[Skybird]

A crook, thats how I sometime try to make sense of it.
Some map-basing tabletop cosims like Assault! had hexfield map elements that could be aligned to any other map segment, with any rim of theirs connecting just any rim of the other segment - and still the seam would allow streets, rivers, forests mountains continue seemleassly. So if you connect two such elements, you could rotate any of them, and sitll woudl have gotten a palyable map, while the map in total would be aslightly different.

Imagine the Now-moments, every single moment, being ike this: images that makes sense to you no matter at which angle you rotate them and look at them then: rotate it by 90° to any side, and still, the image would be making sense in its new position. Then combine this image with the images of other cards, and collect them toegther into one flicker book.


All other moments exist at the same "time", and in the same place. Like there can exist an infintie number of waves in the same point of space. What we perceive is the unflding of events, is just the chnage from one flicker image to the other, the stack of them all glued to ether so that to our eyes at least the all seat in the same space. .


Its just a crooky analogy, i know.



Or think a photographer taking a picture with infinite multi-exposure of one and the same frame.



We perceive the flowing of time, yes. Nut maybe we fall to an illusion there, like we fall to the illusion of moving images when watching a cellulloid movie.


Deep meditation can lead the practitioner to a state of mind, where he kind of disconnects from this flow of individual frames. They keep existing , but the motion is gone, and he becomes aware of their real nature as indivdual stills. More, he may make the experience that he can at will switch between them, at whatever a speed, backwards and forward.



Mind you: "crook". All words are crooks.


Time may be nothing else but the illusion of individual moments racing by , each of them being a still. Whatever we do, we do it in this one single moment we call "the presence". When we remember the past, we do not connect to the past - the past is not there. We think and imagine about what we think it was, and we use traces of the past around us that evertehless are not the past, but part of our present moment. But we remember the past - in the present moment. We do not coknnect to a future, for there is non future wheh we think about the future. We form mages about the future, but we form them - in the present moment again.



The present moment is all that we really have. No past. No future. Just the present. Memories of the past we hold - in the present. Fears of and expectations for the future we build - in the present.