Being Time and Being Change

1. Being Time and Being Change Dogen’s Contribution to Understanding the Temporality of Managing Change

2. Overview

3. Acting in Real-Time • Unexpected contingencies require timely action (Torbert), improvisation • Action in real-time requires an intuitive capacity and presence (Scharmer, Low) • Action can only occur in the Now (Time-Present) • Thinking about action, and acting are qualitatively different

4. Do Managers Act in Real-Time? • Managers’ common complaint is lack of time • Bias for action often amounts to focusing on the fleeting present (urgent) vs. the NOW (urgent and important) • Managers act in linear time, generated by the mind's restlessness, reducing time to a fleeting present.

5. Dogen’s Temporality: Uji • Uji (translated) as “Time-Present,” “Time-Presence,” “Time-Being,” “Being-Time” • Uji: Chapter in his major work, The Shobogenzo. • Insights derived from his practice of Zazen. • Dogen: 13th Century Japanese Zen Master, founder of Soto school

6. The Light of the Present • “Time-present means that time is the present, and the present is time.” (p.1) • “The state of buddha is always made real at a time, and because of this, the state is illuminated by the light of the present.” (p.1)

7. Temporal Contradictions • “24-hour time is relative; although we can’t be sure if one period of 24-hours is longer or shorter, or faster or slower...we still say the day lasts for 24 hours.” (p.1) • “Although we never doubt our ability to clearly trace the passage of time, we cannot be sure that we know clearly what time is.” (p1)

8. Identity as Memory Wrongly Interpreted • “This person I think of as myself is a ‘person’ that I put together at one time-present.” (p.1) “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different. “ --Leonard Shelby

9. Clarifying the “Real State” • “But a person who has clarified their real state sees only each thing, each thing, each thing, and lets go of understanding the nature of each thing. And at that moment, time-present contains the whole of time, and that time contains all things.” (p1)

10. Our Common Spatial, Linear View Time • “We imagine events as parts of a journey, as though we were crossing a river or walking over a mountain pass. And although we feel fairly sure that the mountain pass or the river are still present back there where we crossed them, we have already passed them and moved on to be illuminated by the present, leaving them far behind in the distance.”

12. Deconstructing Time as Passage • “At the time when we are crossing the mountain pass, or crossing the river, we are present there, and so time is present there.” (p1) • “Time cannot elude the present” • “Accepting that time does not appear and disappear, the time when we are crossing the mountain pass is also a real time-present.” (p1)

13. Time-Present Within Past, Present and Future • “…we can also think of time as if going up into the mountains and looking over thousands of peaks, rather than seeing time as passing.” • “The time-peak when we become angry is then a time-present, even though it seems it has receded into the past.” • “And the time-peak when we become buddha is also a time-present, even though it seems to be back there.” (p.1)

14. Time Is Not Only a Flow • “Seeing time as flowing (flying) away is not enough.” (p.1) • “If we think of time only as flowing (flying) away, then there must be gaps between instants of time-present as they pass.” • “Real time is always time present, and so it is always this time present.” (p.2)

15. Time is a process without substance • “Time proceeds from today to tomorrow. Today precedes back to yesterday. Yesterday proceeds to today. Today proceeds on through today. Tomorrow proceeds on through tomorrow.” (p.2) • “Although time can be seen as a process like this, times arriving do not pile up on top of times past, neither do they extend out in a continuous line.” (p.2)

16. Discontinuous Continuity orContinuity of Discontinuity • “The whole Universe is progressing from one moment to the next; not static, but also not continuous process.” (p.2) • Not becoming or duration, but spontaneous manifestation within a “trans-temporal” NOW • Temporal Paradox: What is unchanging is nothing other than the flux of change itself

17. Dynamic Presencing • “Once firewood turns to ash, the ash cannot turn back to firewood. Still, one should not take the view that is ashes afterward and firewood before. He should realize that although firewood is at the dharma-stage of firewood, and this is possessed of before and after, the firewood is beyond before and after.” (Genjo-Koan, Shobogenzo)

18. Horizontal vs. Vertical Time

19. Source: Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space, Tarthang Tulku

20. Source: Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space

21. Passageless Passage of Time-Present • “…momentary Spring passes through a process that we call Spring. But the passing is not Spring itself; we just think of Spring as the movement of momentary Spring through the process of Spring.” • “But Spring is made real at every time-present in the process of Spring.” (p.2) • Spring does not become Summer

22. Dogen’s Deconstructions • Means-ends dichotomy and strong attachment to instrumental, goal-oriented behavior • Linear time, duration and casuality • Our experience of time is related to our experience of self (identity) • Cannot experience Time-Present by thinking about it (sense-emptying vs. sense-making)

23. Timeless Wisdom in Action

24. Gebser, Integral Consciousness, Aperspectival Time ….the things that are to happen have already happened. Or to say that the end precedes the beginning And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now… T.S. Elliot