What is Experience, Where is Mind, What is Consciousness, and Time?

Introducing A New And All-Inclusive Paradigm For Understanding Your World

What Is Experience?

We start with our naive experiences of the world, and try to understand them. Thus, we succeed in explaining the structure of our naive experiences, and not necessarily the world as it truly is. And because we naively believe that we are all separate beings living in a world of separate things that somehow come together into bigger things, our understanding does not stray from that belief.

For example, our conceptual idea of experience, at one time meaning what we are aware of, and at another time meaning what we have taken away from what we were aware of and have accumulated over time, locks us into that original idea of separation.

Both of these meanings constrain our understanding to be a dualistic structure of things existing outside of other things, separate and apart from each other, and our knowledge about that world, therefore, being something you have, and not something you do. This last point is foundational to what is in focus here.

“Ex-,” the first syllable of the word “experience,” has the sense of “out of” or “outside of,” and the second part of the word “experience” is merely a repetition of itself — it uses the Latin stem -peritus, which means “experienced” or “tested.” So, “experience” is both what you are experiencing, as well as, what you take away from the experiences that you have had — and both of these senses are imbued with the dualistic sense of separation and independence.

It’s no wonder that we feel alienated from ourselves and others — we can’t imagine any other way to see the world.

The problem is that we never even talk about what it is that we are describing with our shorthand word “experience” which seems to oversimplify what would have to be happening. Surely the eyes don’t encode classifications of types, classes, shapes, sizes, relations, identities, activity, etc. The eyes can only be encoding raw visual data, as a stream, which is then processed by the brain, in this dualistic view. So, I have suggested earlier in this book another word in order to more clearly distinguish these two meanings: Imperience.⁠

What is imperienced by us is the deeply felt presence to that which we perceive, think, emote, embody, remember and intuit, arising as the processual informing of our lives. That presence, that I speak of, is different than the meaning, or character, or even identification of what is being imperienced — that comes next, and seemingly immediately so, because we never leave our imperiences simply as they are, but always reflexively extrude them through our present understanding, in order to characterize, identify, and give meaning to, what is there.

Experience, then, when used in the singular and more informed meaning used here, is the result of apperception — the process of assimilating that which is imperienced by us, into the body of our existing understandings — which is always already populated with ideas derived directly, and wholly, from our unsophisticated hunches about things and how they are.

And until a sequence or repetition of ‘unexplainable’ circumstances occur, we remain satisfied with our result, and rarely go back and review our original foundational ideas, simply because we are either not able to, so basically coherent are they with everything we now know to be true, or because we cannot imagine another starting point. But if such a sequence or repetition of ‘unexplainable’ circumstances occur, then that might give us pause, and embolden us to attempt to see where we may have gone astray.

In my case, it took me thirty years to finally break free of the underlying naïveté of our collective worldview, that I had been inculcated with over the course of my education and socialization.

It was only when I realized how to start my contemplations by beginning with my meditative imperiences, accepting them without manipulation — not extruding them through my ingrained naive hunches — and redeveloping my understanding of the world from what now had to be true: that those imperiences had happened — and by that, I do not mean “how they happened,” and certainly not “what they were.” It was only then that I broke free from that collective worldview and discovered an underlying truth — true because it was based upon the fact of my lived (duration of) unexplainable imperiences. “Lived” in the sense of my being present to them, and not some experience as it naively appears to be.

This different foundational stance — the acceptance of the fact of something unexplainable having happened, even though it necessitates a reworking of our foundational ideas about the world — is at the heart of all spiritual traditions, yet it remains seemingly unacceptable to modern Science, because it conflicts with what “everyone knows is true.”

The key step, in my own attempts to understand these imperiences which were unexplainable within the confines of my understanding at the time, was my initiatory meditative practice, which I started at the age of five years old. It was only when I realized that my troubles were not caused by the unexplainable imperiences during, and after, meditating; but rather by my ingrained misunderstandings about how the world worked.

I learned much later in life of a different approach than mine, in the work of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and his intuitive use of epoché, an ancient Greek word meaning the “suspension of judgement.” The use of which, I feel, highlights the difficulty in changing our understanding of how experience arises because of these naive hunches that support our dualistic view of the world. Husserl’s suggestion was that we put aside the question of the validity of our understanding of the world and just focus upon the structure of experience and what is ‘given’ to us within it.

Unfortunately, he did not appear to have ever engaged in a systematic practice of meditation — and without it, Husserl found nothing new when he recreated the naive structure of dualistic experience within his phenomenological epoché, though, granted, his work was an improvement over our simple naive ideas.

Husserl first elaborated the notion of “phenomenological epoché” (also referred to as “reduction” or “bracketing”) in his book, Ideas I. Through a systematic procedure of “phenomenological reduction,” he asserted that one would be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus one could examine phenomena as they are ‘originally given to consciousness’.

