Heraclitus= “Everything flows and nothing abides. You cannot step twice into the same river.”
Time as experienced on the ground by the human person — not ‘subjective time’ but ‘inter-subjective time’ and its whole reference frame – was ignored by Einstein as the starting point for his scientific theorizing. This is what falsifies it, according to a new critique by Stephen Robbins [Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research, July 2010, Vol 1, Issue 5].
Robbins has written a revolutionary paper, supporting Bergson’s [qualitative and phenomenological] account of time against Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Though its detail is a strain on the little grey cells, never the less the excitement of Bergson’s criticism of Einstein comes through [see parts 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 especially].. Bergson’s account of time is more descriptively accurate to the actual qualitative phenomenon, which is ‘time as experienced by human consciousness.’
Basically, Bergson is saying that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is too abstract and too static. It is a concept abstracted away from experienced reality.. This is the phenomenological critique of science in a nutshell= science is not sufficiently empirical, because science is too abstract.
In this paper, we meet an essentially Buddhistic account of reality as flux, flows within a holistic field, waves of changing states.. All is moving. Not nouns, but verbs, are reality. “Form is only a snap-shot of a transition” [p 328, Bergson, 1907/1944]. When we abstract away from the ever flowing and in-change reality, we do so to freeze it, to make it static, for only in that manoeuvre can we measure it, dissect it, pin down its cause-effect variables.. Even Einstein, in his account of time, fell victim to that tendency of science to be anti-empirical, because the framework it builds denies our experiential encounter with reality via consciousness. As Alex used to say to me, it is not psychology that should learn from physics, it is physics that should learn from psychology. A phenomenologically grounded psychology.
As Existentialism teaches, time is primal in human existence, and its quality is constant motion. Everything is ‘passing’.. Everything passing through time is passing away in time. Nothing in the world is ultimately fixed, constant, stable. Reality is basically Dynamic, and only secondarily Static.
But the claim that reality is motion, as well as obviously Buddhistic, is also Daemonic.
The Daemonic is the power of change that, by intervening in the flux, shifts the flux and changes the direction of what s always changing. The Daemonic answers the question= how do you change what is changing? You cannot stop it from changing, for flowing is its inherent reality. You have to re-direct it, re-energize it, alter its whole dynamic basis.
In other language, this is called ‘changing the heart.’