In this article, I will attempt to tackle a very sturdy beast. A beast that most of us must grapple with every living moment of our lives unless, of course, you are a fully Enlightened being! A popular treatise Buddhist scholars often study is the Debate of King Milinda and Ven. Nāgasena, an Arahant, who lived around 150 BC.

King Milinda asks Ven. Nāgasena this question: “Nāgasena, when you say, ‘Time immemorial’, what does time mean? Is there any such thing?”
The Arahant, who, it is said, answered each and every one of his interrogator’s questions so eloquently and dexterously, replies: “Time means past, present and future. There are some for whom time exists and some for whom it doesn’t. Where there are beings who will be reborn, for them time exists; where there are beings who will not be reborn, for them time does not exist.”
His reply is bound to leave some utterly perplexed. After all, how can time exist for some but not for others? Should something that exists not be so for all? Or does it mean that for an Arahant, time still exists but does not care about it? 

Very interesting questions, aren’t they? In today’s times, science and the numerous branches of the study of time, such as chronometry – its measurement, chronosophy – its philosophical relevance, as well as chronoception – the psychological perception of time, have brought us a long way in our attempts to understand the phenomena of time. I myself have been involved in these investigations as a student at university, where I studied contemporary theories such as the theory of General Relativity formulated by Albert Einstein and the theory of Quantum Mechanics. Whereas physics originally concurred that time runs equally fast for everyone, Albert Einstein proved to the world that this was nonsensical. Scientists understand that the same event can take a different amount of time depending on the context of the observer of the event! This has to do with the behaviour of light, which we will not go into any more detail in this article. 

For the purpose of this article, we will work with the simplest models so that anyone can understand these concepts with a little bit of contemplative reflection.

Time as a medium for change
One of the greatest scientists of the modern era was Sir Isaac Newton. His idea of time was that “absolute time exists independently of any perceiver and progresses at a consistent pace throughout the universe.” In other words, he meant to say that time is very real. It exists. It is there. Although time itself cannot be observed directly (so Newton argued), its existence can be inferred. That was his logic. This is a viewpoint that science and physics have never fundamentally questioned. Although the question: “What is the structure of time?” has been debated back and forth over the course of recent centuries, its objective existence in one form or another was never questioned. And the reason behind this is that we all feel its passage, all the time – no pun intended! We perceive the world in this way. We feel that we have been there in the past, and we are present now, and we make plans to be in the future (at least as long as we are alive). 

In my previous article, we discussed this description of time: “...‘time’ that acts as a medium for change to occur and is said to flow incessantly.” There, we talked about time as a medium. A medium is something that can bear and contain something and allow its propagation. For example, in school, we learn mathematics. To propagate this knowledge, we need to use language as a medium. We could learn mathematics in mediums such as Sinhalese or English. In other words, knowledge propagates using language as a medium.

In the same way, we can think about time as a medium. What does it propagate, and what does it help transition? The golden word here is “change”. Change is something that happens “over time.” How long does pasta take to boil? A portion of pasta takes about 10 minutes to boil. A car takes about 4.5 hours to get from Colombo to Anuradhapura, whereas I have changed too. I am 32 years old now; in other words, it took me 32 years from the moment of birth to become who, or what, I am now. And all the while, I changed. From moment to moment, I changed. 

Snake
Back in the day, when people used the Nokia 3310, the legendary undestroyable phone, there was a game that almost anyone who would have had one of these phones would have played. It was called “snake”. In this game, you could see a snake and a piece of food. 
 -> -> -> 

Looking at these pictures, what would you say has happened? What do you perceive has happened? Normally, we would perceive that “the snake went towards the item of food and consumed it”. In other words, from picture to picture, the snake’s position and length have changed. 

This is all possible because we also perceive that there is a snake in the pictures. Obviously, there is no snake in your phone! A display consists of a matrix of pixels. These are individual units which, in this case of the phone, can either illuminate or remain unlit. This is what our eyes see. But what do our minds perceive? Instead of perceiving individual pixels, we perceive a combined effect of these pixels by grouping them together. Our perception gives us the feeling of a unified entity, which we call “the snake”. In other words, we perceive some relationship between the unrelated pixels. But are they actually related? If so, what relationship exists between them that, as we perceive it, makes them appear to be part of the same entity? After all, the individual pixels are still behaving as individual pixels: whatever instructions they receive, whatever the causes come together, it is that resultant effect that manifests at that pixel. 

However, once we perceive a snake in the game, we interpret everything that happens in terms of the snake. Our terms of reference are determined by the perceived existence of a snake. For instance, we feel that the snake is moving, for example. However, Was there anything that really moved? Was there a thing that was at position A and that changed to another position, B?

Consider, for example, “the head of the snake” in the first picture. As you know, the head is simply a manifestation of the pixels lighting up. So, if anything, the snake is composed of pixels. Consequently, for the snake to move, the pixels must move. But as we perceive the snake moving, do any of the pixels change their position? No, they don’t. What happens is that some pixels go dark, and others light up. This arrangement of dark and light pixels is the cause of the manifestation of a head, but these pixels have no intrinsic relation to each other. They do not belong to ‘a head’. So, how can we say that “the head” moved from one position to another”? Therefore, is it legitimate to claim that there was something that moved? We can’t say that there was an entity that moved.

