RICHARD: ❓ Have you never noticed that it is never not this moment?
RESPONDENT: Okay, I notice that … and it’s fascinating.
RICHARD: If I might suggest (before you go on with your ‘but’ immediately below)? Stay with that fascination and allow the marvelling, that it is never not this moment, to unfold in all its wonderment.
http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/selectedcorrespondence/sc-time2.htm
RICHARD: ❓ Have you never noticed it is never not this moment?
RESPONDENT: Yes I have noticed it, but …
RICHARD: If I might suggest (before you go on with your ‘but’)? Should the occasion arise that you were to again notice it then stay with that noticing so as to allow the marvelling, that it is never not this moment, to unfold in all its wonderment.
RESPONDENT: Yes, I will try to do it, but I think it is important for me first to understand what is meant by ‘it is never not this moment’, and as you see below, my understanding is quite different than what you mean.
RICHARD: Perhaps a simple demonstration will convey what a thousand words may not: presuming that you are seated at a computer screen situated against a wall in a room … if you were to turn around, stand up, and look at the opposite wall whilst contemplating bodily moving to there and viewing the computer screen from that position such an event (standing with your back to the opposite wall) would be properly called a future event would it not?
Now commence moving towards that (opposite) wall: at the first step ask yourself what time and what place it is … and do so again at each subsequent step.
On each occasion it will be seen that you are just here, at this location, right now, at this moment, all the while you are (supposedly) moving into your future (standing with your back to the opposite wall and viewing the computer screen from that position) … and I have written about this before:
• [Richard]: ‘… one starts to feel ‘alive’ for the first time in one’s life.
Being ‘alive’ is to be paying attention – exclusive attention – to this moment in time and this place in space. This attention becomes fascination … and fascination leads to reflective contemplation. Then – and only then – apperception can occur. An apperceptive awareness can be evoked by paying exclusive attention to being fully alive right now. This moment is your only moment of being alive … one is never alive at any other time than now. And, wherever you are, one is always here … even if you start walking over to ‘there’, along the way to ‘there’ you are always here … and when you arrive ‘there’, it too is here. Thus attention becomes a fascination with the fact that one is always here … and it is already now. Fascination leads to reflective contemplation. As one is already here, and it is always now … then one has arrived before one starts.
The potent combination of attention, fascination, reflection and contemplation produces apperception, which happens when the mind becomes aware of itself. Apperception is an awareness of consciousness. It is not ‘I’ being aware of ‘me’ being conscious; it is the mind’s awareness of itself. Apperception – a way of seeing that can be arrived at by reflective and fascinating contemplative thought – is when ‘I’ cease thinking and thinking takes place of its own accord … and ‘me’ disappears along with all the feelings. Such a mind, being free of the thinker and the feeler – ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul – is capable of immense clarity and purity … as a sensate body only, one is automatically benevolent and benign.