Being with Being

Philosophy, contemplative practice, and the physics of nature's flow — for finding your own way. For those who don't need the added pressure of another's way, but are curious about ways of understanding, perceiving, and living that mesh with each other — and that only you can make your own. Each episode is a complete live recording — typically around two hours — opening with a 15-30 minute inquiry into the session's theme, moving into an hour-long guided practice, and closing with comments and discussion. These explorations grew from years of my own searching — trying to fit into practices that promised relief, never quite finding home in any tradition, and stumbling upon a rational basis for getting traction on ways I don't have to try. As your fellow explorer, I'm Mackenzie Hawkins — researcher in philosophy of physics, contemplative practitioner, and co-author of several books with physicist and Tai Chi Master Dr. Wonchull Park. Drawing from his

Being with Being is a society podcast hosted by Mackenzie Hawkins, with 43 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mackenzie Hawkins hosts Being with Being, a society show with 43 episodes published.

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  Episode #44

  Permission to Be Simply Nowflow: Nothing Left Out - No Time, No Problem?

  Aug 20, 20261h 50m

  In the first half of this series, we did a big long detour into the physics, so that we could approach what various people say as beneficial and helpful — seeing them as options that can be consistent, rationally, with what we know from physics. And now we're bringing it a little bit closer to home. Where this exploration is headed is something I've never quite seen laid out: how much we are embedded in a story of change. How much of our living, our identity, who we are and what we're doing — and what we're being, even — is really embedded in this way that we remember the past, anticipate the future. And that we need to counter this, in a way. Sam Harris says straight-up in his book Waking Up that nothing is more important for happiness than the "trite" fact that everything is now. I kind of got the sense, for a long time, that the way to more fully be here now would be to jettison the ways we flash back to the past or flash forward to the future. Almost like a horse with blinders on — just focus on the now. But what I'm exploring here — as I try to put into words something that has been dawning on me for many years — is that our embeddedness in these stories of change runs so much deeper than our mental chatter, or our mind wandering, or what we might even be able to catch consciously. That's not our brain doing something wrong. That's part of being a human being. Dean Buonomano calls the brain a prediction machine — remembering the past in order to predict the future, moment by moment, automatically and subconsciously. Without any conscious thought, we anticipate where a ball is going to be, based on all our past experience. If we were an athlete catching a fly ball, we'd likely just feel like we're in the zone — even though we're entirely responsive to, and flowing with, a past, present, future story that lets us act. One possibility of this exploration of what is at the root of this difficulty is perhaps seeing even more fully how much our enmeshment with managing change — and since change is so related to time — this sense of living in time is really so fundamental to our experience, both conscious and subconscious. Maybe the difficulty is not that we remember, or that we anticipate. Think of a melody: without remembering the previous note, we couldn't know whether this note was higher or lower — there'd be no rhythm, no melody at all. And that remembering doesn't tend to take away from what's happening now; the previous notes add to our enjoyment of the note we're hearing. It can feel different from remembering the events of yesterday. So maybe the difficulty comes when we have a storyline past, a storyline future, that's a little longer, or more about ourselves. But these storylines of change themselves don't seem to be the root problem. Because if we just lopped off past and future from our storylines, there would actually be very little left of our experience. We're not going for a meditative lobotomy here. What if we merge these two perspectives — so that the nowflow can hold, quite easily, the storylines that include past, present, future? St. Augustine called these the present past, and the present present, and the present future. Everything in that storyline is actually now. That's how we can be affected by it. That's how we can affect it. So there's this embracing of our storylines of change in the wholeness of nowflow. They don't have to seem to separate us, or make us sacrifice the wholeness of everything here and now. No Time, No Problem? An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering? Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time , Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time , Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now , Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries. Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #43

  Permission to Be Simply Nowflow: Nothing Left Out - No Time, No Problem?

