Time and Space Models

The Direct Perception Models   |  The Fundamental Perception Models

Time and Space models, some of which I do find to be of value, have to do with alterations in our perception of those two basic aspects of reality. The general themes regarding time are the reduction and then elimination of the sense that there really is a past, that there really is a future, and that these are something different from the memories and expectations that occur now. It is not that practically there are no past and future, as practically there are, from cognitive, predictive, anticipatory, memory-based, and related functional perspectives, but that we can live more and more fully and naturally in this moment, a shifting moment of memories, expectations, etc. By increasing our sensate clarity through standard practices focused on what is happening right here and now, we can learn to perceive these reasonable mental functions which generally relate to time and space as immediate, as a continually unfolding present, however you wish to describe this.

This increasingly automatic clarity about how the sensations related to a sense of time—related to an anticipated future and memories of a past—are always just happening now, and this perceptual understanding leads to reductions in the sense of “time pressure”, meaning stress related to time. Reducing and then eliminating that stress is of real value due to reducing and then eliminating this aspect of suffering.

Related to this is the deconstruction of space, which involves more and more directly perceiving that space arises on the fly, and that various sensations are actually integrated with space, such that we might even reduce the number of sense doors to one, that being the space sense door, and notice that space itself has textures and qualities that we usually divide up into the other sense doors but really, when carefully investigated, seem to just be part of the integrated, fluxing, vanishing, reappearing quality-texture-volume thing. This way of perceiving cuts away a lot of boundaries and, when fully integrated into the way we perceive reality, causes profound alterations in perception that allow for levels of clarity to be naturally present, and these are hard to come by without that aspect of understanding.

The Direct Perception Models   |  The Fundamental Perception Models