A Moment In Time

By Michael Littlefair

A story about a lay Buddhist and his son, travelling on a journey to Tibet. During the journey, the lay Buddhist explains his understanding of the meaning of Time in Buddhism to his son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781678120078

Book preview

Introduction

Mack: Dad, I wish to understand the basics of Buddhism; can you explain them to me please?

Dad: There is nothing my son, that could make me more happy than to know you will learn as much as possible about Buddhism.

This novel aims to give an insight into the author’s understanding of Buddhism and the concept of Time. In particular, the notion of Time as we perceive it in our every day lives may not be the actual way that the Universe around us works. It may be that, Time is a construct of our conscious mind that simply allows our thoughts to flow. Time appears to flow, but it is actually only our thoughts which flow.³¹, ³² In the same way that matter needs three dimensional space to exist and move, so our minds need the construct of Time to allow our thoughts to flow. The Universe is actually timeless, as our subconscious mind understands. If we assume that the conscious mind had no concept of Time, the result would be that all our thoughts would simultaneously pile up one on another and unity of thought would be impossible. In other words, just as the subconscious mind recognises timeless sequence for what it is, the conscious mind creates the construct of Time from this same sequence. Time is a construct of our mind. So, even though we live in a constant, but ever changing moment that is actually timeless, the conscious mind creates the concept of Time out of this sequence. In other words in our whole life we live in a single constant moment. This single moment is outside of what we perceive as being Time. Past and Future are simply memory and imagination. They are part of our brain’s operating system and do not play any part in Time.

The greatest illusion that, we have about life, is that there is an I somewhere inside our being. A permanent entity which is eternal and doesn’t change throughout our lives and when we die goes either to Heaven or Hell. This is not the Buddhist view. What we perceive as the I is a figment of our deluded imagination. This I constantly changes from hour to hour, day to day. The person with a set of views yesterday, has changed those views today and will change them again tomorrow. The people we like today, we dislike tomorrow. Nothing about our psyche or mind is permanent; nothing. We change constantly. The only constant thing about us is that, we are impermanent. There is no unchanging permanent I in our being. There is an impermanent illusion which we think is I or Me but it has no real intrinsic physical existence. Anything which changes cannot be eternal. All things in the universe are impermanent, and an eternal God is an impossibility in an impermanent universe.

The conscious mind is made up of a number of aggregates that are linked together through consciousness or mental awareness. Thus we consist of six senses; eye sense, ear sense, nose sense, tongue sense, touch sense and mental awareness. When these senses are combined with mental awareness and feelings, our consciousness creates the feeling of an I, the thing all these senses and feelings appear to be acting upon. The conscious mind has a very, very poor data processing capacity. A maximum of about seven bits of information per second. Compared to the subconscious, which can process billions of bits of information per second, the conscious mind is very simplistic, even deluded. It has to make massive assumptions and approximations about all the information it is receiving by using rough models or stereotypes to be able to understand what it is perceiving. That is why humans prefer to use stereotypes to understand people around them. It would be too difficult to treat every human being as an individual. That is why Government propaganda is so effective. If the mind just accepts what the