“The everlasting drawback of the human being is how you can construction his waking hours,” the psychiatrist Eric Berne noticed in his uncommonly insightful mannequin of human relationships a era after Borges insisted that time is the substance we’re product of. It’s the elementary particle of presence and the basic unit of consideration — the 2 most valuable assets we have now, out of which each significant experiences is welded. To offer a follow your time is an act of devotion. To offer an individual your time is a supreme act of affection — for, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “if you love somebody, the very best factor you possibly can provide that particular person is your presence.”
It’s no marvel, then, that in a tradition of accelerating urgency and suffocating time-anxiety, we really feel syphoned of the substance of our lives.
Learn how to break away from that cultural tyranny and reconnect with this deepest metaphysical dimension of aliveness is what thinker Jacob Needleman (October 6, 1934–November 28, 2022) explores in his timelessly great 1998 e-book Time and the Soul (public library).
With a watch to Wordsworth’s immortal indictment of our compulsive haste — “The world is an excessive amount of with us; late and shortly, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” — Needleman frames the fundamental paradox of our relationship to time:
The query of our relationship to time is each a thriller and an issue. It calls to us from the deepest recesses of the human coronary heart. And it bedevils us on all of the surfaces of our on a regular basis life. On the deeper ranges, in entrance of the thriller of time, we’re mortal beings solemnly conscious of our finitude — longing, maybe, for that in ourselves which partakes of the everlasting. However on the floor ranges of ourselves, in entrance of the drawback of time, we’re like frantic puppets making an attempt to handle the influences of the previous, the threats and guarantees of the longer term and the tense calls for of the ever-diminishing current second. The thriller of time has the facility to name us quietly again to ourselves and towards our important freedom and humanness. The issue of time, however, agitates us and “lays waste our powers.”
Writing in 1997, he diagnoses a brand new epidemic of “time-poverty” that has solely deepened within the many years since:
We started to understand, dimly at first, that we had been now not dwelling our lives. We started to see that our lives had been dwelling us. And we started to suspect that our relationship to time had develop into so poisonous exactly as a result of we had forgotten how you can convey to our day-to-day lives the important query of who and what a human being is and is supposed to be.
Needleman — who went on to probe the thriller of what makes us who we’re in his closing e-book — considers “what it means to permit the thriller of time to irrigate our parched and pushed lives” and provides a path to liberation from the issue of time, a portal into its thriller:
The pathology of our relationship to time may be healed solely as we permit ourselves to be penetrated by the thriller of what we’re beneath the floor of ourselves — by striving, that’s, to recollect our Selves.
[…]
The ego, the false self, [is] the foundation of all of the evil that enters the earth and destroys human life, and with it, in fact, the truth of time, the truth of lived presence. The ego lives solely sooner or later and the previous; it has no current second; it’s at all times hurrying or dreaming.
In consonance with the neuropsychological incontrovertible fact that consideration is our solely lens on actuality, he weighs this fundament of our humanity towards the absent-minded mechanization of our lives:
The important aspect to acknowledge is how a lot of what we name “progress” is accompanied by and measured by the truth that human beings want much less and fewer aware consideration to carry out their actions and lead their lives. The actual energy of the college of consideration… is without doubt one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness.
[…]
On the earth as in oneself, all the pieces relies upon of the presence of humanness — in oneself it will depend on the presence, even when solely to a relative diploma, of the Self, the actual I’m — and within the lifetime of the world it will depend on the presence of people that have and might manifest this capability to be, and even solely who want for it and who come collectively to be taught from one another and to assist one another for that function.
This attrition of presence, he observes, is maiming not solely our particular person internal lives however the internal lifetime of humanity as we have now come to mistake the immediately of immediacy for the now of presence. Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have now invented innumerable instruments and applied sciences to avoid wasting time however discover ourselves losing it extra helplessly than ever. We will solely save ourselves, Needleman intimates, by recalibrating our relationship to time, which is basically our relationship to the self and to the which means of human life. He writes:
The actual significance of our drawback with time… is a disaster of which means… The basis of our trendy drawback with time is neither technological, sociological, financial nor psychological. It’s metaphysical. It’s a query of the which means of human life itself.
On the heart of our self-defeating problem is an unexamined premise: We’ve got framed time as an issue — the issue of how you can construction and handle our lives — when it’s best thought to be a query. (An issue is a judgment and all judgment is a straitjacket of understanding; a query is an invite to marvel, which is the antipode of judgment.)
Needleman writes:
Such nice questions can’t be answered with the a part of the thoughts that solves issues. They must be deeply felt and skilled lengthy, lengthy earlier than they’ll start to be answered. We have to really feel the query of time rather more deeply and easily than we do. We agitate about the issue of time, however we seldom really feel what it means.
That is largely because of the common sublimation of feeling — the disconnect from our creaturely sensorium — in an age of disembodied technos. A century and a half after the Victorian visionary Samuel Butler cautioned towards our enslavement by clever machines, Needleman writes:
The time of machines will not be our personal time. Human time is at all times… the time of a being or of beings who can in fact say I. In different cultures, maybe much less alienated from the teachings of knowledge, mankind lived in nearer relationship to organic time, the pulses and rhythms of nature, the solar and the moon, the tides, the seasons, the sunshine and darkness, all of the measures and meters of the music of the earth and the skies. However even this time, this extra pure time, will not be in itself human time. Human time is at all times the time of the consciousness that claims and means I, I’m… To stay in accordance with nature’s time is to permit the character that’s inside us to beat with extra synchronous rhythms — the physique’s tempo, the tempos of natural love and worry and tenderness and anger; and the tempos and rhythms of the thoughts that searches, that should information and obtain the motion of the senses, to plan and handle and to recollect the gods, the better forces… To stay with these tempos and instances extra in concord is to stay within the time of earth and nature and to be a extra prepared receptacle for the consciousness that may really say I’m.
Whereas organic time continues to be not completely human time — it nonetheless unfolds on the fabric degree of existence and never on the extent of which means — it’s infinitely nearer to human time than mechanical time, meted out by the hole pulse-beat of the instruments to which we have now relinquished the administration of which means. An epoch earlier than AI got here to mediate and menace our attain for which means, Needlman provides:
By governing our personal internal world by means of mechanical, laptop time, we’re working one a part of our nature with a time and a tempo to date faraway from the time of our physique and our feeling that there’s much less and fewer chance of those central components of ourselves coming into relationship. And solely within the relationship, the precise harmonic contact, between the principle sources of notion and vitality in ourselves can there be a medium by means of which the genuine self can seem and act in us.
Within the the rest of Time and the Soul, Needlman units out “to uncover the hyperlink between our pathology of time and the everlasting thriller of what a human being is supposed to be within the common scheme of issues.” Complement it with Oliver Burkeman, writing an epoch of know-how later, on escaping the time-anxious lure of effectivity and Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s pretty “Hymn to Time,” then revisit Einstein’s Goals — physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to our existential anxiousness.
