The Art of "No Time"

 During the group meditation practice, one of the practitioners had asked a really interesting question: do thoughts remain in time, or do they somehow disappear? Are moments in time eternal, or are they constantly changing? What do we do with those moments?
   There were a whole range of different possibilities on what time is about and how it relates to practice. Some talked about the role that time plays in the cycle of cause and conditions, using the annual rings of a tree to show how memories transform into something else and leave their traces. That is, there is nothing that does not have a continuity somewhere else, or in something else. But at the same time the question interests me in the sense that I don't think anything ever happens to moments in time. They are constantly popping up and simultaneously disappearing, so it's not even possible to speak of something 'happening in time'. But what is the practical implication of this?
   Shortly after the discussion, I thought about two analogies from the gadget world. One has to do with a toy I used to have called Etch-a-Sketch. When I was very young, Etch-a-Sketch was a very popular toy in which a person could sketch out a picture on a grey screen and then shake it out using the 'sand' embedded inside. This kind of screen was so re-usable precisely because nothing 'sticks' on the screen and the images produced on it are erasable and subject to recreation at any given moment. As long a I don't get fixated on the illusion that the picture I am making is lasting, the toy becomes a game as well as an exploration into what could be created using very simple lines.
       The interesting thing about Etch-a-Sketch is that the materials used to make the images never really change: nothing is ever added to the contents, and nothing is ever 'erased' from the screen itself. Rather, the whole contraption is completely reset as soon as the picture is shaken off the screen. Can we say that the pictures formed on the screen 'go' anywhere? Where do they go? Some might imagine, as perhaps I did, that the picture 'disappears' into the sand. But if that were the case, no new pictures could be generated. In a sense, there has to be a process where new pictures can arise, and only if the previous are continually arising and disappearing can there be room for new images. Could this be an analogy for time? If I imagine that the picture goes into a storage area in the back of the Etch-a-Sketch, then I start to conceptualize of a thing called time. But if there is no such storage granted, would time have anywhere to exist?
      The second gadget I am thinking of is the cellphone. The one I currently own is a Samsung Galaxy with a very big screen for taking photos and viewing pictures. I am thinking that with all the marvels of this technology and its applications, the materials used to make the images are all essentially the same. From that perspective, nothing really transpires between one application and the next. But if I am absorbed in the individual functions, concepts of space and time start to emerge. I see the internet application in a certain place, start to press it often when there is free Wi-Fi, and then start to realize that I have to go to work soon. All these things happen instantaneously, yet the mind thinks that the features are all taking place in an order or sequence that exists 'outside' the mind. But without the mind, there would be nothing to interpret the signs and images on the screen itself, and thus no sense of space or time. And without attachment to these features, perhaps there wouldn't be any illusion or space or time at all. That's because there is no sense of the mind moving from one action to the next in some determined sequence.
      Both of these technologies illustrate the principle that everything is completely cycled back into something else. Yet everything is simultaneously new. While the previous image has no connection to the current image, they do connect insofar as they are of the same material.