Writing

Books by Zuisei

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Writing

To read more of Zuisei’s writing, scroll down to see a selection of articles, including those originally published in Tricycle Magazine, Buddhadharma, and Lion’s Roar.

Featured Article

Not Even the Now

The arrow of time can fly in two directions. This is what scientists at the University of Surrey discovered a few months ago. While our everyday experience tells us that spilled water doesn’t flow back into a glass, ash doesn’t become firewood, and a corpse doesn’t come back to life, on a subatomic level, time does move forward and backward. Think of a swinging pendulum—if time were reversed, the pendulum’s motion would look exactly the same flowing from past to future and from future to past. In other words time, for the pendulum, is symmetrical. But apparently this is how all things work in the subatomic realm. Past and future are indiscernible.

I think the study is intriguing in and of itself, but I found it especially compelling because at the time I’d been speaking with our group about a koan that operates on a similar premise. Taken from the Diamond Sutra, it essentially says: The reason you’re suffering now is because of what you’ve done in the past. But bear this suffering in the present, and your past karma will be extinguished. How can the present change the past, I asked. Can it? This koan seems to say not only that it’s possible, but that it happens all the time. Like time flowing backward in the quantum realm. Or not flowing at all.

Imagine the glass floating deep in space, one article said, with no possibility of anything else acting upon it. In such a “closed quantum system,” time doesn’t flow at all. We could look at the glass now or a million years hence, and it would remain the same, poised as if on a knife’s edge between past and future. The interesting thing is that this is exactly what we see in deep meditation: a glass filling all of space and time—nothing but glass, without past or future. Without present, even. Eckhart Tolle often says, “There’s only the now,” but actually, there’s not even that. On one hand. On the other, there’s everything, everywhere, all at once. And slowly, science is catching up to this fact.

When the British physicists were done with their equations to derive time’s arrow—a project that took over two years—what they found was that even in open systems in which things can affect other things, time flows forward and backward. A piece of firewood will always become ash—and not the other way around—but it can do so while the clock is ticking backward. It’s not that the water unspills, but that it can spill into the past. There you go! I said to our group. Wisdom and knowledge confirming one another over the millennia. Buddhism has always known what science is now getting glimpses of: what I do now affects not only what will happen, but also what has already happened. It’s not magic; it’s simply the way things are.

Conventionally, I think of this process as akin to what happens when an estuary is created. When fresh water and salt water flow into one other, the resulting wetland creates a filter for runoff pollutants moving in either direction. It also acts as a flood buffer, absorbing water from storm surges or rising tides. Just so with my pain. When I feel the effects of my actions, the resulting pain stops me from creating more harm and, in a way, helps “purify” the harm I’ve already committed. Granted, it’s not obvious that this is how karma operates, but it hasn’t been obvious that time can flow anywhere but forward either. It’s therefore a good thing that there are still plenty of people with enough faith and determination to see past the obvious, and with enough doubt to go looking in the first place.

I like to imagine those physicists before their blackboards checking and rechecking their equations, then looking at one another and nodding. “Yep, forward and backward—no question about it.” It must have been an exciting moment for them. But I hope they’ll keep going, because now I’m looking forward to the study that shows there aren’t just two arrows of time, but infinite arrows flying in every direction. Water and glass and all the air molecules in and around it and every single thing and every single being filling all of spacetime, all the time. If this weren’t true, or were less so, we wouldn’t have such a profound effect on one another. Now we just have to see this as the gift that it is, not burden but opportunity.

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*Banner photo by Johnny Briggs