未来に追いつけない焦燥と文明の液状化The Anxiety of Never Catching the Future and a Liquefying Civilization

If, right now, you are feeling a sense of agitation—as if no matter how fast you run, you cannot catch up to the future—or a vertigo as if the world itself is liquefying, it is not because your senses have gone mad. It is proof that the very OS of the civilization you depend on is shrieking in agony. In response to this current spacetime, which feels hermetically sealed with no means of escape, I propose a concept dormant within Japanese culture—not as a cliché, but in a form that overturns conventional wisdom. That concept is ma (間).

At first glance, the concept of ma may seem hackneyed. However, it has almost exclusively been discussed through its aesthetic attributes, and aesthetic ma is not the essence of this concept. In its aesthetic element, it can be examined through the concept known in Japan as kobi hetsurai (媚び諂い), flattery, which is used negatively. This is because the bilateral relationship between the West—the driving force behind what we call the modern world—and Japan has already failed in this regard. The serious issue is that this shallow disguise of a relationship continues today in various forms, proliferating as "mutual understanding." It is easy to criticize this, but when we consider the horizon that appears when we negate it, a new possibility comes into view.

Certainly, it is possible to appreciate ma from an aesthetic perspective, and indeed, the ma frequently discussed in the arts has emphasized this tendency. That is not incorrect in the context of a tourist guide, and the majority of people will be satisfied with that. However, those who truly intend to reach beyond this world are likely exhausted by a reality filled only with such attitudes. I say this because the primary example of such exhaustion is myself. If we continue with this attitude, we will never touch the "quintessence" held by this concept. Ma is not a technique of emotional spatial staging that can be easily verbalized and presented. In other words, the moment one thinks ma is calculable like a stage effect, one fundamentally fails to understand the concept.

Therefore, this time, I will present the path to where the concept of ma should have been positioned and understood from the beginning.

First, there is a premise we must contemplate. That is the fact that the OS driving modern civilization contains one fundamental, fatal bug from its very inception. That bug is the blind faith in linear time—the idea that time flows in a straight line from the past to the future, accumulating along the way. No matter how much we criticize this linear time, we are inevitably imprisoned, unconsciously, in the curse that time is something that accumulates from the past and continues to grow: "today over yesterday," "tomorrow over today," "20s over 10s, 30s over 20s." Strangely, even though spacetime is pluralistic, the code that spawns this mode of thought has been deployed continuously on a human scale.

Moreover, within this fictional dogma of "growth," we are exhausted by chasing a "next" that will never be fulfilled. The structural systemic fatigue of the modern, deadlocked world system manifests as extreme mental fatigue in people, becoming a major issue. Yet, those incorporated into the system have lost their escape routes, driven to the point where they are forced to overuse the concept of "Post-." "post-capitalism," "post-truth," "post-human"—these hackneyed phrases seem to say something but say nothing. In fact, they are evidence of an intellectual devastation so profound that one cannot even pretend to depict the future without decorating it with the word "Post-." This is not an intellectual activity; it is a state of delusional window-dressing, and by no means a healthy condition. Why? Because the people dancing to these phrases repeat a litany of disillusionment and only become more lost. In short, these discourses contribute nothing to people. They are merely the play of so-called intellectuals.

Ironically, the more "post-" words are mass-produced—granting a decorative quality that makes it appear as if a new perspective has been acquired—the more the recognition of the linear world, where "time is a straight line from past to future," is actually reinforced, causing a reverse effect where departure becomes difficult. Capitalism, which is fiercely criticized; the obsession with anti-aging; dopamine-driven pleasure consumption—all of these operate on the premise of this linear vector.

Admittedly, there was once a tangible sense that such a vector was moving society forward. However, as a result of the speed in the digital world accelerating to the limit over the last 30 years, and the boundary between online and offline beginning to vanish, we are starting to feel an intense discomfort—physiologically bordering on nausea—toward conventional linear spacetime sensations. And the cold, hard fact is that no matter how much people pretend with decorations, if one calmly observes from "outside" the system, the OS of the linear world itself has not budged an inch. In other words, nothing has changed. Why, then, is such a delusion continuously and calmly camouflaged?

