The Fluid Nature of Time
An Energy Meditation Digression
I usually write odd little rather comic stories, which, while I hope!, are delightful in their own right, also have a somewhat ulterior, but only implied, purpose. If you pay attention, there’s an underlying discussion of the nature of time, where things happen all at once, and different moments really have not the slightest problem with a bit of communication with each other.
Why have causality when you can have it all?
You see, that in itself is a joke.
If time is not the tick tock you are trained to think it is, then things shift a bit.
In Special Relativity, which Einstein was able to introduce our still 19th century minds to in 1905, there’s a wonderful insight. It’s known as the Space-Time Interval. Special Relativity’s name refers to the special case of constant motion. Trying to understand accelerated motion is a bit more (mathematically) intense. That’s the General Theory of Relativity. You can understand Special Relativity with (nice) high school math.
The General Theory is a bit more. It shows that what we experience as gravity is really the curvature of spacetime itself, created by mass. So then you can derive everything from Black Holes to the Big Bang. Nice (times 2, I guess)!
But back to the Interval. In Special Relativity, the components of spacetime, 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, can all shift around depending on how something is moving relative to the observer, but the Interval, the 4 numbers of space and time (drumroll) is constant.
It don’t change. (bad verb choice for emphasis)
It don’t change, son.
OK, damn it. I start these stories with one idea in mind … and now look where I’ve found myself:
My favorite Zen Master, Dōgen, said somewhere before the year 1253, that
“Everyone thinks time is passing them by. They’re wrong. It stays right where it is.”
Now I’ve done it — I’ve connected Einstein (physics), Dōgen (Zen), and me, yours truly, John Levin on Medium, and his bizarre little stories … where time acts like a thing you can talk to, and, which, of course, through characters as diverse as dinosaurs and AI girlfriends, well, they all become characters you can address and who sometimes address you…
All in this unchanging moment.
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I’ll call that my Energy Meditation Derivation. Dōgen says he’s OK with it. But I had to get Einstein a beer and a schnitzel before he’d sign on.
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Would you believe that this story was originally going to be about my discovery this morning that American Sherman tanks in WW2 had FM radios?! Who would have thought? I saw it on Youtube, so it’s gotta be true!
Search for this one on Youtube: German Troops Never Knew American Sherman Tanks Had The World’s Most Advanced Radios.
It turns out that German tanks had underpowered AM radios, which, while also limited in power and range, picked up every bit of electrically generated static which, inside a fucking tank, was a lot, and also had a terrible German — Just take the orders, schweinhundt!- doctrinaire limitation, ie, the command tank in a group of 5 had a transceiver, but the guys who were supposed to just blindly follow orders, usually just had a receiver.
But … the American tanks had higher powered fucking FM transceivers, immune to static, with multiple times the range, and which allowed for 2 way communication, creating a battlefield knowledge network. You know who won.
The Japanese also had a rigid military doctrine — orders from above — while the Americans valued respect for the actual soldiers and let them innovate.
Here’s a Youtube on that:
Jesus, John! Einstein, Zen, some funky “Energy Meditation” I don’t believe for a moment, and now World War 2? You’re getting worse, son.
But the WW2 things also have a point. Today, Russia is losing a war. Ukraine is winning. And one big reason why is that Ukraine values freedom and innovation for everyone. Russia says just follow orders.
In America at this moment, we have one cultural — and modern — idea: Respect for everyone, and another, Just take orders.
I shouldn’t have to explain the rest of my point.
Fascism means following orders. Our Constitution means respect for everyone.
OK! If you enjoy stories that go where you didn’t expect, well, here the hell I am.
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PS — My form of meditation, Energy Meditation, and that’s my name for it, isn’t mindfulness, but is my own derivation of ancient Tantric “energy body” attention work that I’ve realized has reality, reality as in physics, that matches up well with… things that actually exist, as in scientific reality. If something is going to propel you towards the spiritual sort of Enlightenment, it should really be something actually existent,
Don’t you think?
My meditation guy, Osho, said (while discussing Tilopa’s Song of Mahamudra) that Enlightenment is “Orgasm with the Universe.”
That’s a little heavier than calmness.
And a lot more fun.
But it’s true.
If time stops for you, the energy of that immensity… Then doing some attempt to be calm really is a bit ho hum.
I’m biased. I know it.
PSS — There’s a wonderful biography of Aldous Huxley by his 2nd wife, Laura Huxley, called This Timeless Moment. My favorite anecdote in it concerns the lunch they had with J. Krishnamurti in Switzerland once.
Aldous Huxley, if you don’t know, wrote The Doors of Perception, describing what he learned from having done mescaline — in the early 1950s, of all things!
You can find a copy of it at the Huxley Archive, if you’re very patient while it loads.
Aldous Huxley is in a lyric in a Sheryl Crow song, but I leave that to you.
