Space and time are the great subjective mistakes which we all agree in making and on and in which we build all our disagreements

Attached to Timeless everlasting NOW or beyond assumption that one has duration→

There is an inherent special ambiguity about the “present” as an idea or as an existent, which it does not seem to share with the past or the future. Some argue that the present has no duration, being simply a surface between past and future, while others talk of its duration though they can’t agree on what length it ought to have and take specious refuge in a “spacious present.” Without paying particular attention to these two views, I find the mere fact that they are asserted indicates that the notion is elastic in the minds of other people and so too I find it in my own. Also the “present” seems to me equally admissible both for “what I am doing now” (extended) and for “what is present to me now” (instantaneous). And the first (subjective) may be the “shortest thought flash conceivable” or “my whole life I am living” or “eternity of past and future in the now. In the last (objective), all temporalization, in its three “orthogonal dimensions” of past, future and present, “appear present” as follows: the past was (present), the present is (present), the future will be (present), and (this is an important point) all three together eternally may be.

Again concern with the past (taken as probable) gives us historians (and Hegel), concern with the future (taken as possible) gives us scientists, politicians and astrologers (and Hegel), concern with the past and future gives us logicians (and Hegel). The Buddha recommends concern with the present in the Bhaddekaratta-sutta, and this is only possible by introspection which reveals the ambiguity, absurdity and contingency of eternity in time. Again, perhaps, the past is the legitimate field of knowledge (which comprehends), the future is the legitimate field of faith (faith being ignorant man’s instrument for groping beyond where knowledge extends). The present is the legitimate field for describing, in terms of the three times, and for remembering what one has described.

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Such faith (of stream enterer) decides in advance that nothing arisen can reveal any permanence at all, however brief. Since all subsequent evidence supports the decision, if that evidence is not forgotten, craving is progressively stultified in the impossibility of finding any arisen thing worth craving for, and is progressively displaced by the joy of liberation. The first problem, though, that of time, is properly a matter for insight (vipassanā) and can only be dealt with here by hints and pointers because of lack of space. (...)

To question the objectivity of time is not new even to Western philosophy. While objective reality of time and space still remains one of the assumptions made by scientists for which they have no proof, Immanuel Kant argued irrefutably for the pure subjectivity of both. But almost a millennium and a half before him, Ācariya Buddhaghosa wrote, “What is called ‘time’ is conceived in terms of such and such dhammas … But that [time] should be understood as only a mere conceptual description, since it is non-existent as to any individual essence of its own.” (Atthasālinī. Space is analogously treated elsewhere). A century or two later it was observed that “Nibbāna [extinction] is not like other dhammas. In fact because of its extreme profundity it cannot be made the object of consciousness by one who has not yet reached it. That is why it has to be reached by change-of-lineage cognizance [gotrabhū], which has profundity surpassing the three periods of time” (Mūlaṭīkā).
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