Do we have time?

What does it mean to feel that we're "out" of time? What would it mean to be "in" time—in what time? Depending on how we understand time, and the plays of language we use to describe it, we might not know at all. Many of our ancestors understood time as non-linear, and felt that they were in its rhyming. Do we feel as though we can be in this with them again? How would we need to turn in time with the seasons in order to survive the 21st century? What happens if our poverty in time—recognizing inability to possess our time—opens us like a rose, unspooling into new shapes: petals, patterns, shades? Maybe there's nothing more basic to a delicious life than this.

If we believe that the modern has colonized a sacred relationship to time, leaving us beached on its craggy sands–that is, if we believe that the long colonial catastrophe has imbalanced the seasons and tilted the skies–how do we even begin to re-new ourselves in time? We might often feel impossible in this lack, run down, like there's nothing we could do to overcome our history and present circumstance. We might want a spiritual orientation across constant change and aging, and look for stability in old ways. But there too, we find climate chaos and capitalist speed unmaking us. Our time is not like it was, our bodies are bent like the shadows are long.

But the sun is not set. The past has not passed yet: it is open for us to re-imagine, to spiral back through for worship and sifting. The future is here with us to live now, to wind into and return from with lessons for being other-wise. We are here, then, just in time.

Our traveling-in-community looks to kindle a sacred relationship to time within the world as it is, not as the fantasy of a past that never was, not even as we want the world to be. We know that this searching together prefigures the world that we all need and deserve. This path is looking for ways to age into the earth eternally. This now is the time in which we uncover a fourth moment careening slipstream through the concepts we call past, present, and future.

To make this journey shining through time, we've packed a knapsack of people, traditions, and ideas with which we're thinking, dancing, and weaving. Here are some scraps from our knapsack. 

The past is not passed: the end of the world has already happened.

First, let's talk "ends". When we say, "the end of the world," we mean that worlds upon worlds are already over. Hundreds of years of colonialism have wiped out languages, stories, bodies, habitats, and universes held by Indigenous communities, landscapes, and enslaved peoples. Along with anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, we call this the ancestral catastrophe. This is not a past catastrophe, but the present context of life and death on planet Earth. Though many who are privileged and protected by the gated communities of power may see climate chaos and social collapse as a coming catastrophe, we refuse to locate crises on the approaching horizons alone.

Rather: catastrophe is the time we breathe, right now. It is a gateway—from Édouard Glissant, the communication of a trembling vulnerability through which we share with Earth. The time of catastrophe is not the time of restoration or a past fantasy. This would ignore the ancestral catastrophe and its indelible, ongoing qualities—that is, the impossibility of its undoing. Ignoring this would send us spiraling into forced forgetting and naive re-wording: re-claiming, re-discovering, re-turning, re-membering, re-calling. We do need to claim, discover, turn, member, and call newly. But the "re-" is all-too-often an old habit, one found especially in European Romanticism. It is the hope that there is a past Golden Age, a Garden of Eden that once existed, but that we have now lost. But this is just a story, and, like any story, it's not politically neutral.

So what is the politics of such a story? It certainly isn't radical, it doesn't inspire novelty. It's a fundamentally conservative story, central to modern identity. This story reinforces modern, liberal, capitalist systems and ways of thinking. It's a pressure release, a vacation, a "just get away" trip, repeated by Thoreau, Bohemians, and hippies. By imagining that moderns have lost a past innocence, moderns affirm that they have broken away from tradition, inspired by reason and progress. But no such break ever happened: There was no egalitarian, "primitive," ancient time—no "Golden Age" that later fell. That's a myth central to imperialism and and one that founds numerous faiths, including articles of faith central to modern Romanticism. In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wenngrow roundly refute these founding myths of modernity. They show that our ancient ancestors were never one thing—they were constantly experimenters with social forms. They were not stuck in a timeless Eden. They were in time, too: often seasonal in their approaches to self-organizing. We know that our ancestors as creative agents who experimented with diverse political systems. Those experiments can continue today.

Alongside Indigenous authors such as Waubgeshig Rice (Anishanaabe) and ecological object-oriented philosopher Timothy Morton, we see that the end of the world has already happened.  By this, we mean that the concept of a global world, joining us all together through capitalist empire and "development" is but the latest myth of progress that structures Modernity. That world is already over. As Bruno Latour has said, there never was a globe that could materially provide the resources and fossil fuels to assuage the exponential growth of hyper-capital. There never was enough atmosphere to metabolize the amount of carbon and plastic waste we produce. In short, there never was the time of progress nor the space of a globe for that drive for endless growth. So that world has already ended. Our sacred calendar is not at the near, coming end of a world. It is a sacred calendar that spirals after a world has already ended. It's just that most people and systems have not noticed that it's already over. 

