My thoughts went immediately to the realisation that existence is built upon countless billions – and that’s a massive understatement – of interconnected moments. It’s a hugely complex picture, and there was a time when I would have stopped there.
But does ‘moment’ mean the same as ‘instant’? I’ve long been of the opinion that there can’t be any such thing as an instant as long as we perceive time as something that never stops flowing. (I referred in my novel to ‘the space between the milliseconds.’ Maybe it should have been ‘nanoseconds’, but how far do you go in subdividing time until you arrive at a state of nothingness and ask ‘is that all there is’?)
And so, of course, this led me to further contemplate the notion that time itself doesn’t exist. Every single fact that has ever ‘existed’ or ever will ‘exist’ is already in place, but we have to delude ourselves that time exists so that we are able to move through it in order to experience reality.
So that took me to the next question: ‘Does this mean that there is no such thing as reality’? And that was where the implications really reached out to the edge of the universe and beyond. Everything that we experience, learn, take for granted, choose to believe – it’s all one great delusion. No God, no science, no politics, no reproduction, no machines, no wealth, no nature… All delusion. But feelings are a different matter, because maybe one thing does exist – consciousness.
At that point we’re back to the old and ultimate question: What is consciousness? The words at the bottom of this blog emanated from a similar set of questions earlier in my life. Was I right? I’ve no idea. And it all stemmed from remembering a photograph of a woman washing her feet.
Thank you if you made it to the bottom of this. I’m not sure I would have bothered, especially since my house is so cold tonight (or is it?)
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