First, it is conceivable that because the accumulation speed of information within the enclosed interior has become ultra-high-speed and high-capacity, people have deluded themselves into thinking they have already escaped existing time and space, or they have become able to hold the false sensation that they are advancing toward "Post-." To begin with, even the sensation of advancing or retreating is proof that the rules of linearity have not collapsed. The real problem is that the ground itself has not been shaken; they are merely frolicking on the surface. Perhaps, due to the rapid progression of an era of excessive speed and capacity, the brains of intellectuals—who were adapted to the conventional world—discussed the conditions of the new era without being updated at all, resulting in this chaos. In short, the core of the problem lies in the fact that people who should have been weeded out remain un-weeded.

To follow up a bit further, one could say that on the foundation of the linear world, a "liquefaction" phenomenon is currently occurring. Because compressed time writhes within people's daily lives second by second, the real image has become completely invisible. A typical example is the loss of "seeing people," a point I frequently argue in Shitsurae. Having lost themselves, people who can no longer see others are panicking and pushing all the causes onto society, the government, or the world; that is the present. Why does no one look at themselves first?

Therefore, even though it is not darkness, it is affirmatively rampant for people to disguise it as darkness and act in confusion, hallucinating due to the flood of high-capacity information overload. With such deep-rooted problems, unless one questions the root itself and considers replacing the foundation, one will only continue to run at full speed over a crumbling suspension bridge while clinging to the old linear model. There is no "post-" ahead of that path. In the first place, a future processed merely by the brains of intellectuals is of little consequence. So, what exactly is waiting there?

This relates to the Buddhist concept planned for future articles: kyomu (虚無), the void.

However, the understanding of this kyomu can hardly be said to have advanced. This is because, while the perspective of "God" in monotheistic worldviews holds a "Point" from which the world is illuminated from a single spot in the heavens, the Japanese worldview does not place such a point as an absolute coordinate.

What the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida argued in his logic of place is that existence in Japan is not a point but lies in the basho (場所), the place, that envelops it. And importantly, this basho is not a field. In a dualistic linguistic structure where subject and object stand opposed, it is natural to take up a perspective in which the point of God or self is established. Japanese linguistic structure and thought, by contrast, exist in a state of non-separation, which fundamentally does not possess a state where subject and object are separated, and recognizes basho itself as the basis of cognition.

Of course, neither this philosophy of place nor non-separation (非分離) can be understood overnight; these are themes profound enough to fill several books. I will defer the details to another occasion, but if the reader were to imagine it at this stage: if there is one world where a spotlight (a point) illuminates a single spot in the darkness, there is another, a waka-like world, where the whole (basho) faintly emerges in pale moonlight. Within it, the boundaries between the protagonist and the supporting roles melt together.

However, it is here that there is meaning in questioning again. It is to acknowledge the historical blunder in the relationship between the West and Japan, and to create a new dimension of how to "understand" bi-directionally. Until now, Japanese culture has in fact not been presented from within Japan about Japan; it has always been fixed on a perspective that answers the gaze from outside, so-called Orientalism. Against images such as "mysterious," "quiet," and "exotic," mutual understanding should never have been allowed to be so empty, and the essential Japan should have been put forward. Instead, the Japanese side also answered that image, packaged culture to match it, and offered it as "healing." Moreover, this Orientalist version of Japanese culture is now taken, even within Japan, to be Japanese culture itself.

As a result, the "structural transformative power" that Japanese culture originally possessed to rewrite the OS of modern civilization was eviscerated, reduced to a mere object of appreciation, and consumed in mass quantities to this day. In a sense, due to the mutual pandering caused by the disguise of "mutual understanding" at that time, we lost the golden opportunity to surpass the modern world system with our own hands. This is kobi hetsurai. In other words, it is not a question of which side is the problem, but that they were in a complicit relationship; since modern "mutual understanding" is discussed on this premise, there is no relationship more untrustworthy than this.

If, after the Meiji era, we had realized these problems and sincerely updated bidirectional understanding in a different dimension, we would not have needed to stray this far on a global scale today, as the framework of the modern world reaches a turning point. The reason why mutual understanding between East and West remained superficial and an ineffable discomfort accumulated is that the function (this is a practical function, assuming cultural capital) inherently possessed by this culture was swapped for sentiment and disposed of entirely. Above all, the greatest problem is that both sides are still satisfied continuing the same attitude as the post-Meiji era in different forms. Unless we break away from this, it is moot to discuss how the West and East can create a single world.