Chrononormativity and time compression.

One of the marks of the colonial Plantationocene is mono-culture. As colonial violence forced plant and animal species into controlled lines for easier production, it trapped habitats into labor and multiplicity became monotone. Colonialism forced diversity and difference into uniform resources, into infinitely fungible commodities.

The same thing happens for time, all the time. Under colonialism and the time-compression of capitalism, we find ourselves within the monochrone of neoliberal chrononormativity. This term, coined by Elizabeth Freeman in Queer Temporalities means the use of time “to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.”  Elizabeth Freeman, Introduction to “Queer Temporalities” (special issue). glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 159–76.

Alongside chrononormativity, time compression are the two pillars of capitalist temporal experience. In his work The Condition of Post Modernity, Marxist geographer David Harvey showed us that under neoliberal capitalism, time is compressed, along with space. The intensifying speed of capital also speeds up social life. The pace, the cadence of time gets faster. Technologies such as smart phones, the internet, social media, and financial tech trading stock at the nano-second level all contribute to this speeding up of time. The felt-pace of social life increases endlessly. 

Time-compression is a collection of both micro-social phenomena (on the level of the individual) as well as macro-social phenomena (collective rhythms, structure, norms). Time is a personal experience as well as a shared and binding norm.

In order to maximize efficiency, capitalist practices severed human bodies from the rhythms of the seasons and the cycle of day and night. The acceleration of time is a domestication of natural rhythms. This new velocity allowed for modernity. It now threatens to break it apart at the seams. For example, the very idea of:

• year-round productivity regardless of the weather or season established a new capitalist temporality cut off from the cycles of the sun and moon
• night shifts are way to continue to make a profit even when sun has set

It's no wonder that workers in early industrial revolutions used to smash the factory clocks in resistance. They experienced this imposition of new forms of time as a violent regime. As Foucault showed us, this new capitalist-liberal society needed us to be disciplined: schools needed to run on strict time schedules (remember having to get to your classroom at 10:17 on the dot), hospitals, prisons, and corporate workplaces all reinforced this time-discipline.

This continues in our time as weekends, evenings, lack of vacation becomes transformed into the potential for productivity. And now, the very boundaries of a work day spill over into all of our life. There's no rest. We are never "off." There's always pressure to be more productive.

And we are exhausted. As psychologist Alain Ehrenberg describes, we are "tired of having to become ourselves." (The Weariness of the Self). “I am actually a quite different person, I just never got around to being him [sic].” -Ödön von Horváth

As "Bifo" Berardi explores in The Soul At Work: "The rise of post-Fordist modes of production, which I will call 'Semiocapitalism', takes the mind, language, and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value. In the sphere of digital production, exploitation is exerted essentially on the semiotic flux produced by human time at work." Alienation is now defined in the relation between human time and capitalist value.

And today, we have to extend this Marxist analysis to include the more-than-human. In Humankind, Timothy Morton invites us into solidarity with nonhuman people. The ecological dimension of our course is part of such solidarity. As we wonder about a sacred relationship with time, it must also be a wondering about a sacred relationship with space, place, and ecologies of nonhuman people. The compression of time is ecological: within the speed of hyper-capital, the economic drive to increase productivity is materially entangled with the increased extraction of resources, the increased production of waste, plastics, and toxicity, and release of carbon into the atmosphere. The speeding up of time is also ecocide, global warming, and the 6th great extinction event. 

Pause. Rest. Take a breath.

If you are exhausted, it may be a relief to know that we are equally shaped by deep time and timelessness. U-chronia. Time-less-ness. 

Timeless Fourth Time

Timelessness may also be "Great Time" as in the Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. It may be what this tradition calls the "fourth time," which is neither past, nor present, nor future. Fourth-ness: outside of and beyond the flow of past to future, the arrow of time. What is such a timelessness? How are we this timelessness already?

For some insight, let's turn to one of the great mystical poets and meditation masters of the Great Perfection, Longchenpa. According to Longchenpa, Great Perfection spontaneous practice is free of urgency and goals. Time itself opens into beyond past, present, and future. This experience of time is meant to liberate practices from telos—from achievement—and from passivity or stillness, enacting timelessness as a style. In order to disclose this style, attention to the aesthetic dimension of Longchenpa’s writings and the tempo of Great Perfection practices remains helpful.

