Our perception of life is continuous. The naturally rhythmic flow of the pace of life and its inherent coherence make our experience continuous: the tree you look at now will remain a tree a second later instead of suddenly transforming into a dragon. We perceive continuity, because change is progressive, and because the principle of cause and effect is always at play. If we choose to ignore this two facts, we risk misinterpreting continuity as permanence, turning life into a rigid mirage, into an abstraction wrongly extrapolated from the continuity perceived through our never-ending present moment.
So much for the claim to “be in the now”, where else can we be? There is nothing but the now in the way we experience life. We could argue that the continuity of the now is everything we really have. Doesn’t this make the weight a bit lighter, the ground a bit fuzzier? But the now keeps on moving forward, time brings movement (or movement brings time?). Our perception of life is continuously changing. Impermanence shines clearer now.
Thus we have continuity driven by constant movement and the anchor of the present moment as the elements to build all pasts, futures, dreams and fantasies of mankind. On the one hand, what a piece of work, what a machinery, further than impressive. On the other hand, what a mess it is down here on the field. But hey, the rules are stable: 1x present moment + 1x permanent change. The rest is up to…
