Everything that happens now, is happening now...

(published in JigsawZen.com in 2005)

SANDURZ: Pardon me, sir. I have an idea. Corporal, get me the video cassette of ‘Spaceballs- The Movie’.
CORPORAL: Yes, sir.
(CORPORAL walks to a wall labeled, "Mr. Rental." The wall opens. He looks through the selections.)
HELMET: Colonel Sandurz, may I speak with you, please?
SANDURZ: Yes, sir.
HELMET: (lifts up mask). How could there be a cassette of ‘Spaceballs - The Movie’? We're still in the middle of making it.
SANDURZ: That's true, sir, but there's been a new breakthrough in home-video marketing.
HELMET: There has?
SANDURZ: Yes, instant cassettes. They're out in stores before the movie is finished.
HELMET: Naaaaa.
CORPORAL: Here it is, sir. Spaceballs.
SANDURZ: Good work, Corporal. Punch it up.
(CORPORAL starts the tape. It starts on the FBI Warning.)
SANDURZ: Started much too early. Prepare to fast-forward.
CORPORAL: Preparing to fast-forward.
SANDURZ: Fast-forward.
CORPORAL: Fast-forwarding, sir.
(Corporal starts fast-forwarding through the ludicrous speed scene. Helmet is thrown into the panel at a high-speed.)
HELMET: Nnnnno. Go past this, past this part. In fact, never play this again.
SANDURZ: Try here. Stop.
(The movie stops at the exact same thing that is actually happening now. HELMET looks at the camera, and then he turns back to the monitor. SANDURZ looks at the camera when HELMET looks back at the monitor, then he looks back at the monitor. HELMET looks at the camera when SANDURZ looks back at the monitor. When HELMET turns back, he waves his hand. He turns back to the camera.)
HELMET: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
SANDURZ: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
HELMET: What happened to then?
SANDURZ: We passed then
HELMET: When?
SANDURZ: Just now. We're at now, now.
HELMET: Go back to then.
SANDURZ: When?
HELMET: Now.
SANDURZ: Now?
HELMET: Now.
SANDURZ: I can't.
HELMET: Why?
SANDURZ: We missed it.
HELMET: When?
SANDURZ: Just now.
HELMET: When will then be now?
SANDURZ: Soon.

From the movie ‘Spaceballs’

When I finished high school, a few more years ago than I would like, I had a lot of stuff on my mind. I had to make a lot of important decisions, like picking a career, finding a job and basically making up my mind as to what kind of adult I wanted to become. For a number of reasons I had to spend quite a few hours in town every day with a lot of time to kill between appointments. This meant that I spent hours on end basically sitting in cafes just looking out the window. And thinking about things…

I took all my thoughts very seriously then. I still catch myself putting a lot of stock into the general dumbness that goes on in my head, but not as often as then. Then I would get really worked up on my dreams of the future and put a lot of effort in my analysis of reality (which at the time I believed could be explained in some way). One day, as I sat idly in a café, I drew a diagram with my ideas on the issue of ‘free will versus determinism’. It’s a shame I didn’t keep that scrap of paper. Not because it contained any particular wisdom but because it’s always funny to look back at our own silliness. Nowadays I keep these articles so I can laugh at them in the future (when I’m wise, that is…)

Anyway, my idea of ‘fate’ was basically something about how past decisions condition the present and how the only freedom we ever have is ‘now’. Of course, in the future, ‘now’ will be the past which will, in turn, condition the ‘now’ in the future… Get it? Our ‘free will’ is what makes ‘determinism’. It’s a paradox. Of course this is just a small part of the whole business. And there was one thing in particular that was missing which I couldn’t quite explain. We usually refer to this idea when we say: ‘It was meant to be…’ I was careful not to appeal to ‘divine intervention’, a ‘cosmic plan’ or anything that was even remotely associated with the ‘G’ word. But what I did, in the end, was no better than that. While I was sitting in this café with a pen and paper, being unable to put my finger on this mysterious variable, I decided simply to call it ‘X factor’ and join it to the rest of the diagram with a dotted line. How convenient…

Of course, if you take a close look at that model, the amount of assumptions it contains is hilarious. We seem to accept those assumptions simply because almost everybody else accepts them and that’s just the way it’s always been. We start building ideas about ‘freedom’ and ‘fatalism’ without stopping at least a moment to consider if the worldview that gives raise to this dichotomy is at least remotely plausible.

