Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The Contradiction of Existence

In Chapter 2, I talk about The Constants. They are the qualities of experience that are always present, regardless of what that experience is. They are the foundational qualities of reality itself. Among them are that 1) All experiences occur in the present moment, and 2) All experiences occur in the present location: Here. In fact, these two ideas are really just one, since the present moment, Now, is really Here, just in a temporal sense. In other words, with the future ahead, and the past behind, you are right here in the present.

All things are contained in the Here and Now. You may see something happening "over there" but it is experienced with you, right here. More specifically, the light and sound waves from the event must come to you to take the form of an experience, and since experience is the boundary of our reality, there's no escaping this locality of all phenomena. The same is true for all things occurring in the Now. The past is just an idea in your mind, that you are having now. So is the future. They are no different than any other daydream, and they can occur at no other time than the present.

The thing of it is, the present moment really doesn't exist in any quantifiable way. It's nothing but a dimensionless point, separating past from future. If you drew a timeline from one hour ago to one hour from now, you could not identify any segment of the line as the present. You could magnify the line infinitely, and you would still only find a dimensionless point of separation. Even a nanosecond could straddle it, with half in the past and half yet to be. And any attempt to grasp that point would be thwarted, as it would slip into the past before you could even begin to perceive it.

The same is true of the other three dimensions of spacetime. Here is nothing more than a point dividing forward from backward, above from below, left from right. There's no identifiable place called Here. Here and Now, the location of all existence, is just like the origin on a Cartesian graph. It's merely theoretical, a point in space with no substance.

This apparent contradiction, of all existence not actually existing, is, I believe, a problem at the very heart of seeing things for what they truly are, and it must be resolved in order find the greater Truth of existence.

Jim