Most of us worry a lot about both our past and future, even though the past is gone and the future has yet to occur. We do our best to live in Now, the present moment, but often the past and future occupy such a big part of our mental real estate, the present gets squeezed into a relatively small corner.
One reason I’m liking In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant so much (the subject of several recent blog posts) is that the book points to some provocative ideas about our usual sense of time that challenge usual assumptions. Such as, past and future are always part of the human experience.
Marchant describes some exceptions, such as the Amondawa people of Brazil.
Deep in the western Amazonian rainforest, in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, there is a small community of people who live immersed in the present moment, perhaps more deeply than it is possible for most of us to imagine.
…Researchers who conducted a battery of tests on the Amondawa’s language and behaviour concluded that they have no sense at all of ‘time’ as something you can identify or measure, that exists in itself. They have no regular timelines stretching into the past or future. There is no invisible river that flows independently from natural events.
…Accordingly, the Amondawa do not seem to experience their lives as an extended path or journey. As discussed in the last chapter, most of us naturally see ourselves as moving along a linear trajectory from past to future, birth to death. We locate events from our lives on this temporal path, and we effortlessly review the past or plan the future by looking backwards and forwards along the track.
…Across the Amazon, speakers of indigenous languages time their activities and social events according to cashew fruits ripening, fish in the river, rain and the heat of the sun…All of these peoples experience time not through clocks but in the present moment, through the ever-changing natural world.
In this view, Now isn’t a moving point on a path, as we might visualize it, nor the Aymarans’ frontier of known reality. It isn’t a location within time at all, but what makes time possible. Now is nature itself: the experienced, evolving universe within which all time, and all life, is held.
Obviously we who live in a very different sort of culture, one which puts a large emphasis on past and future as part of a timeline that includes the present moment, can’t simply do away with our habitual way of looking upon time. However, we can adjust our experience of time through a variety of approaches, notably including meditation.
Each of us has a deep connection with nature: our body. Our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and interoception — awareness of how our body feels from the inside — are always functioning in Now. We can’t see a past sunset; we can’t hear a future birdcall; we can only perceive what is available to our senses in the present moment, no mental time travel allowed.
This is why following the breath is such a valuable meditative practice. Not controlling the breath, simply being aware of the breath. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Such is naturally repeated from our first breath to our last. Bringing our attention back to the breath when it wanders gives us a glimpse of how the Amondawa experience time: as events happening Now in the natural world, rather than the concepts of past and future.
This relates to the physicality of Now. Many people view spirituality as being opposed to physicality. They resonate with the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quote, “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” Well, my view is that we are best viewed as physical beings having a physical experience.
Which fits with this passage from Marchant’s book.
We can imagine walking on damp grass or read about it; we can remember walking on grass yesterday or predict what it might be like tomorrow. But most people would agree that, however vivid our imagination or fresh our memory, this visualization is not the same as actually doing it here and now.
To a greater or lesser extent, these conjurations generally feel like thin copies or echoes of the real thing. Our experience of the present moment has a different quality. When we’re paying attention to and interacting with our environment, that’s more concrete, robust, immediate. Rather than something in our heads, Now feels like something we’re immersed within.
It is physically tangible, something that we can get between our fingers and toes, that we can touch and taste, that can affect us and that we in turn can change.
Why would Now feel so different, if memories, fantasies and real-world experiences are all generated by the same probabilisitic models in the brain? To explain some of its features, we need to take a wider approach to understanding our ongoing flow of awareness.
Now is about more than just generating pictures that play as if we’re locked inside a darkened cinema, watching events on a screen. Instead, there’s growing evidence that experiencing is a physical process: an interaction that intimately and necessarily involves not just our brains but our bodies and the world.
Over the next few chapters, then, we’ll journey closer to the heart of Now as we explore the growing idea that our physical bodies, and crucially our actions in the world, are the ultimate source of our present moment: from vision, touch and taste to ‘presence’ — the feeling that we are immersed within reality — and even awareness itself.
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Not surprised to hear how the Amondawa people have a different perspective of time in that: “All of these people’s experience time not through clocks but in the present moment, through the ever-changing natural world.” I have heard this of other indigenous people who live with the rhythms of nature.
Perhaps this is the problem: we are so divorced from nature that, by seeing everything in terms of concepts, we are always psychologically living either in the remembered past or the projected future – in the anticipated next moment. Consequently, what appears in the present moment is overlaid and hidden by our particular culturally conditioned views and opinions.
Unlike the Amondawa people, who live with the naturally occurring present moment, we have become so removed from what is naturally always appearing via our senses (what is actually appearing right now) that we have to resort to damage limitation, such as meditation.
I would add a note on my understanding of predictive processing. Depending on the perceived physical reality, the brain extracts information from our past experiences and predicts a course of action. The brain makes predictions from past experience in conjunction with presented sensory information. Where no danger threatens, when no particular response is called for, reality appears as it is – or as best as our organism assimilates what our senses perceive. Such is our reality.
But of course, in physics being the concern with the nature and properties of matter and energy including mechanics, heat and the structure of atoms, the reality of such, although interesting and furthers our understanding, does not help us in understanding who/what we are. For that, we perhaps simply need to realise our actual moment to moment, ever-flowing and ever-changing life experiences, is who/what we are.
