Facing Life Directly One Brick Of Now At A Time?
The Wall of Now. Where did it come from and where is it going, as it seems this wall has a kind of permanence to its construction while simultaneously leading our choices down an uncertain path.
These existential ambiguities roll through relativistic ontological parameters; Where do subject and object meet? When and where do I know a thing as empirically present in my awareness? Are my cosmological and spiritual assumptions of what Is Now an honest cognition if I have no interest in my own possibilities of error in judgment?
Where is now exactly? What does my consciousness have to do with it? Did we create now out of our past, since all we discern petty much is judged against what we know? In fact, does not the simple construction of a sentence wrap the DNA of the past into a spiraling act of memory projection? This seems to make awareness a thing that has a long tail into the past, while we assume there is not an extension into the future.
We construct our awareness of Reality, our epistemological conclusions as to what actually is, with a faith that the future is currently free of us, free enough that we can change it by doing a thing now and “seeing” how it turns out. Riding this temporal arrow of the nature of now, we aim at being present while we are encouraged by many factors to goalatize the future a target as a futurized intention to make some next thing happen. ( Now that sentence seems to have redundancy built right inti it) This post seeks to hit some truths that exist on both sides of the present moment, that persist for some time with some relevance to doings now. Perhaps to what is valued as a value itself.
Amidst all this questioning of existence there is this assumption; That questions are examinations of Life beyond the trap of what seems obvious; That what is obvious has a likelihood of flaw particularly as we do not doubt our abilities of discernment, and that those flaws have their own meanings to self and to society, meanings that can cover the “true” intent of a definition with the sociocultural coloration of ignorance into a garb of knowing. The unexamined now is like the unexamined life, where my awareness of my impact on the world is kept in a kind of darkness for a unwillingness to know a more complete impression of truth for my own solipsistic demands of “my” emotion.
How high is It, this construction of now in my mind? How broad? Is It really a frozen moment, a photo, or do things go beyond it into the known and the unknown? Is this unknown my feeling of freedom, where if bridal-led with a sense of constraint leads me to believe I am restricted, oppressed by constructs that direct me toward what is allowed and what is not? What is possible and what is not?
I ask many questions here, not to propose I have all the answers to Now’s conundrum, but simple to open portals of thought into this 
present moment. What of this moment is true and what is more of fantasy? What is imagined and projected out by my assumption, my interpretation of what is occurring in The Now and what, perhaps, do I chose not to know for whatever reason be it belief or ignorance?
This illusive present moment, here one moment, here the next, but where is It exactly? What do past and future have to do with now, it seeming both are so dependent upon the outcome? If now is a Finite moment, sometimes called the Now Point, what are past and future to this present? And what of my, our, one and only Point Of View? Does my event horizon of consciousness actually cross over to yours, or is the singularity of me alone, behind a kind of insurmountable wall of the perception of my conscious awareness>
Our awareness, does it not exist beyond the confines of NOWs certainty? My memory influences my senses from the past and my senses filter my environmental insights indicating intrinsic importance to awareness, but this ability to perceive does not mean I perceive correctly once my cognition registers to me as a true view. Right now exist amidst a myriad of interrelated/connected processes involved in space-times relativistic matrices, going and doing while I attempt to extricate one moment to call right now where I am convinced I reside fully. I have learned across space-time to have faith, to believe principles of connectedness have regularity. Yet how do I know when I have encountered some canard, a thing perhaps designed to obfuscate or otherwise confuse?
At The Mercy Of Now’s Possible Facade
We are born able and susceptible to construing patterns of being, kinds of laws that are trustworthy; I trust my foot in the air will land on something solid (usually), how do I predict this? ; That a predominance of data suggesting it is so? Same thing (thinginess?) with where I am headed, quite certain it will be there at the end of the block, and somewhat less certain; at the end of this sentence.
Our thoughts go off dancing across time as surely as a dancer on a surface, but the surface of consciousness may resemble solid sandstone, or quicksand, depending upon where the pressure falls and continues, seemingness becomes a kind of trusted standard on which to step. We step where our senses know best by history, tending to walk in the direction of sight–where we intend to go or sensory apparatus feeds this movement through now. We assume consciousness exist now, in The Now, while not knowing the parameters and depths of now. The notion of my being, (beingness), with a self awareness we self proclaim as sentient, even including an awareness of a soul, the idea of a transcendent nature that persist beyond the physical restraints of the body. In this matrix and continuum of being present in Life our human ideas are tested for validity, and yet the standard for correctness has a problematic core; our fallibility in knowing we know enough to decide what is true from what is not.
