ETERNITY, INSTANT AND BEING-TIME: PARADOX ?

by Dr. Vincent Vuillemin, monk zen, chief of project in CERN

For most people eternity recalls the notion of a linear time, of a continuum of an infinite length of our universe. The instant itself calls up a fugitive passed moment which we could not retain. As far as the time is concerned everyone believes that he knows what it means, but does it exist in fact?

Generally words are making springing in our brain images or concepts elaborated from what we know by experience. We anticipate a normal time of our life, we know about the seasons, about days and nights, phases of the moon. The measurement of the change, of the rotation of the earth, of these natural phenomenon’s, is called the time. It only has to do with a measure of the change, with a segmentation of time, today extremely exact, of everything which is subject to evolution. In an absolute vacuum, time does not exist. No activity is present, nothing changes, no measurement is then necessary, time does not make sense. If our universe has sprung from vacuity, time is born with it. Without universe there is no time. If this is true, what does the eternity mean, for us who are living in a temporal world? Eternity would then be defined outside of time; in fact eternity would be what there is when time does not exist. At the contrary if our universe comes from an eternal evolution of pre-universes, disappearing and being born, time existed before our world. Eternity is then conceivable as a temporal notion, an infinite time. It is either or either: either matter, space, universes have been present, changing and renewed, in an eternal way and time contains eternity, either it is not the case and eternity is outside time. Does it exist in reality or is it only defined in the absolute vacuum?

Instant also brings a paradox. How should we consider an instant compare with the time which flows by. An instant is immediate, when it reaches our consciousness, it is already passed. We can know about time, but not about the instant. In a conception of the time flowing in a continuous way, the instant cannot be conceived. How much time is separating two successive instants even if they are infinitively close to each other? The instant seems then to be outside time. Or we should consider that the time is made of successive instants which follow each other, so close that it appears as a continuous phenomenon at our macroscopic scale. Similar to the quantization of energy, the quantum time would exists. But what would be the natural dynamics which would make it pass from one instant to another? Again two things: either time is linear and it cannot contain the instant, or time is quantified and we do not know what gives birth to time.

What is this all about then? We see that we get older; we say time is passing by. Without any being, in a large sense, there is no time. Dogen says: we are beings-time. As far as our life is concerned, time gets born and disappears with us. So at the end, eternity, instant, are only words for us. We have invented these words which express no reality, except in our mind, words which do not correspond to any being. Where are they coming from? from ourselves? In that sense we are also beings-universe, beings-eternity, beings-instant, beings-zen, who practice what exists in this world, the body-mind in zazen.