Now

By Simon Barget

Thu, 29 Feb 2024

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Nothing happens outside of now. Things that occurred in the past occur (and occurred) only in so far as they are brought into this moment. There is no place in which you can say the past lives, independently of our experience. You can point to a photograph but the photo is perceived now. The photo depicts — it is a representation and not the actual thing it shows. Same with a video recording. Our sphere is always now. If something is not in the process of being actively recalled, it is not happening and in some sense did not happen. The ‘did not happen’ is not a denial of a valid claim of occurrence. It is not to belittle anyone or question someone’s honesty. It is pointing, again, to an absence of any place in which the thing that did happen can reoccur now.

You can, loosely speaking, bring about a feeling that the event occurred by recalling it into the present moment. But this does not recreate the event itself. The value of seeing this is that the emphasis is rightly put far more on what we bring to anything now via perception, as opposed to some cast-iron idea of an occurrence that exists independently of whether we are recalling it.

Everything that has happened before backs up in on itself, creating more and more mass, but it is always, and always has been, contained in the sphere of now. That is not to say, of course, that the objects continue to exist — whatever that existence entails — continue to be observable, the objects disappear, everything disappears and regenerates, but the disappearance and regeneration happen, to put it imperfectly, simultaneously and now. Now is a limitless expanse which can contain anything. Everything that has ever happened happens now.

In connection with the above, we feel that ‘now’ is not sufficient for us. There is a trick of the mind that convinces us that something better is always close by and coming. To accept that this is as good as it will get runs counter to a natural inclination to look forward and live. If some people call this hope and they accept that they unconsciously or consciously agree that now is not sufficient for them, then they are, at best, placing an unsubstantiated bet on something they cannot say will or won’t happen with any degree of certainty. It is just as reasonable to suggest that something worse is coming.

There is something ultimately scrutable about our experience, something that says it is unacceptable and needs to be tweaked. There is a compulsion to scrutinise. It is seemingly inescapable.

The overarching assumption in 4. above adds to the overall scepticism in that we do not really know a before and after, a neat distinction creating two separate parts, a line we delude ourselves into believing we can see. It is impossible to point to that line, that distinction, and it must be admitted to a great extent that it belongs to the realm of imagination. In other words, we can conjure up images but these images do not become real by our bringing them up. The best that can be said is that they occupy us in a similar way to which we can be occupied by a dream until we realise that the events therein did not happen. So there is no other moment that we can ever segue into. The apparent movement is no movement at all. It rests here. You never go anywhere else.

When you start to see this ‘better’ or ‘worse’ in 4., you start to question what it means for something to be better or worse. There seems to be a constant weighing-up process in operation, a constant ongoing dissection of our experience by something, call it the mind, questioning: could this not be better could this not be worse? Maybe we can translate this as: could I feel better, could I feel worse? Could there be room for feeling better? Could there be room for me to do something that makes me feel better than I feel at the moment?

What you can derive from 5. above is that we appear to confuse the sense of our being occupied by an image with our sense of whether the event held together by those images is happening. This implies that the issue is more about whether the occupying actually has value. What we are really asking ourselves is if it is important to focus on this thing or another thing or no thing at all. We are enraged by a holocaust denier because he or she denies value, worth, meaning and significance. We are not so much upset by some slick sophistry of words that debunks the actual reality.

This idea can be substantiated by acknowledging the importance of shared memories to friendships. A recalling of something between people suggests an importance to that something. A failure to recall suggests the opposite.

The natural concomitant to the above is that the present moment is merely a choice in emphasis on what we value. This is not controversial until we realise to some degree that we do not choose the emphasis and the value and that social mores and rules go a much greater way to doing so. The value has been pre-arranged and we are unconditionally influenced. We are somehow innocently implicated.

We are always guided by the feeling. We think we know how we feel, therefore we think we can know how we will feel. In other words, our self-assessment of our feelings is one of the ways we create a sense of time and possible movement, a sense of future and changing. We say to ourselves: if I can know how I feel now, I know that I have felt differently before, therefore I know I can feel differently soon.

But you have never felt differently before. You have felt differently. In other words, feelings do alter, just as objects move and light changes but this alteration does not suggest or bring about separate and distinct tranches of time. The upshot is that you cannot bring about or force a new feeling by convincing yourself that there is a fresh piece of time on its way.

Point 11. rests on two assumptions: one that we know how we feel now i.e. that we can trust the judging mechanism (our mind) and two, that our recollection of how we feel is accurate. But if we go back to 1. above, we see that it is an assumption in itself that something occurred as a distinct thing, without us enabling it by bringing into the moment. In other words, the recalling of our feelings ‘then’ is severely tainted or completely overwritten by what is now. Since there is only now.