For example we assume that there is something called time. This something appears to move forward into the future. The past contains things that existed yet exist no longer and the future is a potentiality. That means that things that don’t exist yet might exist as long as certain events occur between ‘now’ and ‘then’. This assumption is called ‘causality’. Our capacity of abstraction enables us to imagine alternative situations in the future based on this principle of causality. ‘If I do this or that, then the future will be like this. On the other hand, if I do such and such, the future will be like that over there’. As I get older -and more and more screws loosen in my attic- this idea of several ‘possible futures’ sounds increasingly stupid to me. But what’s definitely outrageous is when we use this capacity of abstraction to imagine alternatives to the present. ‘Instead of being here, typing away at my computer I could be enjoying a drink in a beach bungalow in Brazil.’

Says who?

But the real truth is that anything that we think or say about reality is only an abstraction in our minds. The idea of time; the idea of causality and the idea of potentiality are only constructions of our own brains. We elaborate those concepts by extrapolating the way we perceive our experiences and then taking them out of their original context, isolating some stuff so it can be thought of in some particular way. But separating some stuff out of its context to imagine what it would be like on its own is something that never occurs in ‘reality’. Therefore abstraction, as a process of trying to explain reality, just doesn’t do the trick.

But we go further. We create abstractions from abstractions. We isolate some of the explanations we give to experience and create new ideas from there. Of course, if time goes by leaving what exists now in the past and making future a potentiality that depends upon what happens between ‘now’ and ‘then’, that implies that what we decide to do now will determine any one of all the potential futures. We call that power of creating a particular future through our decisions ‘freedom’. And we go on and on. After the idea of freedom, follows the idea of responsibility. That, in turn, takes us to principles of morality.

Mind you, by no means am I trying to suggest that the opposite is true. Denying time, denying causality and denying freedom isn’t any better. In fact, the nature of both the affirmation and the negation is exactly the same. All I’m trying to say is that it might be convenient, in terms of how we function as human beings, to believe in time, causality and freedom. It’s like a working hypothesis. Whether time exists or not is really difficult to ascertain (I’m not kidding here). However, for all practical purposes, assuming it does exist and convening on how it is to be measured is tremendously useful. If we didn’t have this working hypothesis called time, it would be impossible for me to arrive in the office only five minutes before my boss.

We have to keep in mind, though, that these are just assumptions and will remain as such. Reality is whatever it IS. Then we construct all these elaborate ideas about it. That’s why I am so fond of redundancies. In the end, redundancies never fail the truth. You might argue that they don’t really say much about the truth either, but that’s precisely why they don’t screw things up. If I were to draw a new diagram about destiny and free will and things that were ‘meant to be’, I would do something very different. I would appeal to redundancies.

Years ago I saw a short spot from the Benny Hill Show in which two guys decide to split and share a cake. It appears to be that someone with a serious eye condition cut the cake in two and left one very big piece and one very small piece. The first character grabs the big piece and starts munching away. The second character is a bit upset about the rudeness he’s been through and makes some kind of a comment. The first character looks a bit impatient and finally asks: ‘if you had chosen first, which one would you have picked?’ The second guy answers, ‘the small one of course.’ ‘Well there you have it’, the first one snarls back, ‘why do you complain so much?’

A more sophisticated version of this idea comes across in the recent movie ‘Minority Report’. The Tom Cruise character has a discussion with the Colin Farrell character. Guess what they are discussing? That’s right, determinism. To make his point, Tom Cruise rolls a ball on a curved table towards Colin Farrell. As it leaves the table to an inexorable fall, Colin Farrell catches it in mid air.
‘Why did you do that?’ asks Tom Cruise.
‘Because it was going to fall,’ answers Farrell.
‘Are you absolutely certain it was going to fall?’
‘Absolutely’
‘And yet it didn’t’

Ah, what would we do without the wisdom pouring out of Hollywood? There’s no need to go through tedious philosophy books. Just pay a visit to your neighborhood ‘Blockbuster’ store and pick up a couple of DVDs.

But I’m rambling. Let me get back to what I was trying to say in the first place. We have created a series of assumptions about reality that are very useful for us to go around through life. Ideas like time, causality, justice, ‘me’ and ‘the rest of this wretched humanity’, etc. But most of the time we seem to loose sight from the fact that these are nothing but assumptions or working hypotheses. Whatever reality ‘is’, the abstraction process leading to our assumptions about it is precisely what leaves out the juice.

When we embark in endless speculations about how right or wrong our past decisions were. When we lie in bed with our eyes wide open worrying about the future. When we feel the weight of the world pressing down on our decision about what color our underwear should be. When all this happens, it might be convenient to remind ourselves that any conclusion we might extract from the process is simply worthless in terms of ‘reality’.

Reality is whatever it is and things that happen just happen. I like Wei Wu Wei’s take on the matter: ‘Every action we perform must accord with the future, with what is due to appear’. Or in the words of our contemporary Zen Master Mel Brooks: ‘Everything that happens now is happening now...’