But it is here in the naive idea of this abstract entity ‘consciousness’ and the ‘given-ness’ of that which it is conscious of, that this process fails to achieve its goal, because, even though the ‘content’ of ‘consciousness’ may be freed from naïve assumptions, those assumptions are already implicit in the naive conceptual understanding of what ‘consciousness’ is, and introduces the need for ‘content’ of that ‘consciousness’.

It is my firm belief, based upon my own success in wrestling with this problem, that one must engage in a dedicated meditative practice in order to develop profound meditative states, during which a definitive and intuitive insight of the nature of mind — that productive responsiveness that manifests the world — can occur. Without it, we cannot break out of our naive confusion of an illusory ‘consciousness’ plus its ‘content’. And this meditative insight is most efficiently attained when meditating with inner spontaneous sound, as described in this publication.

Are Consciousness and Mind Two Things?

Accomplishing that, one discovers that mind cannot be identified as the operations of the brain, as Science would have that idea defined, for the operations of the brain are merely part of the manifestation of the world, and thus, are nothing more than a part of the activity called ‘mind’.

This insight has a profound consequence in that the abstraction of ‘consciousness’ as being a cognitive state about something else is viscerally seen to be wrong.

A simple reflection allows us to see the truth: given our naive understanding of duality, if we search for the location of our ‘consciousness’, we must admit that it is within the body and not outside of our body. Therefore, our ‘consciousness’ can only be aware of that which is comprised within our body. So we can be directly conscious of our raw sense perceptions, conscious of our thoughts and feelings, and nothing else, and only indirectly conscious of the apperceived content of those perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.

This leaves us with the question as to whether or not those activities within the body are the exact same as those outside our body that our senses can ‘sense’. That is, that when we sense a waterfall outside of ourselves, there is literally a waterfall created inside of us; or conversely, when our senses generate nerve impulses to the brain, it is because there are nerve impulses outside of us that were sensed.

Of course, this depiction of a search for ‘consciousness’ will be immediately laughed at, because we already know that is not how our senses work. We already have an understanding of how they work: our senses ‘encode’ changes in our outer environment which they ‘sense’, which are then sent into the brain as nerve impulses, where they are ‘decoded’ into ‘conscious experience’. We know that this is true because when we apply our technological tools to our brain we can see activity in places that scientists have noticed get active in cases like these. No word yet on how the sense data is encoded in the senses, nor decoded in the brain, nor how the activity of the brain gives rise to ‘conscious experiences’ since ‘consciousness’ can then only be aware of nerve impulses firing around the brain, not the external environmental changes that are somehow ‘encoded’ by the senses. Reflect on the unlikely nature of this ‘knowledge’.

The alternative is one that recognizes that the naturing of all manifested phenomena are known by being manifested, not sensed/encoded/transmitted/decoded/processed/and then somehow reconstructed by the brain — and then known — by ‘consciousness’.

Our body, and all that it comprises, is known immediately, not mediated in any way, not even by coding-decoding operations. This, after all, is how we see thoughts being known. The only difference in this alternative is that mind is not a separate ‘consciousness’, it is the direct knowing, that is, the informing or ‘naturing’, of all that appears.

“Informing” and “naturing” are synonyms for this activity otherwise called “mind.” “Knowing” is asserting the essential character of the activity — it is cognition, but not in the dualistic sense of ideas known, but a world manifested. There is only this continuous manifestation of the world and everything that comprises.

Why the need for the complexified construction of dualistic thought? The answer is fundamental in most spiritual traditions: Because of our naive view of the world as a dualistic system of interactions between completely separate parts.

Sooner or later in any attempted description of how ‘consciousness’ functions, you will have to insert the irreducible fact of knowing what is happening. Doing away with the duality implicit in our naive view of reality puts knowing right up front, which obviates the need for all the complexities. And again, this is exactly how we understand thoughts to be known.

Also, mind doesn’t need sense data; it creates its own sounds and light, for example, and these spontaneous phenomena have been used for millennia as supports for advanced forms of meditation. And because these spontaneous sounds and lights are continuously heard and seen, but not ‘perceived’, they are the best supports for meditation — much better than physical phenomena which are always discontinuous.

It is also true that we hear silence and see the dark. These phenomena have no sense data per se, being they arise in the absence of the related sense’s data; and yet, they are not like a memory of something no longer there, but are viscerally noticed and imperienced. Mind also can manifest pain when limbs are no longer attached to the body. And mind can extinguish pain, though the pain sensations are still there.