  Aug 13, 20261h 54m

  So much of this series has been on the side of: is it really not a problem in physics if there is no such thing as this fundamental time dimension or even a background spacetime container in which change happens? It seems to me that wherever human beings go, and certainly human beings go into science, they bring shoulds with them. With science as this objective enterprise, it kind of makes sense that we would like a view of reality that is, in a way, a view from nowhere. Why would we want to tie our view of reality to something that is contingent on how fast the observer’s moving, or where the observer is located in space? We want to see that 4D spacetime block from nowhere inside it. We want reality to be invariant. We want it to be what it’s going to be—not a perspective on reality, but reality itself. And the power of mathematics makes it where we feel like it should be that the structure of a mathematical object like 4D spacetime—that’s what physics is telling us is real. That’s gotta be reality. But Dr. Park just comes at this—the shoulds of how science should be—from the perspective of what is. What is it that we’ve got? What have we got to go on? In physics that at its basis is purely empirical, what we’ve got is experiments. Effects that we can replicate. And anything that relates to a valid or not valid reality view ultimately comes down to: does it have a distinguishable effect? That’s not always what we necessarily want to hear. But it opens the door for even taking our reality views themselves—this is what Dr. Park calls reality view equivalence—and see if they make a distinguishable empirical effect in the setting up, running, and measuring of an experiment. If nothing in experiment—nothing in experience—contradicts my reality view by revealing a distinguishable difference between whether I hold that view or some equivalent view, then it’s a perfectly good reality view by that criterion. It will never lead me astray in anything that can make a distinguishable effect. What Dr. Park points to is that there’s a minimal information—position together with its changing, right at the moment—that he calls essential information, and the reality that corresponds to it, essential reality. And here’s the key: if any consistent information is added to essential information, there’s no additional effect. You can add the past. You can add the future. You can add dimensional time, or acceleration right at the moment—and none of those have any further additional effect than what’s already covered. So we’re left with a perhaps shockingly minimal view of reality. We don’t need the entire construction of 4D spacetime. We don’t even need some kind of background structure called time. What we do need is changing that’s inherent, intrinsic, to just this moment—relational, relative changing, in 3D space. So there’s changing spatial relations, and that can be complete. Considering this essential reality as the whole reality is the nowflow view. We could hold this view and never encounter a contradiction, so far as we know. IThere’s no effect left out. There’s no effect that’s left over, left lingering, left partially here and partially not. Think about the Zen enso circle. Or Dogen—entirely worlding the entire world with the world. This is whole. Nothing left out. Nothing left over. This is it. By showing how one moment is sufficient, essential reality gives us this option for a simpler view of reality that’s both consistent with physics and helpful in living. That’s the option. No Time, No Problem? An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering? Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time , Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time , Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now , Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries. Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #42

  Do I Have to Be a Spacetime Worm? - No Time, No Problem?

  Aug 6, 20261h 59m

  At some level there’s the mathematics that everyone agrees on and everyone can use. But what does this mean in terms of time and spacetime? Something I’d like to reflect on before we dive in is that there is this very human tendency—very, very human tendency—of wanting the universe, wanting reality to make sense to us, to be what we want it to be. We can want reality to be invariant. We can want what’s real for me to be what’s real for you, or else fear that we’re no longer sharing in reality. We can bring assumptions to the table without even realizing we’re bringing them. This is another wonderful popular book, one that I highly recommend, by Sean Carroll— The Biggest Ideas in the Universe . And if you pick up this book—and I would say most, the majority of writing including popular writing, but also philosophical writing, even physics interpretations of relativity—they will tend towards this interpretation of relativity: Sean Carroll writes: “In relativity, it’s no longer true that space and time have separate objective meanings. What really exists is spacetime.” That was the impression I got reading popular science books, even as a kid. Since only spacetime is invariant between two events, the reasoning goes, you can’t even really disentangle space from time anymore. So there’s this reification of this thing—spacetime. And that can lead to the conclusion that became dominant after relativity came to the fore: the past, the present, and the future are equally real. Let’s take this a little further—not to torture ourselves, but to really see the impact that a view of reality can have on us. Relativity “means”—I’ll put that in quotation marks—the 4D spacetime block is real. And that “means” that you and me and our dog and our cat and any objects are actually 4D spacetime objects. Sometimes called “worms.” Only the tiniest, tiniest slice of this spacetime worm is ever at the present—that view is called perdurantism—somewhat confusingly contrasted with endurantism, which is the view that you can be wholly present at each moment of existence. Part of this exploration can be how much we may, in our sense of our identity, our sense of suffering—even in how much we’re trying to be present—have a sense of being spread out in time. Maybe not a 4D spacetime worm, but a sense of being kind of smeared out in time. Instead, what if I don’t leave any trace of existence behind me? Nor is there one ahead. I get to be wholly in the flow of this moment. When we get to feel that there’s actually nothing—no dimension of any kind—that has to hold those past or future events, we can feel the wholeness that all of us is entirely held in this 3D space now. Maybe it doesn’t have to feel like a limitation. It can feel like liberation. Or just maybe a little bit more workable. A little bit more bearable, livable. Especially next time, we’ll get into more about how both of those views are equally valid in terms of empirical physics—both are options. And maybe you’ve already come to your own conclusions. I’ve certainly been completely unbiased in my presentation of this, as you can tell—Not! So let’s begin to explore this experientially for ourselves. No Time, No Problem? An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering? Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time , Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time , Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now , Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries. Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #41

  Innumerable Clocks, Innumerable Times - No Time, No Problem?

