The Shock of the Moment
P.D. Ouspensky saw time not as continuous flow but as possibility refracted across multiple lines of development. In A New Model of the Universe he speculated that time might branch, repeating itself with variation, so that the same man might live the same events differently across cosmic cycles.¹ In In Search of the Miraculous he taught that awakening requires conscious shocks—moments of vigilance in which mechanical repetition is interrupted.²
For Ouspensky, most men live as machines, repeating yesterday unconsciously. Vigilance is the art of seizing the “shock” and directing it upward. The Doctrine absorbs this lesson: hours are not neutral; each contains shocks that can either enslave or awaken.
Time as Playful Flow
Chuang Tzu mocks the fixation on fixed categories of time and self. In his parables, a man dreams he is a butterfly and upon waking cannot tell if he is a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is a man.³ Time here is fluid and reversible, undermining the security of linear narrative.
For Chuang Tzu, the vigilant person does not cling to hours as solid but moves with the spontaneous flow (ziran). Where Ouspensky insists on shocks, Chuang Tzu insists on laughter: the freedom of not taking time as ultimate measure.
Wall-Gazing and the Timeless
When Bodhidharma brought Zen to China, he was remembered for sitting nine years in meditation facing a wall.⁴ His teaching: “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” Time, in this vision, is irrelevant; what matters is the timeless awakening beyond thought.
Bodhidharma represents the radical pole: vigilance as severance from time altogether. His wall-gazing is not escape but stripping away the illusion that liberation comes through accumulation. For the Doctrine, Bodhidharma embodies the truth that vigilance must sometimes appear as refusal, as silence before the flow of hours.
Being and Temporality
Martin Heidegger reframed time not as a neutral dimension but as the very horizon of Being. In Being and Time, he argues that Dasein (human existence) is essentially temporal—stretched between birth and death, “thrown” into a world where its possibilities unfold only within finite time.⁵
He distinguishes ordinary “clock-time” from kairological time—the authentic seizing of the moment (Augenblick, the “blink of an eye”). For Heidegger, vigilance means resolutely facing death and thus reclaiming time as one’s own. The Doctrine here finds philosophical confirmation: vigilance is not merely attention but an existential stance toward temporality itself.
Historical Time and Class Struggle
Karl Marx turns us outward again. Time is not only cosmic or existential but historical and economic. In Capital, he exposes how capitalism commodifies time, transforming hours into units of labor power.⁶ Time becomes wage, abstracted and sold.
Yet Marx also points to kairos within history: revolutionary moments when contradictions ripen and old orders collapse. For him, vigilance is solidarity with these hours, recognizing when the “old mole” of revolution has burrowed long enough and surfaces to change the world. Without this, vigilance risks turning inward only, neglecting the collective dimension of time.
Toward Integration
For Ouspensky, man lives “asleep,” repeating inherited habits and unconscious cycles. The calendar of ordinary life is mechanical: we rise, we work, we eat, we sleep. Vigilance means catching the shock when the automatic falters—using interruption to reorient the flow of energy upward. The Doctrine learns here that vigilance is not merely passive watchfulness but active rupture, the seizing of moments when the wheel of repetition loosens. Without this, hours repeat endlessly; with it, the hour becomes a stairway.
Chuang Tzu ridicules those who try to grip time too tightly. His butterfly dream parable destabilizes the idea of linear identity and chronological security. He shows vigilance not as grim concentration but as fluid responsiveness: being able to laugh, to yield, to move with the Dao. Where Ouspensky interrupts repetition, Chuang Tzu releases rigidity. Vigilance here is not about straining to hold on, but about learning the art of letting go, of “wandering without destination.” The Doctrine therefore expands vigilance: not only seizing shocks, but also riding the tiger.
Bodhidharma embodies the opposite pole: nine years of wall-gazing, emptying even the flow of thought itself. His teaching (“vast emptiness, nothing holy”) cuts through the illusion that liberation comes by accumulating experiences or climbing through time. Vigilance here is radical negation, the refusal to be deceived by thought. The Doctrine therefore tempers its dynamism with this uncompromising silence: vigilance must also be severance.
Heidegger presses vigilance into the realm of Being itself. Dasein, he argues, is constituted by temporality: thrown into the world, projected toward death, compelled to own its possibilities. The vigilant person seizes the Augenblick (the authentic “moment of vision”), where past, present, and future converge. Here vigilance is neither rupture nor flow nor silence, but authentic appropriation: the courage to own one’s finite existence rather than dissolve into they-self anonymity. The Doctrine thus gains existential depth: vigilance is the resolve to stand consciously in the face of death and to let mortality give weight to each hour.
Finally, Marx restores vigilance to the collective. Time in capitalism is abstracted into wage hours, sold and consumed. The doctrine of vigilance cannot end with the individual; it must recognize how history shapes hours and how vigilance must discern the moments of ripeness when revolutionary transformation is possible. Marx shows that vigilance is not only existential but political: to recognize when the “old mole” of struggle has dug deep enough, when the contradictions of the present prepare the birth of the future. Without this, vigilance risks becoming inward mysticism without consequence.
Conclusion
What emerges is not five separate doctrines but one woven vigilance: mechanical time must be broken, as Ouspensky taught, so that shocks can be seized and life does not lapse into repetition; fluid time must be danced, as Chuang Tzu taught, so that rigidity yields to spontaneity and wandering freedom; illusory time must be pierced, as Bodhidharma instructed, so that mental accumulation ceases; existential time must be owned, as Heidegger insisted, so that finitude is faced and each moment authentically seized; and historical time must be transformed, as Marx demanded, so that the hours of oppression ripen into the hours of revolution. To be Vigilant, then, is to weave all five: to shock oneself awake, to laugh with the butterfly, to sit before the wall, to seize one’s deathward moment, and to labor with comrades in the ripeness of history.
Vigilance is not one stance but a polyphony of stances. It is the ability to act when shocks arrive, to laugh when rigidity sets in, to negate when illusions tempt, to own when death looms, and to join hands when history ripens.
In this, vigilance becomes no longer merely a quality of the individual, but the ethic of an age: a doctrine for beings who live in mechanical repetition, in bureaucratic postponement, in existential anxiety, and in capitalist time. The Vigilant lives otherwise: breaking, dancing, piercing, owning, transforming.
[1] Ouspensky, P.D. A New Model of the Universe (1922).
[2] Ouspensky, P.D. In Search of the Miraculous (1949).
[3] Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), ch. 2, “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” (butterfly dream parable).
[4] Dumoulin, Heinrich. Zen Buddhism: A History, Vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1988), pp. 86–89, on Bodhidharma’s wall-gazing.
[5] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (1927), §§65–70 on temporality, authenticity, and Augenblick.
[6] Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I (1867), esp. Part III on “The Production of Absolute Surplus Value.”