These examples point to a more spontaneous — rather than caused — naturing of these manifestations of mind, than current science is willing to admit into polite conversation. These examples most certainly underscore the possibility that the connection between mind and body — even the need for such a theorized structure, which then necessitates the further need for a connection between them — are not understood correctly.

The current understanding of how senses are developed are similarly flawed: the assertion that “humans see and have eyes, therefore sight arises in the eyes because they sense light” is in truth backwards. It is, as Henri Bergson suggested, ‘vision’ that ‘eyes’, and ‘hearing’ that ‘ears’, etc. In other words, it is not random chaotic events over long periods of time that give rise to the particular physical manifestations of life, nor the architectural efforts of an undisclosed entity that do. Rather, it is the unrelenting, spontaneously creative, and coherent naturing of the manifestations of the formal world, that do.

The activity of manifesting the world and all that can be known — these intelligible forms — has no actor, anymore than an electromagnetic field has an actor, because there is no “self” and thus, no entity to be something other than its activity.

One insight that comes with the fruition of a dedicated meditation practice is that nothing has an independent self-existence, although we can distinguish between bare (pure) presence, as discovered in very deep meditative states, and the unrelenting, spontaneously creative, and coherent naturing of the manifestation of the formal world. The intersection of these two aspects of the manifestation of the world is the event horizon that is commonly called “Now.” And now is not a moment. We easily fall into the trap of thinking of time as an infinitely divisible sequence of moments. That’s not what time is. The Now is therefore not that either.

But it is premature to talk about this yet, as there is still this misunderstanding created by a still remaining naive understanding of what Time is.

The Coherent Order of the World Is Not Optional

This bare presence does not indicate that there is a ‘ground state’ for reality either; it means only that we are wrong about the nature of knowing. There is no ‘ground state’ — the naturing of all that is manifested is the necessary functioning of reality.¹ It is necessary because there can be no initial state of nonfunctioning, for what would change that state? Some dualistic other? Some broken equilibrium? Of what?

It is here that we may falter and fall into ruminations on the possible ways that this effulgent display of reality might spontaneously explode into being at some point in the immense eternity of time. But this activity is not optional and is not limited, simply because it is not contingent upon anything, and there isn’t any ‘thing’ that is to be changed or acted upon. This is it. This is reality. It’s an inside without an outside, so there is no escaping its bounty.

Parmenides, the Ancient Greek philosopher, in his great poem in which he undertakes a shamanic voyage to the underworld, meets the goddess Persephone, who explains to him the Way of Truth, the nature of reality, and the importance of mind-training. Persephone explains how inner spontaneous phenomena, such as the sound and light that we imperience even though there is no corresponding external source, should be used as one’s meditation support: “Look steadfastly at those things which, though absent, are firmly present to the mind.” And she goes on to explain that what arises at any moment will always be coherent with what was immediately prior, according to the possibilities that are open now: “For it cannot cut off what is from clinging to what is, either scattering it in every direction in order or bringing it together.” The ‘it’ being referred to is mind — the activity of manifesting all that appears — and this activity can never be incoherent in what appears, but must always follow only what is inherently possible in what is.

Note, that she doesn’t say or even imply that this naturing is architected even though it is responsive to what is possible; instead this activity we call mind coherently ‘clings’ to that which is, though it can be moving towards disintegration, or integration. Therefore, what spontaneously arises is constrained to be coherent from moment to moment. Our focus of attention ‘steers’ what arises — we choose — by activating possibilities for what comes next, out of those possibilities which are opened by our affective response to what is, but what exactly comes next is only finalized in the spontaneous creative effulgence of reality.⁠²

The Responsive Nature of Mind

It is our affective responses to what is — positive, negative, or neutral — which opens up the possibilities of what may come next. But exactly what comes next is constrained to be coherent with what is already present in every context — yet not determinately so, for there is a creative spontaneity, sometimes more, sometimes less, to what comes next.

Our responses, being perspectives on what is, are not definitive in and of themselves, but are additive, like a superposition of colors, and thus the possibilities are never determined either, but are the creatively spontaneous paths opened by the combined affective approval, disapproval, and neutrality of all entangled perspectives — some more possible than others, and some so assured as to be of the character of a ‘cause’. And these affective responses are not contained within form, for then they would be the result of, and not the impetus for, the manifestation of the world.

This is what the expression “processual informing of our lives” means: Our “lives” are an unfolding procession of events — vignettes — and within each vignette there is present the backstory of the trail of necessary conditions that led to this event — which we call memory. These memories are not evidence of a ‘past time’ as there is no evidence. Memories are current events when they are ‘recalled’. Memories are not static because they change with each recalling. So these necessary conditions for the present are qualities of the present — not the past. What proof then could there be for what is no longer present?