In a "post-" world where the first globalization has completed, we face many discourses stating that a predictable future exists nowhere. However, this also fails to question the linear world itself; it is merely that the real image has become invisible because the liquefied, compressed state within the linear world has become everyday life. Against this crisis situation—this sense of blockage that "there is no future as it stands"—the "slowing down" or "healing" advocated by intellectuals, or conversely "acceleration," offer no solution. The very idea of premising speed is merely a speed adjustment of the linear world and does not change the paradigm. Like before, this is the sophistry of the modern generation to postpone debt to future generations, an abdication of responsibility. This attitude is rampant on a human scale.

Here, the possibility opens up to redefine the Japanese wisdom of ma and present it as a breakthrough. This is not a proposal for mere aesthetic space or rest. By gaining insight into the culture of ma, a completely different world opens up; I wish to present the function possessed by ma as the entrance to that.

In my interpretation, ma is "a wormhole that allows the linear world and the nonlinear world to encounter one another."

It is a circuit that short-circuits or connects two different worlds, but the crucial point is that the two worlds exist in a state that is not separated. That is the form of the non-separation of Japanese thought, and the essence of basho. In physics born from the Western world, a wormhole is understood to connect two distant points, but ma does not point to an unexplained blank zone spreading there; it is in itself a realm of plenitude. In other words, there is no "Point" there.

It functions as a circuit that directly connects the "present self," who continues to act while bound by causality, and the "future self," who has nullified the time axis, within the basho. Caution is required here: it is not "transcending the time axis," but "nullifying the time axis." This point remains misunderstood even in the context of Japanese Zen; the moment the concept of "transcendence" is used, it is no longer Zen, yet this is often overlooked even within Zen. Here, time changes from something that "accumulates from the past" to something that "flows backward from the future," though here too, it is not a "reverse flow" but a "forward flow." Moreover, it is not a straight linear line, but a non-linear dynamism that writhes bidirectionally like a spiral structure.

It is not connected linearly as past self → present self → future self rather, everything begins from the recognition that time is nullified within "Self," and indeed, "linear connection" itself does not exist. Since this "Self" manifests in basho, it can nullify spacetime. To rephrase it in modern terms, it is not the idea of "making an effort to win the future (Push)," but a paradigm shift to the idea that "the future self is drawing the current self with intense gravity (Pull)." This is the true nature of the mechanism Confucius anciently called tenmei (天命), the mandate of heaven. In other words, we are being pulled by "non-Newtonian gravity" from the start.

So, concretely, how should we implement this new dimensional concept of ma into our lives? Rather than interpreting it abruptly through spiritualism, we must first understand it as physical and biological engineering. This is because, in Japan, thought is not a logic puzzle completed in the brain, but a phenomenon always accompanied by actual bodily practice (pratique). Unless the hardware called the body is arranged, the OS cannot be said to have been rewritten. Many people think of the body as a lump of matter, but the essence of life phenomena is not matter itself, but is driven by the ma between matter and matter.

For example, there is the ma created between cells. In fact, nerve cells (neurons) do not physically touch; they invariably transmit information through a nano-level ma called the "synaptic cleft." Information can transform from electrical signals to chemical substances and be transmitted precisely because this ma exists. However, the bodies of modern people have this ma turned into sludge by excessive metabolic byproducts (amyloid beta and oxidized proteins), and as a result, they have fallen into a state where they cannot receive intuition, which is the signal from the future. This is the same principle as using a radio buried in noise to try and receive a faint broadcast. That is why it is necessary to discuss fasting here not merely as a diet method but as a survival strategy. Hunger is not deficiency. The function of fasting is system cleaning—to wash away the dirt of this ma and bring the signal transmission latency we inherently possess down to as close to zero as possible. Thereby, the spiritual ability called intuition is restored to its natural state, and one can grasp the signals from the future.