Over and again, Longchenpa describes the primary characteristic of the spontaneous Great Perfection in terms of freedom from cause and effect. However, his critique does not lead to temporal suddenness or speed. What then is the pace of meditation if we understand these following verses as a concrete meditative instruction regarding how to relate with the telos or fruition (‘bras bu)?:

The usual order of things is reversed within the single sphere of being,
and so hope and fear concerning the fruition are cut through—
a state equal to space.
So vast, so supreme, the enlightened mind of victorious ones is equal to space. There is no renunciation or attainment—the expanse of the single sphere.
This is timeless freedom; it is irrelevant whether or not one has realization.
A yogin is content on the path equal to space, with nothing needing to be done.

The theme of instantaneousness here gives way to a sense of inevitability. It is “irrelevant” whether one has realization or not. In these verses, the timeless availability of awakening is more important than any sense of abruptness or a sudden flash of experience. Again and again, the distinguishing feature of the Great Perfection is its freedom-from, or suspension-of, the paradigm of causality and effort. This freedom extends to any linear or temporal continuum with a telos or even a sense of the telos as immediate or present. Such freedom, and practical instructions “to be content with nothing needing to be done,” is what allows for spontaneity.

The sudden-gradual polarity may be understood in terms of a diachronic or synchronic development of the path across time. Sudden refers to an instantaneous method and realization, whereas gradual refers to an extended series of stages, a variety of techniques, and a progressive, teleological movement from confusion to enlightenment. I find that Longchenpa’s writings on spontaneity do not easily fit into this polarity. While he is certainly critical of the gradual, diachronic, cause-effect temporality of the path, at least in The Basic Space of Phenomena and The Way of Abiding, he does not emphasize an abrupt, synchronic sense of spontaneity. Instead, Longchenpa’s spontaneous practice is not about time, nor about expediency, nor about temporally immediate access to enlightenment or the indwelling potential, Buddha nature. It is instead an approach to practice that may be described as flowing diachronically—across time—as much as it may be described synchronically—in a flash. The Great Perfection employs a range of methods and some of them (such as subtle-body practices and the four "Leaping Over" visions) are an explicitly gradual unfolding, yet remain effortless and spontaneous.

For Longchenpa, there are four times: past, present, future, and the fourth time. The fourth time (dus bzhi) is the absence of the other three, or timelessness (ye nas). “The three times and timeless time are All Good time, and it is the originally accomplished and changeless state.” The fourth time is the ontology of the three times in the sense that the fundamental being of all three is unrestricted, empty, and spontaneous—the true nature of phenomena: “Since you rest in infinite evenness, a state not subject to restrictions or extremes, you experience a state of spontaneous presence within the realm that is the true nature of phenomena—“the fourth time.”

The section in which Longchenpa explicitly evokes the fourth time follows after a description of his personal experience, a phenomenology of what it might be like to experience the world as spontaneous and timeless. Even though aspects of this description are not explicitly about temporality, Longchenpa describes his own experience of phenomenal objects and awareness as the way in which to understand time, and it therefore seems important to provide this context.

Since everything reverts to a state of evenness, with no object
whatsoever existing,
there is no orderly process, there are no phenomena, there is
no identifiable frame of reference.
The ground collapses, the path collapses, and any sense
of fruition collapses,
so you cannot conceive in the slightest of good or bad,
loss or injury.
Your experience of evenness is decisive, timelessly so,
and you feel certainty about the universe of appearances and possibilities.
The division between samsara and nirvana collapses—
not even basic space exists innately...
Since the perspective of confusion—the universe of appearances and possibilities
collapses,
Day and night are timelessly pristine, naturally pristine, pristine
in space.
Days and dates are pristine; months, years, and eons are
pristine.
One thing is pristine; everything is pristine.
The spiritual and the nonspiritual are pristine
in primordial basic space.
The term “basic space,” the product of conventional mind, is pristine.
However you strive, whatever effort you make, what now will
be of value?
The entanglements of the desiring mind resolve—the supreme marvel of space!
The nature of this irreligious beggar resolved into such a state.

Long ago, in the distant future.

What is the time in which we dream? When does our imagination happen, our prayer, the when from which we call protection, the eighth day, and those times into which we promise "forever"? That is, what is the otherwise-time into which we, ourselves in our own life, dissolve as we figure our descendants, or aren't yet known as we story into the mythic past? Lastly, again, how do we practice this "otherwise", according to what all humans have always practiced, according to our patience as being-of-Earth.