There is presence as well — viscerally felt presence to the scene, as the scene, and more remarkably, the venue that we call now which is the perspective. And finally, our affective response, potentially to all of it, or to that which our attention steers us towards.

It is these affective responses that refine some course of coherent possibilities to become activated. But those possibilities which are activated are only advanced by our attention to them — they are not ‘caused’ by our attention to them. What is finally selected, is the result of the spontaneously creative responsive naturing of all that manifests in our lives. In all of this, it is our attention alone, and our steering of our attention via our affective responses, that is always the enabler — always the instigator — of what comes, and so our ‘lived presence’ is just this: the attention we pay to the unfolding procession of events. If we do not pay attention, the procession of events is driven by other perspectives — what we might call “chance,” though the only difference from the description already given is our inattention — and so we can find our lives ‘out of control’.

“Lived” therefore must be “presence,” meaning, are we present or not? Are we absent in daydreams of better days? Lost in reveries of what once was? Suffering because of something that hurt us long ago? Unaware of what is happening now? Or worse, confusing the meaning of abstract thoughts with what actually is showing through? We cannot escape the naturing of this world, which is both the performance and its audience. But we lose ‘control’ if our attention is misdirected by loud noises and flashy lights (advertisements of our attention, like the misdirections employed by magicians, marketing people, and the lies and antics of wannabe dictators, among many other modern instantiations).

Thus, the naturing of these manifestations must be essentially cognitive, otherwise there can be no reduction, nor weighting, of possibilities, but all must be equally followed. That explosion of all paths would be as unproductive of form as random chance events over long periods of time are by their very nature — because order, being formal organization, and chaos, being its absence, necessarily means that order cannot arise out of chaos, ex nihilo nihil fit — and in the absence of the cognitive nature of this activity, would be more unknowable than a hidden architect. Furthermore, this essentially cognitive naturing cannot be something other than what manifests, for then it would be, once again, the reemergence of our naive dualistic understanding that was already shown to be insupportable, both logically, and like the invasive weed it is. Knowing must be doing something, not having something.

Therefore, one sees how order does not arise out of random chaos, nor out of intentional design, but rather, the spontaneous, creative, and coherent responsiveness to what is, and the autogenous possible futures found in every moment.

And at this juncture, I need to make an important observation: like our other naive hunches, humanity has tended to feel both the necessity for a cause for what is, and to frame that cause in as mundane a construction as is within their naive grasp. But this responsive naturing, being an uncaused, uncreated, and unrelenting activity neither obviates divinity, nor demands it. No interpretation of divinity is undermined by this understanding. Rather, it is the insistence that God must be like us, and would act as humans act, that is called-out as being naive.

Really, why would God be like us, and operate like us? Why would any divinity, let alone God, want to create a world that seems to be totally indifferent to the beings that it is populated with? As Sir James Jeans put it:

Is this, then, all that life amounts to — to stumble, almost by mistake, into a universe which, to all appearances, is either totally indifferent or definitely hostile to it, to stay clinging onto a fragment of a grain of sand until we are frozen off, to strut our tiny hour on our tiny stage with the knowledge that our aspirations are all doomed to final frustration, and that our achievements must perish with our race, leaving the universe as though we had never been?⁠³

This responsive naturing could just as well be characterized as self-less loving responsiveness — like a mother to her child’s needs. And why wouldn’t that be a more divine way of creating the world, than by a set of plans, rulers, compasses, hammers, and chisels, the way we humans would go about it. But it doesn’t matter what we believe, what matters is how close to the truth we can approach with our limited faculties. It is up to each of us, to make that determination on our own, to the best of our ability, and not to blindly follow those who claim ownership of the truth.

What is Consciousness?

Everyone looks to discover what ‘consciousness’ is, when its lack of appearance makes it clear that it is just an abstraction created by our distinguishing mind. But let’s review why.

Some people say that consciousness is an emergent feature of certain physical processes, structures, or functioning of at least some biological entities, and what this means is that consciousness is a supervenient phenomenon. But a supervenient phenomenon has no direct feedback mechanism that can affect the entity from which it emerges, which is to say, the entity is not dependent upon it, not controlled by it, doesn’t know about it in any possible way or degree, nor benefits from it. If any of those were true, the phenomenon would not be a supervenient phenomenon, but merely a complexification of the process, structure, or function of the particular entity involved, that is being asserted to be the origin of the emergence of consciousness. Habitually, this is asserted to take place within the physical brain.

