the feeling of time.

[kamika]

Okay so like... i knew practically nothing about vipassana before going to a 10 course at the vipassana center. but i knew i had a lot of self discipline.
So forgive me if this question has been answered in a book of vipassana but
is there a word to describe the feeling of time, is that just what happens when one remains aware and equanimous over a period of time.

like, i don't visualize it, but when i get really focused over time i start to feel the individual frames of instances like a flipbook or a reel of film. for each fraction of a second, i feel the slightly unpleasant slightly pleasant sensations all through out the body. I guess when I'm trying to reflect on what i know about the universe when i listened to Stephen hawking's audio books, i think about how space and time are related, and how the cause and effect and time are intertwined, so if cause and effect can be taken away, so can time, that's why Vladimir Lenin's body didn't decompose as fast, because they took away most of the changes in atmosphere.

i started to think about how atoms arise and pass, and how even the sun will pass, and how even the universe (if quantum mechanics is correct) will eventually collapse on it's own density and start over again.

Umm... yeah, i want to read a book on vipassana.
that would be awesome if a physics professor wrote a book on vipassana from the cosmology point of view.

I guess i have a while to go before liberation, but i sincerely feel like I'm on the right path.

[metta fou]

Anicca

[Matthew]

If you want to understand the Western vs Asian concepts/understandings of time and why the difference between them makes Einsteinian physics incomprehensible unless you can place yourself in an Asian mindset read "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra. The sorts of moments you seem to be experiencing are quite natural.

We live with a flawed conceptual framework of time: Time is like a piece of string we move along. The fact is that the only piece of this string which exists is the moment we are in now. It's the only piece of this string that ever existed. Time is a constantly flowering now. We imagine the past and future: the rest of the string, but that is the only thing that makes them real.

Matthew

[kamika]

I think that was what i was coming to comprehend.

I was looking at a spider web when i was laying down outside and i noticed that i cannot see the complete spider web, only the part that is reflecting sunlight, and our brain fills in the gaps to draw the line from one reflection to the other.

which is kind of like our concept of time. these things have happened in the past, so it makes the future look a certain way, but we can never know for sure because the only thing we can see is the now.

[Matthew]

I think that was what i was coming to comprehend.

I was looking at a spider web when i was laying down outside and i noticed that i cannot see the complete spider web, only the part that is reflecting sunlight, and our brain fills in the gaps to draw the line from one reflection to the other.

which is kind of like our concept of time. these things have happened in the past, so it makes the future look a certain way, but we can never know for sure because the only thing we can see is the now.

One step further .. the only time that exists is now.



Matthew