"Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time."

T. S. Elliot

Perfect moments arrive in surprisingly small packages. Most of the time (no pun), a perfect moment arrives unexpectedly and says "surprise!" On the other hand, perhaps there is no perfect moment. Let’s review a bit of Zen meets Quantum physics, and then discuss the General Theory of the Perfect Moment. This is going to be weird, so take a moment to ingest whatever mood candy suits your bones before we get started.

According to my erudite (but highly suspect) interpretation of Zen, bumping into "the perfect moment" is about as likely to happen as Britney Spears getting elected to Congress. Not that Congress would be the worse for it. It’s just that the Law of Probability tends to deter teen queen flip outs from gaining the keys to the Rotunda. Would you vote for Britney Spears? (I would; but that’s another story)

Often, what seems perfectly obvious is merely another variety of smoke and mirrors. Take time, for example: What, exactly, is it? Is time linear, discreet, and unidirectional? Or is quantum mechanics correct to suggest that time is an essential ingredient of Relativity Cheesecake? Better yet – does time even exist?

For there to be a "perfect moment," there must be some place for it to unfold. Smart folks know that time and space are united in a sort of yin/yang belly dance; a psychedelic bugaboo involving what seems to be infinite motion and elbow room. Look out yonder on any dark night and what do you see? If you said the time-being, you’re on the proverbial path.

Zen Master Dogen, one of Japan’s seminal Zen thinking caps, has this to say about time:

Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand the time-being is that you think of time only as passing.

In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being. (1)

Feel better now? I know I do. Because what Dogen is telling us is designed to free our limited selves from our attachment to what we perceive as passing scenery and the tyranny of the Cosmic Clock.

Of course, any bimbo can look at an old photo of themselves and see that something funky happened to their body. How quickly a dashing young whipper snapper morphs into a middle-aged turkey, followed by a wrinkled old fart. In essence, we measure time against our own biological metamorphosis. A scary proposition.

Upon his enlightenment, the Buddha is said to have gazed into the true nature of things (or no-things, to further complicate matters). In an effort to shed light [no pun] on the subject, he proclaimed: Thus shall you think of this fleeting world—a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.

Take a moment to reflect on this dream, then ask yourself a simple question: Where in hell is this going? Trust me, I’m wondering the same thing. Not because I’m running low on famous quotes; it’s just impossible to predict what’s going to happen next, even when I’m in the writer’s seat (beware the illusion; stay tuned!).

It’s safe to say that any of you could run this essay through the latest high-tech software, scramble my words into a random re-write, and end up with something at least as coherent as what you’ve read thus far. That’s because the time-being is an arbitrary animal that transcends the mind’s ability at conceptualization. Therefore, anything you say about it is nonsense, akin to a William Burroughs cut and paste job. Of course, Mr. Burroughs made good money with that technique, so sharpen the scissors and get to work!

Which brings us back to the beginning: The Perfect Moment. What is one perfect moment in an endless sea of time-being? How to put one’s finger on a specific point in space/time and exclaim: "Eureka, a perfect freaking moment!" Try it; by the time you get the phrase out of your mouth, the moment will have become another moment. On the other hand, modern physics leads us to believe that "another moment" is simply a concept in need of a mechanic. Calling Mr. Zeno!

If you want to find yourself whimpering in the corner with a bottle of Budweiser stuck up your nose, root around in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. After a few minutes of the IEP’s twisted logic and brain infarctions on the subject of time, you’ll be ready to pitch every clock you own into the nearest gutter. Here’s an example of what the site’s lofty gurus have to say about time: …. most philosophers agree that time does exist. They just can’t agree on what it is.

Hot damn, it’s all starting to become clear: The perfect moment is an arbitrary phantom of nit-picking reductionism, argued over by folks with nothing better to do than dissect what every child knows is the eternal present.

Interlude:

Let’s not kid ourselves, we’ve all known since the get-go that our collective self is an inter-related, interdependent, swirling happening in a universe devoid of coordinates, or any "time" we can pin down as being other than the present. The past was once the future. The future will become the past. But wherever you find yourself, regardless of your psycho-motor drive, the time is now. What is, is.

Call it what you will, but now turns out to be the perfect moment, especially if you happen to be on the brink of a tsunami-sized orgasm. And if you’re not, get busy! For, as Mick Jagger once poignantly crooned: "Time waits for no one." And where orgasms are concerned, Sir Mick should know.

One squirrelly thing about time is that it won’t stand still. Or, as a certain genius put it: The only thing that never ends is the present. Time is motion, motion is change. And the dance of time, motion, and change is the three legs of the Universe (the fourth leg, of course, being the media).

Some folks joke that time was invented so everything wouldn’t happen all at once. Which is another way of saying that time is what makes life possible, in the broadest sense of the word. Anyone with a keen sense of the obvious can see that impermanence is the operative function of what we call reality. But, by the same token, if all is flux, then the idea of a perfect moment becomes just that – an idea.

Let’s not leave Mr. Einstein out of this rambling blog. Anybody who could come up with E=MC2 and get away with it, deserves our admiration. So here’s his spin on time: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." It’s funny how being told that your entire matrix of space/time is a mere illusion settles the dust inside one’s noggin. Makes you want to jump up and shout OM, doesn’t it? But don’t blame me, I’m just reporting the news here.

In the long run (long being another illusion, juxtaposed against short, which is relative to one’s speed, trajectory, and mental mojo), time is a balancing of one’s subjective reality versus the collective is-ness of what we foolishly refer to as the Universe. I say foolishly because it’s a bit presumptuous of a gnat to holler that his dog is the sum total of existence. Where’s Jean Paul Sartre when you need him?

Let’s review –

Primates that we are, our species has a natural tendency to measure our lives against a backdrop of conditioned happenings, all of which are beyond our control. But, being control freaks, we devise increasingly complex technologies in hopes of dividing reality into (seemingly) manageable chunks of space/time. As this is a natural, but fruitless endeavor, we end up creating more friction than we’re able to happily accommodate, and thus find ourselves suffering as a consequence of our own actions. Shrewd New Age hipsters will smell the word karma about now.

Sound zany? Of course it does. So, in order to project a healthy dose of Bodhisattva vibes, I’ve devised a simple formula to illustrate the concept. Ready?

R – T = O\1 @ C bwc & wtb?

Translation: Reality minus time equals nothing/one at the speed of light; but who cares, and where’s the beer?

Look at it this way – you’ve some to the end of this bullshit essay. And that, my friends, is a perfect moment!

Salut!

Footnote 1

"The Moon in a Dewdrop; writings of Zen Master Dogen." Translation by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi

Additional note for spontaneous neuron stimulation:

"The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts."

Old English gravestone.