Given this, clearly the assertion that consciousness emerges from, or is due to, some process, structure, or function of the brain is merely magical thinking because there is no evolutionary antecedent that can exist for consciousness — consciousness has no spectrum or degrees of existence, so no evolutionary path is available for its co-genesis with the biological processes, structures, and functions. If it is claimed that it arises from these, it must arise in all cases, and identically from these, when they are present in any entity, but clearly this is not the case. Consciousness varies between entities of different species, and even between individuals within each species. Furthermore, meditative and contemplative traditions have clearly established — and science is presently confirming for themselves — that consciousness can be trained and developed, intensifying its ability to be focused and concentrated. This clearly shows some kind of correlation between the biological processes, structures, or functions involved, and consciousness — but it also confirms the independence of consciousness from the merely biological implementation of the entity.

Instances of consciousness do have a direct effect on the entities that present with conscious activity, so either consciousness is a part of an integral process, structure, or function of the entity, and this assertion of consciousness being an emergent phenomenon is invalid, or it isn’t part of an integral process, structure, or function of the entity, and we are left in a state of bewilderment as to how consciousness elicits affective responses from the entity for conscious activity about which it should have no knowledge at all. And since no one can find a process, structure, or function within conscious biological entities that comprise consciousness, this assertion of its emergence as a supervenient phenomenon is unfounded wishful thinking — wishful because it is championed as ‘solving’ the hard problem of why or how consciousness emerges without presenting any explanation as to why or how it emerges. In other words: the emergence hypothesis says that because humans are conscious, consciousness arises because of being human, and this is fallacious logic Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.

The ‘hard problem’ of ‘consciousness’ — the how and why of its existence — fails to even insightfully deal with the affective responses that conscious events elicit. Establishing how ‘consciousness’ arises by categorizing it as an emergent feature, assumes that it is neither primordial, nor coextensive with the genesis of the entity. So what it does not in any way explain is the need for, or benefit of, affective responses — good, bad, or neutral — that every conscious entity exhibits. This is the impossible problem of ‘consciousness’ that comes with positing that it arises as an emergent feature after the genesis of an assumed initially non-conscious entity.

The distinction between knowing a thing, and judging a thing, is an important insight coming out of Buddhist meditation practices. It is in fact the fundamental insight of the Buddha that judging things leads to frustration and suffering, whereas, accepting things as they are is the way to escape one’s suffering. This could not be true if judging something and being conscious of something are the same thing. And the weight of evidence for this disjunction of ‘consciousness’ and our affective responsiveness is overwhelming. Also, in case the objection is raised, acceptance is different than remaining neutral, which is an affective response. Acceptance is a positive act of accepting what arises, whatever may come.

Some people propose that ‘consciousness’ is a fundamental characteristic of the Universe’s physical reality, asserting that it is aware, in addition to being space-time and all that it contains. Besides reproducing the same error in asserting that the brain and its parts are conscious as well as being what they are biologically, this is a confusion because there is no universe-thing that is actually being space and time. Space itself doesn’t exist since its defined as a very large, or infinite void — an absence, not a presence — the idea we have of space is just a coordinate system for quantifying the relational complexity of things that exist in time and move ‘in space’ because of ‘forces’, ‘fields’, and ‘laws’. So how does ‘consciousness’ come into that?

Other people propose that ‘consciousness’ creates both time and space, and everything that exists in time and moves in space, but in this case ‘consciousness’ is necessarily absent from space-time, and therefore ‘consciousness’ cannot be an aspect of space-time that can be abstracted out. As well, the universe cannot create itself, being non-existent before ‘it’ somehow self-creates, in this view of ‘consciousness’. Thus, ‘consciousness’, in this formulation, cannot account for our lived presence in ‘space-time’.

So, once and for all, ‘consciousness’ is a phantasm of conceptual thought based upon our original naive hunches about a dualistic world, set in stone by our later developed understandings that necessarily accreted onto those original hunches, because we never try, at least in science, to first find a less naive understanding to begin our contemplations by.

Reflect on this: What are we abstracting ‘consciousness’ from? Certainly not experience, because it’s not a quality of experience. Those would be sounds, lights, tastes, smells, touches, feelings, emotions, and thoughts. It’s experience that is a quality of consciousness. So what are we abstracting it from? The human body? But we only know the human body by those characteristics listed above, so being embodied is a quality of consciousness. So what is consciousness a quality of? The answer is: nothing. Its not something that can be abstracted out of anything. It’s nothing but a phantasm of conceptual figuring (ratiocination).

We identify with our thoughts, but we never identify with our perceptions. This is wrong because they are of exactly the same genesis. They arise “in the mind,” which is “our” mind because of our act of identification with “our” thoughts. The difference between thoughts and perceptions is solely an artificial distinction. When we “turn around” this understanding of our perceptions, after clearly seeing the nature of mind (in relation to our thoughts) we no longer distinguish these categories (of thought and perceptions), but rather see them clearly for what they are — mind.

What About Time?

