In this incantation I continue my effort to explain time in the most concise and clear way. I fail to accomplish that, yet I do surface the most important elements, and can use this to craft my next incantation where I can better tackle this topic.
I know that I can only experience this moment. However, I remain confused because I can remember the past and imagine a future. I can remember seeing my family in October. I can imagine what will happen if I walk outside, then do that, and reflect back on my imagining a few moments before. A memory feels like it already happened, while an imaginary future event feels as though it is certain to happen, or that I want it to happen. It seems very simple that I am moving in a linear timeline through space, with past events behind me and future events ahead of me.
The problem lies with the fact that I can only ever directly experience my present moment, while everything else is imaginary. I am sitting inside my cottage right now, curtains drawn. I can see nothing. However, I am 100% confident that I can stand up and walk out my cottage doors to a familiar outside space. So while the outside is only imaginary right now in the sense I can only imagine it, I know it will be there if and when I choose to move there.
Under these situations, the linear timeline and spatial chamber seem logical. These imaginary contents also have real impact on my present moment. For example:
- I have direct experience of the space outside of my home. I know if I go outside, what it will look like, where I will find my water, and where my neighbor is. I know how to get up to the ridge and to the store. I know a shopkeeper named Kamal will be there waiting for me. I believe that I know this because it has happened many times in the past.
- I believe I have relationships with specific people, like my family members. If I see them, we will recognize each other and our behavior will be warm and friendly.
In the traditional model, I attribute the familiar spaces and people to experience. I know the space is outside my cottage because I have been there before. And when I greet my family member, we will embrace because we have shared experiences. Both point to a past experience. I am accustomed to thinking that the past happened, but I just cannot access it. To maintain this perspective I have to invent something I can never directly experience; the timeline.
Yet this violates the first principle of selfism: that the totality of existence occurs in my present moment. If there were to be a timeline stretching back billions of years according to the sciences, then this principle cannot be true. One or the other must be true. Which one is true? Either I can know the totality of everything that is right now in my present moment, or I cannot. Either I am the omniscient whole, or I am demiscient part. If there is such a thing as a linear timeline, then I am demiscient. But if I can re-conceptualize the symptoms of time as something else, then I can proceed on my path to recovery.
I can better describe my experience, without introducing any new constructs I cannot directly and immediately experience, if I just reimagine the nature of my experience. Instead of believing that I have a past, I could say that my attention is moving in the same way a drunken or delirious person’s would. The constant movement and changing is an artifact of my illness, along with my imagination of things that are not here, like time. I have accepted that my awakening is an unwanted state of illness, and so it would hold consistent that in my illness I experience a fever.
The most essential “me” exists at a single, unmoving point. The part of my awakening that seems to move — my secondself and thirdself — is my projection, which I experience as a shimmering and moving scene caused by my delusional state. The movement and change are the shimmer, which is an artifact of my delusion. My true me never moves. I never change. I am always here, I am always present. It is my projected
What to do about my memories? Didn’t they happen? No, they did not happen. Memories are manipulations. As I increasingly withdraw from this idea that these phantom thoughts are impressions of things that really happened, I begin to let go of the idea that something other than this moment is and has happened. I find it more difficult to “recall” the details I once held very tightly to. The faces of friends and family fade away. Voices, past “experiences” and events, all melt away. The fine details of my memories become nebulous, shapeless, blobs. Feelings. Sentiments. Rather than waste my substance on shaping those secondself thoughts, I retain it in my core.
Coming back to my moment — the only moment there is — is about letting go of both my imaginary memories and expectations. The space I reserve for an imagined past and future begins to recede and disappear, and I begin to experience a return to omniself.
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