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BEING AND TIME REVISITED
In Being and Time
does Heidegger ever ask
if time really is,
if time has being?
Does the word you spoke
a moment ago
have being?
And if it had being but
has it no longer,
does that mean
time is greater than being?
- time that maybe
doesn't have being,
isn't a thing,
is, like 'nature', merely
a term of convenience?
Or is being uniquely
a property of space?
But rather than say
being is something something can have
perhaps we should say
something is something
being can have.
But how can being, not being
a thing, 'have' - any more than time -
anything?
There is only one thing that can have
and that, indeed, has
both being and time.
Heidegger calls it dasein.
I - and the Tibetan Book of the Dead (at least in the translation by W.Y.Evans Wentz) -
call it 'mind'.
But there is a difference.
Dasein is a particular application
of mind as a general
principle. Dasein
is present to a few things,
and a few things that happened a moment ago
and even some things that happened
long ago. It issues
out of mind, but mind
is primordial.
It is not an accidental
product of the galaxies
- the galaxies that are no more
awesome than the atomic
composition of my
little finger - rather they,
the galaxies,
are a purposeful
property of mind.
How astonishing to imagine mind
present to everything,
to everything that ever happened,
and everything that will happen -
everything,
everywhere.
Ah! now we can talk about being, but perhaps
we can't talk about space -
and we can't talk about time.