Amidst this sea of ambiguity we are reduced and induced to deciding what to do now, and now. We create a paradigm of consensus realities that become a prism and as easily a prison of perception from which we diagnose the condition of Reality, and then are readily encouraged to prescribe what to do now and next now, moment by moment. With unknown skill and perhaps unknowable discernment of tool quality and performance skill-sets, we are to do something, usually a thing considered of use by society and culture.
Do I Decide What Is?
In our result oriented world; things are or are not. Ambiguity and uncertainty are considered undesirable qualities because of this decision imposed upon Reality. We can look at many an emotional issue with a certainty in which we “see” the reality of the actions of others as conveying their intentions, then judging by what is sometimes faulty logic and erroneous evidence, acting upon that questionable self diagnosed Appearance Reality. This degree of often likely error goes on to create its own ripples of influence into my perceived now, and likely to some degree, into the world.
We have a certain rush to judgment mentality construed as being a good thing overall. Questions unanswered, gray zones, insufficient evidence, transitional limbos, these will often not reflect well in the goal oriented glare of the light we place upon success and achievement. If we are to sell ourselves, as we do striving for work or attention, we usually do well to appear to know what to do now even if we have no idea in reality. In this case, attitude, such as apparent confidence, will do more to color in the gray areas as will the truth of a matter.
We gamble on our opinions of now to get what we want, perhaps not really knowing why we want what we do. We humans are here highly susceptible to appearances, so much so that we can see, particularly amidst our youth, how style and attitude are employed to perform as substance, especially the “looks” of power. This pretense to knowing exist in our “grown up” constructions as well. We have institutions that perform in what may be at times an Appearance Reality facade; judging one as being guilty to an act via some seeming preponderance of data meeting an alleged standard of proof while not intending to know what may in fact be non pejorative information. We have executed the innocent, assuming they are guilty of a horrendous use of personal power, yet not personalized the institutions use of effectively that same power. We can operate our reality farm detection machinery perhaps not knowing to what degree we are harvesting our own Confirmation Bias; how we imagine some aspect of now is without knowing if we actually have the correct data set, and not intending to know this truth.
We have religion, politics, construct and concept designed to further one point of view in a reality of collectivities. When what seems as ugly weeds of cognitive dissonance arise amidst my garden of self reflection, I may pull them up and throw them away, going on to perceive my world as if these incongruities of the self never appeared, or perhaps making sure to point out the weeds I “see” in others gardens as indications of their own inferiority, for look at how beautiful my garden is.
My view of the soundness of my world view can include defects I do not acknowledge and assumptions I do not own up to. This landscape of being, where we may build high and proudly, can be, and likely is, unexamined in the nature of its accuracy. Our ideas of cause and effect, of laws of manifestation, are likely compromised by all we do not know. We trust experts who claim to know, and beliefs we claim to know, and not wish to know if they in truth do know true cause and effect. The deep question to the nature of being human is if we want to know, if we truly intend to know what is possible, or else are satisfied floating along on currents of assumption because that’s what we are told to do, for it is the easiest thing to do, to repeat.
But For Now?
It is beginning to be understood that what appears to us to be the future influences the present moment. A kind of precognition is being documented by random number generators and other devices, detecting events before they happen now. My awareness of now (including my own personal awareness of precognition) seem to indicate now is not as isolated a moment as we have assumed. My awareness of my island of now may well exist in a virtual sea of now, a sea connected to All.
The institutions we create in society, and so the self, are riddled with the fault lines of these assumed truncated appearances which do not discern a truth, or at least not the truth believed. Truth is however, always ever-present even in dysfunction and error. There are cause and effect relationships depicting the nature of existence even if I am not getting accurately what they are or if they are. For better and for worse, we marry our identities to presumptive traditions, for we assume a “thing” is already completely known for the appearance of consensus reality says a thing is so. But in reality? We may well be the forest too and not just the tree; the flower and not just a petal; more of an integral aspect of existence than just a body that comes and is then gone.
We humans lay claims upon sure truth and reality even while not knowing the ingredients of the landscape in which we flourish and perish.
Related articles
- Do crows, like humans, have a concept of “hidden causal agents”? (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
- Sun swung from influence in ’60s (environmentalresearchweb.org)
- Causation Warps Our Perception of Time (psychologicalscience.org)
- Temporal binding due to causality (charbonniers.org)
- Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A (phys.org)