Fascinating, this Amondawa thing. Hadn’t heard of them before.
Checked them out a bit, while focusing particularly on their odd time thing. This link’s interesting, and informative: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13452711
I’ve only glanced through this (and some other links) cursorily, no more than ten or fifteen minutes worth of browsing all said, so pinch of salt over how holistic and therefore accurate is my “research” on this: but it seems these people seem to lack the concept of both abstract time, as well as abstract space. …So that, for instance, they’ll designate themselves differently at different points in time, rather than talking about themselves at different ages; and likewise, they apparently don’t have words or concepts for generic rivers or river banks, for instance, but instead designate the specific riverbanks that they frequent as specific standalone units (without in any way suggesting the commonality running through them all, which is that they’re all riverbanks).
So that, and in short, these people apparently lack the concept of space and time as abstractions, and only understand specific places and events. (Or so it would appear. Pinch of salt, though: because apparently that view is not without contestation by experts, and the actual research on this, that I’ve seen, isn’t particularly deep.)
And in any case, that’s how it is, or was, to begin with, and basis their “native”, indigenous, untouched culture. As they learn from civilization — or are contaminated by it, if you’d like to take that line — then apparently they effortlessly segue into a more “normal” mode of conception and recognition of time and space, that they encounter in the Portugese language, for instance.
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Completely, utterly fascinating! Much like the Polynesian cargo cults, curiosities like this are not only fascinating in and of themselves, but also in terms of what they might, just maybe, indicate to us about ourselves!
Loving this discussion on Marchant’s book! Both the discussion on her overall theme; as well as this particular and unexpected Easter egg about these Amondawa folks!
This reminds me of a TED talk I’d come across, long ago, where this lady (I think it was a lady, not a guy, although I won’t swear to it, it’s been a while) delivers this fascinating talk about how our language affects our thinking and understanding (and vice versa, I guess).
…I don’t remember in what context I’d come across that TED talk. It may have been something I just happened to stumble across. Or maybe it was referenced in some book or magazine or something, that I looked up. It may be even have been part of a discussion right here in Churchless! Regardless of how I happened to come across it, but I think this speaks directly to the broader theme that she was pointing at. How a people’s (or, at the individual level, a person’s) thoughts and ideas and perceptions even, are formed to a large extent by what they are able to vocalize via their language/s (even as the latter itself is shaped by the former.)
The Amondowa attribute supernatural and very conscious forces behind observable events and engage in working with / mediation with those forces. They do experience time as a series of few major events, and now is simply the vastly larger present reality between those seminal events.
They see themselves as part of nature and not separate from it. Their intellect does not make them superior to nature or different from nature, as so many philosophers and atheists hold.
They see spiritual power as distributed throughout the natural world, as conscious entities. And they see themselves as beings within whom spirit resides, as it does in all life.
Humans are considered to be only one type of people.
As my father taught me as a child a similar belief.. “There are people of canine persuadion, of aviary persuasion, of insect persuasion..of human persuasion… .”
To the Amondowa life is both spiritual and physical experience. They do not distinguish spirituality as some unique event, in the similar way they do not distinguish moments of time.
What they practice is much more in line with Tiele Harde Chardin’s philosophy that we aren’t physical beings having a unique spiritual experience on a specific date or time, but spiritual beings having a physical experience.
The Amondowa would go further because they do not distinguish physical from spiritual but act as though these are two inseparable elements of their lives, part and parcel of each other, and they experience and relate to their physical world through their spirituality in the form of perceivef individual consciousness in one form or another in all things.
Just as do mystics
Do the amondowa wake up every morning and plan and work to be sure their families are fed, their children are taught and protected, and their elders cared for? Do they carry expectations of what must be done before the sun sets today? Do they ever worry over a sick child or parent?
I suspect they do. Only they rely also upon their connection to nature and the spirits they perceive are conscious with whom they can negotiate for some of the things they need. And I suspect they also have need, desire, want, pleasure and disappointment, but perhaps not so crushing as the calendar, the clock, deadlines, milestones, expectations create for us.
Still, if a child isn’t learning, at some point they decide to find alternative resources. Time and expectation do play a part, but perhaps not as central to us.
But there is an important reason.
When you set your own expectations for yourself, set your own course, then you create your own Timeline, even your own currency of time and expectations. That is real freedom.
The Amondowa must feed, clothe and protect family and tribe. They have much narrower bandwidth for decisions, are much more dependent upon the forces of nature, which do not fit one’s chosen Timeframe.
They are not free of the passage of time around them.
We are not free of our own expectations, but we do have the capacity to free ourselves.
And just like the Amondowa, that happens by accepting our place in the world, physically and spiritually, and our duties to work with both.
Of course none of this really matters unless you’re an old thang like me and Brian. Other than that you have all the time in the world so it doesn’t matter if it’s past present or future. Shysterji can argue the case with God Itself. It doesn’t take a college degree.
Shysterji is my most recent name for Gurinder hoping that he finally becomes the man everyone loved. The lawyer Charan Singh Maharaji. Cept Shysterji is as close as he can get.( It will all be there in his last legal will and testament).