The path to timelessness: Insight, assignment conditions and strong anticipation

This paper focusses on the notions of time and timelessness in Eastern and Western thought traditions. The Introduction addresses the Eastern differentiation between the mind, which does not operate in a successive manner and is therefore not caught in time, and the time-laden successively operating mind and brain. I also describe how Jiddu Krishnamurti reconciles the two through insight, an event which restructures the brain and culminates in an eternal Now. In the following sections, I draw analogies to Western notions of timelessness and insight. Insight-induced transition from time to timelessness can be described in terms of a fractal temporal perspective which is void of succession. Insight is defined as sheer simultaneity: zero succession and infinite simultaneity. Another path to timelessness focusses on decoupling the successively operating mind from outward movement as a way of ceasing all inward movement and with it, all internal time. According to Krishnamurti, if we cannot focus our life on 'the outward', the inward movement and all internal time will cease. However, the noise of the observer turns out to be an insurmountable obstacle. Next, Daniel Dubois' concept of strong anticipation, i.e. delay compensation, is described from both the fractal endo- and the exo-perspective. Timelessness is defined as zero succession and infinite simultaneity. Finally, I describe - again with a fractal model - Otto Rössler's notion of assignment conditions as a second causation as a way of describing Krishnamurti's eternal Now through interfacial shifts.