The present is not time. The present is where consciousness encounters reality.
Or, more cautiously:
“The present” may be the name we give to the meeting of awareness and an ever-changing cosmos.
Time may be the measure of change, but presence is the experience of participating in change.
So consciousness isn’t outside the unfolding.
It becomes a participant capable, at least sometimes, of influencing its own subsequent unfolding.
measurement does not put us inside the thing being measured. It establishes a relationship between the thing and an instrument, producing a signal that we then interpret through concepts and mathematics.
concept never completely captures the object. The map can become extraordinarily sophisticated without becoming the territory.
Being in the moment is not observing the moment.
When you are actually in the unfolding, there isn’t a second version of you standing outside it making a complete recording. The recording happens from another position, through another relationship.
So perhaps:
Reality is the unfolding; knowledge is a trace left by our encounter with the unfolding.
And the trace can be extraordinarily valuable without ever becoming identical to what it traces.
The moment exists as an unfolding. Once we record it, describe it, or remember it, we have already converted it into something else.
Which means that the only way to be completely in the moment is not to capture it, but to participate in it.
Art by Kate W 