Few seem to notice that ‘consciousness’ is dependent upon time to be anything at all — what, after all, would a consciousness with no duration be? And the converse, that a duration of time that no one is aware of, seems devoid of any cognitive significance at all — except in the view from nowhere that is inherent in, and makes possible, the idea of objectivity. But I have already pointed out that if ‘consciousness’ is in the body, then it can’t be conscious of anything that is not of the body, and so ‘objectivity’ is illusory in that it can never be more than an abstract description of presumably ‘shared’ experiences. This objection can only be lessened by reducing the description of these experiences to their barest level — that of quantification. And this Science does.

But this dependency is a trick of ratiocination, not an insight of reason. The concept ‘consciousness’ in all its variants has no distinguishing feature that can, in truth, separate it from ‘time’ — other than the naive insistence that they must be different. In this view, ‘consciousness’ comprises our lived experience, and ‘time’ is simply an objective structure for ordering events, so the first is subjective and the second is objective. This knot of reasoning serves no purpose except that it tries to account for our lived presence (subjective duration) within our lives (objective timespan) by both accepting and rejecting the structural duration explicit in both. Saint Augustine expressed his own confusion in this matter this way: “What then is time? If no one asks of me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I know not.”⁠⁴ We’re not much better today.

Thus, time is asserted to be something different, upon which ‘consciousness’ must depend because of our confusion that they are different.

The need for this distinction between time and ‘consciousness’ is created by our misunderstanding that ‘consciousness’ and duration have different meanings. But what can ‘consciousness’ be abstracted from, if not from the duration intrinsic to our lived presence? Is ‘consciousness’ not something that endures from moment to moment? ‘Consciousness’ without duration is merely a hypothetical construct — a phantasm of ratiocination — not even an abstraction, which, after all, must be of a quality of some actual phenomenon from which to be abstracted. What is this insistence that the durational nature of experience must be something different than ‘consciousness’, but a way to escape from Science’s dread of subjectivity — bound, as Science is, to a dualistic understanding of all things, that originates from our most basic naive hunches about the world.

That duration is not an abstracted quality of our lived presence, but rather, a subtraction from it, while time is an abstraction from the presence of all ‘things’’ present in this manifested world, seems more a matter of inattention, than of careful consideration. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding is at the base of our present difficulties.

There is only lived presence, that we figure as ‘duration’, and the passing relations that are its animations, which we figure as something outside, separate and apart from our lived presence. And this naturing of the manifestation of the world, which must be essentially cognitive, cannot be so, unless there is no distinguishable difference between these two aspects of our being: duration and knowing. But there is another way to see this more clearly.

All that is manifested has a sæculum— a potential ontogenetic full-life span — from the most basic phenomena of physics to the most complex phenomena of the Cosmos, including that which we restrictively call ‘life’. All of it is known by being manifested, and therefore the sæculum of each is the possible morphology over time of each — and not the passing randomly caused ‘physical changes’ such as wear and tear, disease, injury, modern nutrition, etc., as one might naively assume. It’s the development, stasis, and degeneration of the organism, or thing, over its projected lifespan.

In other words, while we tend to see most things in the world as a product of random, chaotic, interactions with other things, and those interactions shape and delimit the lifespan of each, what we never ask — anymore — is how the forms of things take shape.

Today, after the discovery of DNA, we know about the production of proteins, and believe this raw material is a sufficient answer to all the old questions. But we haven’t answered any of those questions, other than to explain where the raw materials of life come from. But as to the formation of what is built with those proteins, little or nothing is said. Which leaves us in the darkness of seeing everything as a puzzle of many pieces that can only be assembled in one correct way, even as we are surrounded by infinite variations on a theme.

But the question remains: what does time, as duration, have to do with anything? If time is no different from cognition — that which ‘consciousness’ is trying to explain — than what is it cognition of? If this sæculum that I have brought our attention to only specifies the possible duration (lifespan) of our life, then we are still stuck in a dualistic understanding.

So focus now, on the correlation between potential lifespan and form. A human being has a potential life span, as do the cells that comprise the body, and the molecules that comprise the cells, and the ‘particles’ that comprise the molecules — each manifested intelligible form, from the most basic, to the universe as a whole, has both formal properties and potential lifespan. And those two categories can only be two aspects of one thing, otherwise we can’t define either one. Remember that I am using “formal” in the sense of ontogenetic development, not a black-tie dinner event. So, the formal properties of a thing logically define the potential lifespan of the thing, and the potential lifespan of a thing clearly delimits the formal properties of the thing.

Another point to consider is that the sæculum that each of us has, starts always now. Naively, we would think: first, it starts at the moment of our birth, and then it slowly ticks away as each moment of our life passes by, until our sæculum extends no more. But, that would be confusing our physical ontogenesis with the idea of objective time. A lifespan is what a tire has. A sæculum is the formal evolution of our lived presence.

