emptiness reasoning called "neither one nor many", but even here time just failed to be either. Time is impossibly empty. A moment without a beginning (or ending) cannot be, and yet there is no way a truly beginning moment can exist!

This is not just a clever idea, this is a liberation teaching. It isn't only to be understood, but experienced. All of this is to be used skilfully in meditation. Dukkha and time are interwoven, by seeing the empty nature of time, we can radically dissolve dukkha. For its impact to really liberate the heart-mind two things will likely be necessary: we will need to bring it to bear on quite a subtle and malleable heart-mind; and we will need to have considered this reasoning till we feel convinced by it. Then with very little thought we can delicately penetrate our subtlest perception with our conviction of time's emptiness.

We now have three practice approaches to choose from, we can change the time frame story; play with the felt sense of time construction via vedanā, attention, intention; or analyse the impossible present moment. We can use them alone, or they can be combined with other insight practices. Each mode will work to reveal different depths of understanding that time is dependently originating and empty of inherent existence, and present varying effects on our direct experience of time. This is an invaluable insight, and it is really worth seeing it as deeply as we can to best embed the insight in our life, and the full effect, perhaps ironically, will require taking ones time to see time is empty many times.