Heliotrope on the Beach (with Einstein)

It is nice to feel the sun in February. It is good to feel the warmth and see the colors. I naturally want to turn and face it. To embrace the moment and be and celebrate the sensory now between the ticks of the clock. To stop and smell the roses and be, in that pause, the all that is both rose and nose, sensor and scent. To be the face on both sides of the Daddy-Laz nose-to-nose-to-nose-to-nose game.

This is perhaps one aspect of the meditative experience. Certainly it is suggested by phrases such as “being in the moment” which often get batted around in new-agey circles. But I think perhaps that this is also a bit of a trap, or at least it’s a pleasant truth might hide another one. A false minimum which is not a destination but only a philosophical rest stop and scenic vista. Snap a picture, breathe the air, stretch your legs, grab a snack and move on again.

The thing about being in the moment is that it puts a lot of emphasis on “the moment”. That delta-function pixel point, the little frame marker that ticks across the bottom of the You-Tube window. And the thing about moments is they are always fleeting. To be in the moment is to be alive, but always dying. The moment passes, the clouds roll in and you step on a small green wooden triangle left upright on the living-room floor. Ouch.

In my more lucid moments I can just about wrap my head around relativity and see time as space, force and movement as geometry. As Ford Prefect told Arthur Dent, “Time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so.” We experience time as a sequence of moments, irrevocably dripping from the past to the future but physics, (at least some physics) seems to suggest that this is at least partially a matter of perspective. The moment is the interaction of the stimulus and the sensor, but even that is not quite true. Like a general behind the lines my news is always late. I am never in the moment but always behind it, and the information is never pure. I experience not the warmth of the sun (or the son) but only the electrochemistry of the wetware connecting sensors to sentience. And who or what, pray tell, is the I-I that is receiving these messages transmitted through meat and cabling and imagining a world full of sunshine?

In my really lucid moments I can hold these ideas and get a sense of the path as a whole. Of life not as a series of discrete nows but as a 4D holism. A shape without hard edges, but which, while seeming coherent in the middle, is interwoven with the rest of creation like roots in soil. If I concentrate, method actor me can experience June sun in February and February sun in June. If I pay attention, I am not a creature falling through moments, but a me made of moments. The timeless thus of all the nows. This at least is a sort of description of the incomplete glimmer I get of Big Mind like a tesseract shadow projected down to flatland and uploaded to memeland and propagating now inside your own self dear reader.

Nice day for it.