A human being’s physical ontogenesis may be solidified at conception — as a fertilized human egg — but conditions and possibilities open up and are trimmed away with our response to each moment. And note carefully here that by “our” I am referring to the sæculum of our human body, the sæcula of the various organs of the body, the sæcula of every cell that makes up those organs, and other structures of the body, the sæcula of the molecules within those cells, and the sæculum of every particle that make up those molecules. It’s sæcula all the way down, and all the way up (rather than the turtles of Native American lore). Earlier in this book, I referred to that as deeply nested recursive organic structure of sæcula. Form and sæculum are synonyms in this work.

So it is better to say that one’s sæculum is reconfigured as some possibilities are actualized, and others are not. And by ‘reconfigured’ I do not mean ‘change’, but rather, that it has never been otherwise than it is ‘Now’. And as it is sæcula all the way down, and all the way up, the actuality of the entire universe and all that it comprises reconfigures Now. There is no Time over which to change…

Our sæculum — our potential ontogenetic full-life span from Now on — changes as we move through our lives, moment by moment — the direct consequence of every event we traverse. It is an accounting of a life well-led, or a life wasted away, and each vignette of our lived presence has reverberations along our path. I would say that this is echoing the Buddhist idea of Karma.

But what about the manifested things of the world that we would consider, not so much organic, but as material? The only difference is that there is no movement of attention, or very little, because the possibilities are much more limited. But there is a degree of spontaneous creativity as well. This is why scientists have noticed, and engineers have to contend with what are called “stochastic” phenomena. It’s why your computer has a ‘clock speed’, which is used to synchronize seemingly random behavior, but which, ‘over time’ shows a marked preference — it creates a bell-curve when the activity is plotted on a graph. A preference implicates an affective response, no matter how small.

The Apparent Motion of Time

There is only one thing left to ask: what is the apparent motion, that we sometimes call the river of time, and other times call our path through time? Why was Saint Augustine confused about what time means?

I see the understanding presented in this text — that of each ‘moment’ as a vignette, consisting of the presence of the path through the possibilities that brought us to this point (the backstory present in each moment), the scene to which we have an affective response (our lived experience), and the possibilities for what comes next (foreshadowing) — is both complete, and is still — still like a diorama in a museum. It is only our attention that ‘moves’ from vignette to vignette, and as I said, it is our attention that steers us to what comes next. Thus, ‘we’ are just this: the localized perspective of the Now that is present as what is manifested, which is known by being manifested, and not by being ‘perceived’ which has all the dualistic complexifications that modern thought has given that.

It’s not that there is only “Now” as if it was some time called the present moment, in which things slide into view and then quickly disappear, as if we ourselves are passive observers, it is instead that what is, is only ever now, and we are not observers, but are the perspective of the presence that is called Now, upon the scene. In a way, the Now is the venue in which the scene is set in place. But the only ‘movement’ through the scene, is our directed attention to the scene and its parts.

If you reflect upon this, you will hopefully see the benefit of training your mind, and paying attention to what is happening, seeing clearly why, and choosing wisely, your path through your life.

The perspective that we normally lay claim to as our own, is the perspective of the Now upon the vignette of our lived presence. The movement though, is just that: the perspective of the Now as the vignette is manifested and therefore known.

The continuity of our life — our passage through these scenes — is imputed, not actual. Much as the perception of the eye, which has a hole in the receptors of light, is covered over by projection of continuity from the surrounding areas over the blank spot in our vision.

The collapse of the “wave-function” is total, comprising the entire universal plexus, now, all at once. As Parmenides put it:

This alone yet, the account of the route, remains — how it is. And along this route signposts further (you), many indeed, how, being ungenerate and unperishing, is whole, monogeneric as well as untrembling, and not without finish; and not sometime was and will not be, since now is at once total: One coherent⁠.⁵

We can follow the scene non-judgmentally, or we can direct our attention to whatever we like, turning away from what we don’t like — and it is the passage of attention from vignette to vignette, and within each vignette, that is the imputed motion that we naively call the passage of time.

Each type of being, and thing, seems to have a relative scale at which it unfolds. A human can’t see the wings of a hummingbird, and in turn, we must seem to be just two-legged sloths to a hummingbird. But no matter the scale at which our lived presence unfolds, it happens Now.

Truth or Practical Knowledge?

Truth is primordial to any subsequent proof — because something must be true before it can ever be proven to be true. It is a confusion to hold proof as the necessary antecedent to truth, conflating truth with proof. But this is the state of affairs today.

