"The Experience of Change: An Interview with H.H. the Dalai Lama" by Daniel Goleman. Parabola, Vol. xv, No. 1 (Feb., 1990) The following is an excerpt from this article:
DG: What is the relationship between the sense of time and one's own state of consciousness?
HH: Depending on a person's spiritual maturity or realization, there could be a difference in how one sees the moment. That one could have different experiences of time is demonstrated by an ordinary fact: For instance, if two people attend a party, one person might be so absorbed in the party he would feel that time went [snaps his fingers] just like that! Whereas the other person who did not enjoy it very much might have felt it long, dragging, because he was thinking about when it would finish. So although both of them attended the same party, in terms of time they were different.
DG: . . . Does cultivating attention play a role in this?
HH: It does play a great role. If you have more attentiveness, if you have a fuller sense of presence, then it will make a great deal of difference in how you experience your life. But then, you find that if you analyze time very precisely, there is no present, in the real sense of the word: only past and future, no present! The sense of present that we have is a conventional notion. Even if you employ a computer or some other instrument to divide time and analyze whether there was a present or not, you would find that there isn't. "Present" is a relative term. While in experience there seems to be nothing but the present, we actually experience only the illusion of the present.
Things are all the time moving, never fixed. So we can't find the present. . . .
My point is not to deny the existence of the present, but rather the present independent of some object that changes. If we investigate, the present is very difficult to find, but that does not mean the present does not exist. But when you talk about the concept of time, it creates confusion, because it is not based in matter. We could try to talk objectively of time as it is based in matter: anything made of matter goes through a process of change from moment to moment. Within a minute, within seconds, within one hundredth of a second, it is all the time changing. It can be spoken of only in terms of something that is subject to change. There is no independent, linear time as some kind of container.
. . . .
DG: In modern life, there is a disease called "time sickness." Time sickness is the sense that there's never enough time, that time is passing too quickly. With it comes anxiety about what's going to happen. Fear and anxiety seem to be related to wanting to stop change, wanting to hold on to time. What is the cure for time sickness?
HH: One cure is to reduce the dependence on machines! Time is moving, moving, so we feel we have to catch up . . .
DG: Catch up with the pace of technology?
HH: I think that is the problem. But that doesn't seem practical!
DG: If you have to live with machines, then what can you do?
HH: Machines are okay. It is our attitude. Attitudes toward them play a great role. Generally speaking, the original idea of inventing these technologies was to serve humanity; so if you are able to retain that kind of attitude toward technology, then you will be able to command technology to do what you want, and if you find the pace of machines too fast, to stop.
DG: To turn them off?
HH: To change one's attitude. It is by their dependence that humans give technology the upper hand.
DG: All of society is slave to this pace of technology, so if you're to live in society, you can't just turn it off. Is there anything you can do inside to control this anxiety?
HH: There's a big difference one could make by changing one's attitude. Although the situation might be such that you are pressed to do something, due to your way of looking at things you might even be able to reduce that tension you would normally have otherwise. Through training of the mind, discipline of the mind, one could really reduce the anxiety that is usually associated with being pressed. In some cases you see people who are very rushed. But they still handle the situation very slowly and very powerfully. In another case, the person remains anxious all the time, even during holidays!
DG: It's a very big problem in modern society, an epidemic. Is there any particular remedy? What is the quality of mind a person needs to be free of it?
HH: A lot of factors might be at play, depending on what mental attitude you have toward certain things and how you deal with it. In some people, according to the Tibetan medical system, it is due to an inner imbalance in the body that makes the person very nervous. In that case you need a treatment of the body. And in some cases the body's condition is very normal, yet the person is anxious. Each case is different and there's a different technique for overcoming it. Generally speaking, I think peace of mind plays a major role in this. Basically the person whose mind is calm and easy, who is a giving person, has things go more easily when there's some difficulty in the situation.
DG: Then time is manageable.
HH: Oh, yes.
. . . .
DG: What I'm struck by in what you're saying is that one's perspective, one's view of things, determines how time is experienced--how one experiences change, life, and the purpose of life--whether life is empty or full. And it's not the specifics of the situation, it's how you see it. And I suppose that applies to time, too.
HH: Yes, yes, that's good. But it does also depend on external circumstances. and how the two come together.
. . . .
HH: A time which from one perspective may appear as momentary, from another perspective can appear very long. . . . Depending on how advanced your level of mind is, your perception of time changes. Something that ordinarily appears as momentary may appear very long. And as you're dying, there can be both normal time and this expanded time. As you shift to the subtle body, time expands. Consciousness is not tied down by the physical body. For the subtle body, things can move faster than the speed of light. There are two kinds of time: physical time and inner time. In Buddhism, there are many realms, each with its own scale of time. There are infinite universes and infinite time scales.
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