  Jul 30, 20261h 56m

  When we look at the clock and think it is telling us THE time, then there’s the time, this abstract time that’s passing us by, and then there’s this clock. We almost don’t even think of that as a relationship. It’s almost like the abstract time that’s passing us by is driving this clock. This poor clock. Maybe driving us all. But when physics is telling us how clocks behave, and how there’s not one clock that we can say is the true time, then we’re left with this clock relative to the other clock. This particular changing thing, and that particular changing thing, and a relation between them. There is no truer time. There are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is more “the real” time than the other. The clocks really do run at different speeds—the faster a clock is traveling, the slower its time goes—and we couldn’t even use our GPS without accounting for that. We can’t perceive that in our own experience. That web of relations amongst this multitude of times is not something we need to usually pay attention to as we go about our daily living. But there’s such a habitual sense of checking the clock and feeling that I’m looking at “the” time—and maybe that we can begin to dismantle. Maybe this fact about clocks in relativity is something that supports us in reclaiming the flow of time into each particular changing thing that’s affecting and being affected with each other. Everything and anything can be a clock, and there’s no one clock that’s telling “the” time. Maybe everything is, in a way, its own time. So we might come to feel the breath itself as a clock. I’m not going to say that this is the best clock ever. But this rhythm of widening and coming closer together is a kind of clock. We get to be a clock. That might not be the most inspiring thought you’ve ever had. What—I’m just a clock? Maybe feeling into the effect of getting to own “being a clock.” What if that rhythm is only in relation to other rhythms? What if that rhythm is only in a web of other rhythms? There’s no one time that our breath is happening in. I’ve been so struck at how much flow time has been stealing from me. The flow of time has seemed to monopolize flow. What’s it like to feel the flow of breath in itself? A flow in this web of flows. All relative to each other. All interacting. And then in an exploration like this, it’s like this small explosion, blossoming of all these particular flows, reclaimed from the abstract sense of time passing us by. No Time, No Problem? An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering? Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time , Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time , Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now , Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries. Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #40

  Being Time: Reclaiming Flow for Being - No Time, No Problem?

  Jul 23, 20261h 57m

  So I'll begin with a passage where Dogen says: "Although you never measure the length or brevity of the twelve hours, their swiftness or slowness, you still call them the twelve hours. As evidence of their going and coming is obvious, you do not come to doubt them." I remember having those school schedules — you know, your day mapped out, blocked, A period, B period, C period, and it's down to the very minute. And we can grow up in this and not have any doubts about this sense of that we are living in time. The comings and goings, the goings and comings of the passage of time can just seem quite obvious to us, so that though we might have doubts about many things, they don't necessarily tend to converge on this doubt about time passing. And today's exploration is going to be about coming to question, doubt in a way. Why we take this flow of experience and, in a way, hand it over to this flow of time, this sense that there is time passing. And then what is that time? And how does that shift my relation to my own experience once flow belongs to time rather than flow belongs to the being of what is? Perhaps a bit unfairly, Newton usually gets the blame for the modern-day sense of why we tend to have this sense of abstract and flowing time. So he says in his opening of the Principia: "Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself, of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly, and by another name is called duration." It's a powerful way that he was able to bring together so much of what was known piecemeal into physical theory of everything from an apple falling to the moon orbiting around us. The power of being able to model the world in this way can get us swept up in the mathematics: There is this mathematical t, this t variable, flowing, flowing in its own passage by its own nature. And what I was hinting at before and would suggest is that the way we use time just tends towards that sense of giving the flow over to time. And this was the case, it seems, way back in the day when Aristotle was first questioning about time. He writes: "Now the most obvious thing about time is that it strikes us as some kind of passing along and changing." And then this is where he goes further than what our assumptions are. Because if I have that sense of time, everything seems to be changing in time and so time is what seems to be flowing. But he says: "If we follow this clue, we find that when any particular thing changes or moves, the movement or change is in the moving or changing thing itself and occurs only where that thing is. Whereas the passage of time is current everywhere alike and is in relation to everything." Well, that's kind of interesting, right? So once we have the sense of time, passage and flow of time — it seems like everything, just everything is flowing, passing in time. But if we really touch in on something that's changing or in motion, it's always the particular. Always a particular thing that's moving or changing and only occurs where that thing is. With that in mind, let's pop back over to Dogen and "Being-Time" and explore why he might say "Hence pine trees are time, so are bamboos. You should not come to understand that time is only flying past." Let's see what it's like to reclaim flow from time. No Time, No Problem? An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering? Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time , Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time , Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now , Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji —to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries. Thank you for Being with Being. beingwithbeing.org

  ListenShow Notes

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