Next is the ma of enzymes. Proteins and enzymes function because they possess a physical ma called a "pocket" within their complex 3D structures, the full scope of which is yet to be unraveled. In other words, life is not the matter itself, but can be said to be the chemical reactions occurring in this micro ma. Without ma, reaction does not occur. And ma is always created within basho. In this case, energy efficiency—named vitality—is enhanced only by eliminating metabolic noise such as overeating and toxins, and maintaining the state of ma possessed by life. Buddhist monks engage in fasting and the like as ascetic practice to reset the root cause that generates this noise.

Furthermore, there is ma at the genetic level. When the deficiency known as the starvation state is input into the body as ma, the body stops the growth/division mode called "mTOR" and activates "AMPK" and "Sirtuins (repair/longevity mode)." This is a switch that warps from "linear time of aging and dying" to "nonlinear time of repairing and continuing to live" at the genetic level. Here too, ma as a trigger is indispensable. What I wish to show here is that switching to a different world occurs precisely where there is no operation of so-called subjective consciousness, through the ma born from basho. This is why Buddhist monks have worked to extinguish earthly desires (bonno, 煩悩). In the state of switching, there is no subjective consciousness.

This is also applicable in space. In aesthetic ma until now, it has been considered to intentionally grasp "blank space with no function" as ma in living spaces, but the thinking is reversed. Because ma is filled with function (vibration of cultural capital), function is born in other spaces and placed objects. Importantly, this differs from the hollow proposal of "less is more" seen in modern minimalism. Everything in a room can be perceived as an "accumulation of past decisions," so they act as anchors binding you to linear time (the past). In fact, everyone has the experience of being unable to throw away cherished items, but these are all "accumulations of past decisions" and are not necessary for creating the future. The resolve and determination to discard this accumulation of the past are indispensable for accelerating toward the future.

By doing so, an absolute ma overflowing with function is born, just as the Japanese tokonoma (床の間), the alcove once was. When we allow revelation (data from the future) rather than thought (data from the past) to pass through that zone, we will gain the opportunity to witness the encounter of different worlds in a specific living space. In short, the cultural essence of ma is "a place that nullifies spacetime." And it is not our subject that creates it; the basho creates it.

Ma is the state where the linear world and the nonlinear world encounter and dissolve, a state that is neither one nor the other. However, just as it is known in the world of quantum mechanics that the presence of an observer determines the behavior of quanta, we moderns—observers who premise the linear world—view this ma negatively as deficiency or void, regardless of whether we see it affirmatively or negatively.

I frequently tell friends around me: "Don't use your head; think with your gut." "Thinking with the head" is to make judgments based on data from the past accumulated in the brain (neocortex), which is identical to the probabilistic processing of AI. In this case, humans can absolutely never beat AI. However, humans are inherently equipped with a method of thinking that does not use the brain. That is "Intuition" manifesting in the tanden (丹田), the point two or three fingers below the navel, and "Revelation," which is data from the future. This is not a metaphor. In human body structure, if consciousness is placed in the head (brain), the center of gravity becomes high and unstable, but if consciousness is dropped to the tanden, the center of gravity physically stabilizes, applying physical laws where one is unmoved by external noise.

That is precisely why one decides with the tanden, not the brain. By doing so, the shortest route to the future becomes visible, and a way of living based on one's tenmei becomes possible. The moment the brain is used, the true judgment wavers due to past data (fear and experience), the speed of advancing to the future decreases, and in the worst case, the possibility of the future is abandoned. Many modern people have a bad habit of panicking and seeking results quickly, but this is because they believe too much in the brain's processing power. This is proof of being incorporated into the linear world.

What I want to assert here is that what is required is "active waiting." To wait does not mean to wait doing nothing; it means to receive the revelation of the future, depict the vision, and then thoroughly make preparations for its arrival. What Confucius speaks of is very simple.

As the measurement problem in quantum mechanics mentioned earlier shows—that in a world where the state is determined only by the observer continuing to observe the object—the only thing we must do is to just quietly continue to observe that ma. If you try to control it forcibly using magnetic force (jiriki, 自力, self-power), the gravity of the world on the other side is cut off. This is, in short, the harmful effect of subjective consciousness. But the moment you discard self-power and let go of control, gravity from the world on the other side begins to work, and you begin to be guided. This is the protocol for survival that becomes visible only when we stop consuming the concept of ma as mere aesthetics and redefine it as a physical and biological function at a very deep dimension.