At times, we know a thing is true intuitively, and thus we see no need to bother with proving it. We may be wrong in our intuitive estimation, which could lead us further into errors of judgement. But we can be correct, as well. Intuitively true things are viscerally felt to be true, not because of belief, or having reasoned them through, but because they are an informed intuition that arises in mind, spontaneously out of the blue — like a seed that germinates when the necessary conditions are present. We feel the intuitive truth of a thing in our bones — not in our head.

A perfect example of this is found at the heart of modern Scientific practice, because Science today is founded upon the ideal of Verificationism: that some understanding or concept is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is true by definition or is verifiable. Yet, Science doesn’t prove Verificationism, it presupposes its validity. And in truth, one cannot verify Verificationism by proving definitively that to be true something must be true by definition, or verifiable. Uncharacteristically, however, Science relies on this intuitive understanding and tacitly accepts that some things can be true without verification.

How could you possibly verify the assertion that to be true, an assertion must be true by definition or verified to be true?

First, one must list all possible assertions, in order to determine if each is true by definition, or can be verified to be true — a Sisyphean task in itself, that is compounded by the ever-changing conditions, and thus the list of possible assertions that can be made, about the universe and everything in it.

Yet one of those listed assertions must be the assertion that to be true, an assertion must be true by definition, or verified to be true, and that is only provable by first having proved every other possible assertion. It is this necessity that shows the impossibility of ever proving this assertion, and certainly never being able to prove it in time to make sure that it is true before the universe ends. It is and will be forever, the last piece of business before the lights in the universe go out.

“Thus, the gold standard of Science is a victim of its own austerity: it is not even false — it is cognitively meaningless.”⁠⁷

The problem for us all to ponder, is that Science doesn’t accept anything that cannot be shown to be true, or that is true by definition, and it vociferously refuses to accept any other intuition of truth that is not proven by the scientific method. This completely undermines our natural reliance on our own direct experience to guide us through our life and to help us find the truth of things. The result of this is that our reasoning about the world is severely constricted.

And it is important to consider that this refusal on the part of modern science has nothing to do with the search for, and discovery of useful knowledge, it has to do with hegemonic control over Truth. Prior to Galileo, even before the early formulation of the scientific method by the Islamic scientist Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (Latinized as “Alhazen”) in the 10–11th century, humans searched for practical knowledge, not The Truth.

If something had a practical benefit, it didn’t matter if it was true or not — much like the modern use of the placebo effect, and the explanation of why the geocentric and heliocentric theories of the organization of our solar system, which were at the center of Galileo’s dispute with the Catholic Church, could have co-existed for thousands of years before Galileo’s assertion that he had discovered the truth.

Alhazen was an early proponent of the concept that a hypothesis must be proved by experiments based on confirmable procedures or mathematical evidence. But he didn’t conflate truth with proof. That was Galileo’s contribution.

Ponder the possibility of truth in your life: that there are true things that have not, or can not be proven; that there are true things that are necessarily true by definition; that there are true things that have been proven; that there are intuitively true things that we may, or may not be correct about; and that there are necessarily true things that are true because we have directly experienced them.

Which of these possibilities of truth are more meaningful to our own lives?

Modern Science wholly accepts only two of these types of truth: those true by definition and those proven to be true. But critically, Science denigrates necessary truth based upon direct personal experience as being invalid as evidence of truth. That leaves each of us impotent to find our own way to the truth — if we accept the hegemony of Science over what can be considered to be true. Interestingly, Science itself doesn’t. It doesn’t care, or refuses to notice that Verificationism is cognitively meaningless.

It took me thirty years to break free of that hegemonic control. And the only way I found to do so, so as to avoid merely substituting one authority with another, was to develop the ability to disengage the otherwise automatic apperception of the imperiences arising from my lived presence into the body of understandings that informed my life, until I had completely and vigilantly excised the naive hunches I started out with, along with everything that had followed on from them.

The result of this long effort is that my circumstances are simpler, clearer, and more life-affirming, without all the built-up cruft confusing things and necessitating intellectual phantasms like ‘consciousness’, ‘given-ness’, ‘awareness’, and even ‘happiness’ — I am perfectly happy living my life without having to search for happiness, or any of the others. You can be too.

Footnotes:

¹ This is explained in the discussion “Plato On The Necessarily Nondual Nature Of Reality”

² The Poem of Parmenides, Translated by John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflen, 1968)

³ “The Mysterious Universe,” Sir James Jeans, 1930, Cambridge University Press

⁴ Saint Augustine, Confessions [397–400], Book XI

⁵ From “Appendix II” of “The Syntax of Time,” by Peter Manchester, Brill

⁶ Taken from the paper “The Entangled Puzzle Room — A Thought Experiment” by Professor Gar Mar, Stony Brook University, July 2019. It is based on the insights of Kurt Gödel, renowned as the greatest logician of the 20th century.