Trying to avoid making grandiose claims at the outset, such as Life is an eternal moment, even if that’s true. The calendar says today is Wednesday, March 8, 2023. But I know that’s just a temporary label for the ongoing and ever-changing present. We are all conditioned to think that existence is a series of moments, each one impossibly small, arriving one after the other.
As a child, whenever I went from place to place I would think to myself, Now I’m here. Now I’m here. Later on, a friend told me he used to do the same thing. At some point I learned one is always now here, no matter where or when. Again, “later on” and “at some point” imply that life consists of myriad points strung together like beads on a necklace. Maybe there’s only one bead, composed of infinite facets that appear depending on the angle at which one observes it.
The oneness becoming what we apprehend to be a multiplicity is illusory. The nature of an illusion is not that the thing is not real, but rather that it is not what it appears to be. The sunset is a real phenomenon, in the sense that it does appear, but the Sun, of course, does not actually go down. We are just spinning away, rotating endlessly. There only seem to be separate days, just as there only seem to be separate moments.
Things change, and from that fact it is natural to assume that change substantiates temporal passage. Our bodies age, events happen, and entropy grows inexorably. That is, there is more and more complexity, more information accumulating, more ways in which objects can be arranged. The mind can only operate in a linear fashion, and so it imposes onto reality this one-after-another sequence whereby this happens, then this, then this, and so on. The idea of everything taking place within one eternal moment does not fit with the thinking mind, and so it’s dismissed as nonsense.
A note on nomenclature: the word eternal does not mean “forever,” although that is the sense in which it is typically used. Rather, it signifies without beginning or end, and because a point at which something starts and a point where it stops are the hallmarks of linear progression, the eternal exists outside of the beginning-middle-end business. It is not everlasting but ever-present, if the distinction can be appreciated.
The other night, I was struck with the sensation of not knowing when Thursday had occurred. Of course, I did know, but one of the joys of obsessive-compulsive disorder is the veneer of not knowing what you do in fact know, e.g. the stove being off and the door being locked. This was last Saturday, so obviously Thursday was two days before, as it always is. Neither Thursday nor Saturday are real things, even though we pretend otherwise. It doesn’t really matter, since two days is a very recent interval.
Besides, if reality is not linear what difference does it make?