In unified awareness time is not yet distinguished. We begin with an open question of how we would draw distinctions upon unified awareness which would lead to some understanding of the phenomena of time, or perhaps to an underlying ground of time.
Our natural awareness includes a successive variety of different states; to this extent time may be included in awareness. Awareness itself, however, and particularly unified awareness, is not itself necessarily a changing thing and in my experience has a perceptibly still center.
To the extent that we have direct experience of time, it is of present time. Awareness is always in the present, in so far as it is temporal at all. If we recall the past or expect the future we do so in the present. In fact the present may be defined by awareness. Time unifies all in the present but separates the past and the future.
Although there is natural stillness in the core of unified awareness there is also natural motion in the content of awareness, in being. Being flows and changes in the interior of consciousness and in the perceived world around us. Being includes change; being changes and, having changed, changes again. Change accumulates, becoming more different and yet more different, thus arises change diverging from change which continues and becomes accumulative time, that is, time that adds up to minutes, hours, days and years.
The leaves and branches on the maple tree outside my window are moving in the wind. When the breeze is light only the ends of new growth rock up and down but when a stronger gust comes the amplitude of vibration increases and the branches move from closer in towards the trunk. Day after day as the seasons progress I watch this tree bud and bloom and grow in greener fullness and in a few more months from now it will golden, shed and then stand half a year etched branch bare against the sky. I have marked time on this tree from the vibration and stillness of a single leaf through the substantial growth of the last few years. I have trimmed a few low branches which caught at my head while mowing the grass and two years ago I cleaned out several sections broken in an early snow. Through this maple time has shown two faces to me, a face of observation and a face of action.
Some change is nonaccumulative, random or cyclic. In the brilliant October sun the golding maple outside my window is thrashing in the wind; primary branches surge up and down while smaller branchlets twist and writhe about; each leaf vibrates to its own rhythm, but all of this wild change returns and passes through the same positions and this is change without accumulation and one can watch it absorbed in the surging energy and lost to time. Yet now and then a leaf breaks free into tumbling flight and that is nonreturning change and also the flickering screens of green and gold shadows slowly evolve with the changing of the afternoon light toward evening and that is change which is part random and part accumulative.
Observing the content of awareness we notice that the normal state is change and that stillness requires effort, either meditational effort to acquire inner stillness or external effort to build walls and buildings to hold a void of quietude away from the ceaseless flux of nature.
According to a common mode of thought the observations flowed from outside my self inward and the actions flowed from inside my self outward. Time in these senses involves a crossing of the border or distinction between self and other, between subject and object.
What is the fundamental thought that will carry us from the static and passive into the kinetic and dynamic? I suggest that that thought is of the crossing of boundaries. A distinction drawn upon unitary awareness generally creates a boundary except that when we examined the origin of distinction we found the boundary creating the distinction; it was simple more convenient for us as we went on to name the distinction before the boundary. A boundary is a separation. It is also a connection. It is unitary as in being; it is commonly dualistic as in being over against void or as in self and other or as in that which is aware and that which it is aware of; it is a triadic dualism as in where the boundary becomes a third with the two sides of the boundary. A crossing of boundaries is naturally of the last form with the two sides of the boundary joined by the crossing.
Naturally watching the world observes flow and change even in the present. The instantaneous present of clocks is an abstraction which would require several levels of distinction as well as science and technology to construct. The present nearer to our immediate reality extends a little into the past and future of clock time While we live as personal beings in the realm of separation, our awareness is finite and, being finite, has boundaries. These boundaries are also, like all boundaries, connections between what is enclosed and what is outside. Such connections imply change and transformation, because the connection is like a crossing, a motion of our awareness going forth. Therefore our perceptions are not always limited to the still and the instantaneous. The experienced present is thick enough to include the motion of a cat's head when coming to sudden attention or dappled shadows moving across the forest ground. That thickness of the real present gives a natural foundation for time. We also find the abstract or exact present as a boundary marking a distinction between past and future and our thicker really experienced present is a continual crossing of that boundary in the direction from the past to the future and, memorially, in the opposite direction.
In so far as the immediate present is concerned it is also possible to find a direction to time. I can readily assent to the knowledge of whether a closely observed ant is crawling backwards or forwards and this kind of observation gives a natural direction of time; time is flowing along with the ant, the cat, the shadow, although time itself has more to do with the necessity of packing more content into my awareness than can exist there simultaneously. If my awareness were broader then perhaps all experience would be simultaneous and not require time. Because of the limited extent of my awareness the present is not thick enough for all content and thus necessarily this fairly immediate awareness of time and the direction of time in the thickened present of real awareness extends into further time.
The concept of time as unpacking the content of awareness does not immediately imply a single direction of time; we could imagine that time as the spread of awareness were not all in a single direction, from past to future, but rather this way and that way, and we know the truth of this in common cyclical events and that our pure linear direction of time is a social convenience.
There are internal waves and external waves in time and being. External waves include natural waves of days and seasons, of weather storms and cloud shadows mixed with sunshine. External waves also include social waves of the hours and calendar, of social, economic and political change. These combine with singular, fractal, chaotic and catastrophic forms to give the pattern of external events. There are also internal waves and other changes of mood and mind. Our actual pattern of experience includes the interaction of all of these forms of change and duration as they are experienced.
This is not to say that all patterns of time and experience are cyclic. There are cumulative nonreturning patterns of growth and decay and also others; learning is a largely cumulative pattern for an individual, mixed with the loss, sometimes to advantage, due to forgetfulness. There are also probably random, chaotic events in time in mind, things like delta functions, such as the spark of a creative thought; there are accidents, perhaps, both fortunate and otherwise. There are the small events of thought and perception, of memory and imagination, which combine with larger patterns and events to fill the cup of time.
Awareness encompasses experienced time, but how is the time of action to be encompassed by awareness? The feeling of taking personal action is part of awareness, but that is not the action itself. Awareness is, including change, but action becomes. Action grows out of us like a leaf or flower grows out of a plant. Action impinges upon and changes awareness and that may be the cause of our action, the desire to change awareness. But desire itself is part of awareness. Whence, then, comes that part of action which is beyond awareness?
If we imagine time deep past when the first stars were forming, before humans, before the evolution of consciousness. All was fire and matter, hydrogen and helium collapsing, glowing, burning. Although there was electromagnetic radiation, all of this, a billion years of stupendous action, was invisible, unseen because there was no seer. But, then, did it really happen? Was it real or just something in our imagination? Suppose the universe had ended then, due to some unseen cataclysm, before ever mind or awareness came to be. Would it have ever been? Unknown, unseen, unimagined? Would it have mattered? It would have been of no consequence, no meaning to anyone.
Frederick Joseph Staley