But then, does that mean that nothing happened? That would also be wrong. Clearly, the arrangement in Picture 2 is different from the arrangement in Picture 1. However, we cannot say that Arrangement 1 changed into Arrangement 2 or that Arrangement 1 became Arrangement 2. There was no “thing” that moved. None of the pixels moved, so no snake moved. Only some pixels were turned off; some were turned on. But these are static pixels, which don’t move at all. 

So then, the way we perceive is somehow wrong, isn’t it? What we perceive is a snake that has moved from one place to another. But now we know that it does not make sense to construe it this way. It seems that our minds perceive an alternate reality to the one that our eyes see. But why is that?

The Time Paradox
We can’t talk about worldly entities unaided by the concept of time. That is because the moment we perceive the world as one in which there are things and, by extension, changes happen to “things”, we need a medium in which such changes take place. However, in reality, “causes manifest an effect”, in which “happenings” take place, rather than “changes happening to some “thing” or to some entity resulting in a “changed thing”. In a world that is dependently originated, i.e. conditional, we cannot talk about changing entities, but neither can we talk about static entities. The state of being conditioned implies that things are not formed and complete but rather are incessantly forming and transient at every moment. Whatever is observable through our five senses or conceivable through our sixth are objects, in as much that they serve as the stimulant to our senses, but not discrete entities independent of their causes and conditions. Every moment of their fleeting existence is a momentary manifestation of causes and conditions.

At this point, we are faced with a paradox that we need to navigate. How can there be static entities (permanence) if every manifestation is an effect of a combination of causes and conditions? But then, if everything is a process, how can there not be change (impermanence)?

These might be the questions you ask yourself. The problem is that these questions talk about concepts that have no real hold in reality. It is like enquiring about the name of a child that you didn’t have. To begin with, we can only talk about it if you have a daughter. What sense does it make to ask: “Is your daughter’s name Julie?” if you didn’t have one? 
If you answer no to my question, you could be implying that your daughter is not called Julie but something else, or that you simply do not have a daughter. If you answer yes, that would be lying. So, when you answer such a question, is not the most sensible thing to do, to reply, “That is the wrong question!” because both answers are wrong? 

If you would answer me: “There is no name”, I would conclude that your daughter does not have a name unless you enlighten me that anything I ask you about your daughter is flawed because it is built on the premise that you have a daughter. 

Likewise, to ask, “Is change real?” implies that such a thing as “change” exists. If I said “Yes”, you would conclude that there are “things”, and they are impermanent and ever-changing. If I said “No”, that still implies that there are things, but that they are static.

Similarly, if I answer you that “change is not real”, you might conclude that “everything is static”, which is wrong too. For as long as we take staticness or change as concepts that apply to entities, we will always be speaking about a daughter that you don’t have. 

Dynamic equilibrium
Even when you watch a picture on your phone, that is not a static picture. It is continuously being “shown”, which means that a process is continuously happening, and the net effect is what we call a “picture”. Even though the picture “seems to be static”, that is not because there is a static picture there. It is because the net effect of the causes is the same, although none of the causes themselves are. It is just like the temperature in the room: the air is constantly moving, but the net effect on your skin is the same. Although nothing is actually static, there is an equilibrium, a dynamic equilibrium. Our problem is that in our mind, we separate aggregations of matter and energies into “units”, which then change from our perception of the “dynamic equilibrium of an aggregate” into the “static equilibrium (or state) of a particle/entity”. This misperception is called Dukkha. It is only a perception in our mind; it is not really the nature of the world out there. 

Now we can understand why an Arahant does not perceive time. It is because he does not perceive entities! He is free from Dukkha, the perception of “units” and, therefore, the idea that there is a medium called “time” in which “units” change. An Arahant perceives manifestations of matter and energy according to the reality of anicca, the principle of “Dependent origination”. 

This is what Wikipedia tells us about time: 
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future.

Here, we can see that it is referred to as “the sequence of existence”, just like the sequence of pictures that, when we perceive “a snake”, translates to “the story of the snake”, the sequence of events that happened for the snake. 

In the study of physics, we are used to starting with a particle or an object, say a snake (or a car). After that, we ascribe to it a position x and describe its movement as a function of time x(t). 

Limitations of Physics
In other words, as soon as we start with x, we need t. However, this leads us to problems that we cannot resolve with our current understanding; namely, we assume the existence of particles, where particles are taken as “units”.

The problems that modern physics has not been able to resolve are evident when we read about the description of an electron in Wikipedia: The issue of the radius of the electron is a challenging problem of modern theoretical physics. The admission of the hypothesis of a finite radius of the electron is incompatible with the premises of the theory of relativity. On the other hand, a point-like electron (zero radius) generates serious mathematical difficulties due to the self-energy of the electron tending to infinity. 

As you can see, scientists still struggle (and will continue to do so) as they start with the wrong premise of entities that change over time. Without the help of a Buddha, who comes to explain to us the reality of anicca, we fail to understand the process that happens in our mind, the process of Dukkha, which perceives “existing entities” that are not really out there, instead of perceiving the world in terms of the concept that any phenomena are the net-effect of causes. 

When talking about the reality of the world, the world is described in very simple terms:
“Any phenomena is the net effect of causes”. The names we give are, therefore, not in terms of “intrinsic differences” but only due to differences in how the causes are arranged. 
For example, the energy manifesting a bottle can also manifest as a pen, a man, a woman, a tree, etc.

In the next article, we will talk about elementary particles and how we can understand the fundamental particles of nature in a completely new way, using the wisdom that the Buddha has gifted us, the wisdom that can help us make sense of this world and free us from all mental suffering once and for all and attain the supreme Bliss of Nibbana.