Time and Space: East and West

TIME AND SPACE - EAST AND WEST We in the West are handicapped at predictive activity because our minds have such a weak sense of 'time'. I mean "human" or "natural" time, as distinguished from clock time or the time of physics, which is time reduced to space, or to projections on paper and on the computer. Our perception and personalities are static. We need to regain time, and train our sense of process. With no training of that kind we are unable to predict the future. Being equipped with computers makes us worse, because it makes us think we're coming to grips with time, while actually a static piece of apparatus, a machine, has been interposed between us and the creative process of life. We often ask the question "What does the future hold?" That is a meaningful question only if the future is a storehouse. A computer can piece together a million indications of, say, what's buried in a cave; it can help us become better archeologists, but archaeology doesn't help us in uncovering the future. We are building the future, on the basis of or 'often in spite of' - what's buried in our history. Some of us are trying to build a society that is qualitatively different from past and present society; a complex instead of a complicated society. But, of course, we 'have' to take our ideas from earlier experience. Some of the greens say that we can and should start by 'changing ourselves first', and through 'that' get ready to change the system. That's still building on the view of man as a soul separated from his body and from his environment. That's observing the river, from a safe river-bank. [The other way is] you step into the river, and are - grabbed by the current, and are 'forced' to learn how to swim. It's then that you learn to accept that nothing is permanent, that everything is time, and time is creativity. Only then will initiative and responsibility replace passivity. The West is space fixed. The East - has temporalized space. Let me illustrate the separation by referring to the house- building cultures of the two traditions. In the Himalayas, there is a valley called "The Plow Furrow". I have visited the place six times, and I and my family are adopted members of these local clans. I have seen tourists and mountaineers from the West come through this valley, and stop briefly, take one look at the village and say, well look at these poor people. They strive to build houses with right angles, perpendicular walls, conforming to geometrical perfection, and look how these ideals are always beyond their reach! They are toiling but frustration is always their lot. -And of course! Because these primitives don't have the simplest knowledge of mechanics, they lack the proper instruments and tools, and they are always short of time. We have to help them, said Sir Edmund Hillary, and brought in an aluminum school, 'shining' with Graeco- American principles. But these tourists and helpers haven't a clue. The Himalayan farmers, are not aiming for geometric-Platonic perfection which has to do with perceiving the world as immobile space overlaid with illusory movement, even with detesting movement and time. It is misleading to use the word 'architecture' about Himalayan houses. We should talk about 'life with one's house': the house is part of one's personality. It is always changing; change is in its nature. The house, together with everything near and relevant to it, human beings, animals, plants, all this is behaving like one organic, rythmically changing form. The Sherpa and Tibetan houses are living beings of which the builders take responsibility on an every-day basis. The house is meant to be repaired everyday. It is built light so that the forces of nature, like wind, are permitted to show their force, but in such a way that it's always the parts that are quickly, almost effortlessly rebuilt. The roof blows off in strong winds, the way it's meant to, but that means that the much more important skeleton of the house remains untouched, and the family puts the roof back. I've watched it happen on several occasions. Putting the roof back is like putting your hat back. You don't feel terrible having to do that. That is the strategy formed by necessity in a non-affluent society. Western architecture is an expression of a 'stop-time aethetics'. The modern house is a member of a class, I label 'paper constructions', because when that kind of house is built it shares an important characteristic with the clean drawing on paper done by the architect. If you smoke a pipe, like I do, and as an architect you have a bad day and happen to put your sooty thumb on the just finished drawing, leaving a black stain, that's intolerable, and you just have to throw it in the dust bin. The same is the case with a modern house. If one day the passers-by observe a crack in the wall - a scar on that pure smooth face - they can't bear it because it's part of a structure where the cracks of time are supposed not to have relevance. Western architecture is built to make you believe that time has stopped and that withering or death is no more. To keep the illusion going, however, presupposed a global robber economy, a systematic plundering that is now finally emptying the earth's last resources at an exponential pace, scooping up energy and materials and people around the globe to desperately preserve structures that are contradicting time, the process of life. Man is here living by contradicting himself at his existential roots. On the personal micro-level something like this would be called insanity, probably labelled as schizophrenia. In contrast to this, to regain sanity, I propose the 'philosophy of positive decay'. Accepting decay means accepting life. It's another word for eco-philosophy. The Process Paradigm of Buddhism The key element of Buddhism, is that the world is suffering, ( Dukka: 'revolving on a crooked axle'), they mean 'we are time but think we are space'. It's the element that unlocks Buddhist philosophy. We think we are space and act accordingly, which means we are continuously colliding with ourselves and everybody else. We are part of a time flow, of a stream, of chains of events with no beginning and no ending and in this stream our individuality disappears. By natural inclination we seek individual permanancy. We are 'inclined' to do that, but as human beings we are born with a freedom to rid ourselves of that inclination. Even the name we are given at birth fortifies the inclination. Holding on to our name from one minute to the next is pulling us into the trenches of the war against time. When we are born as human beings we start by discovering our body, as often as not by getting hurt, we don't get milk when we need it, we burn our fingers or cut ourselves on a knife. Having a human perception and self-consciousness we react self protectively, and step by step an individuality bound to a body becomes the most vital thing in the world to care for. But we can't protect our body, nor even our mind! To exist individually means to be a loser. This kind of thinking is consistent with the [ Industrial Growth Society ], with a socioeconomic system demanding that individuals fight each other. We build protective walls around our person, we seek economic security, social status, honour, a pyramid on top of our grave. But everything has to come down because we are but eddies in the time stream. The worst of our 'reductionisms' is that of reducing time to space - an illusory world. And the more we do it, the greater the crash when time breaks through. - short extract from "Complexity And Time: Breaking The Pyramid's Reign" by Sigmund Kvaloy, 1984 (printed in "Sacred Land - Sacred Sex - Rapture Of The Deep" by Dolores LaChapelle)