One Foot in Eternity

In the "Transcendental Analytic" section of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that the experience of time is synthesized by active participation of the mind. Kant deals here with only short-term memory and attempts to show that there are rules as to what we may experience in the moment (the duration of the present), since these rules are fundamental to the process by which duration comes about (with the mind's participation). What I would like to do here is explore the long-term memory side of this phenomenon. I do not claim that time itself is synthesized by the mind (whether large times like a year, or the simple present moment's duration, of which Kant dealt). In fact I believe both the present moment's duration and such large sections of time such as a year do in fact exist apart from human abstraction, though a year is too large to ever be experienced. Human beings only live, and are conscious, in a present Now. All human knowledge, beliefs whether true or false, and consciousness, must begin at this Now, and have no other ultimate source. Whether or not, ontologically, reality exists in a Platonic eternity, what human beings discover of this eternity, they can only discover through and by means of the Now. Let us explore a little exposition concerning this Now and see how really little can be deduced from it in its bare, essential form.

Let us suppose, then, like a Buddhist, that the present moment, that conscious Now, is the only thing within which human life and truth, understanding of logic and science, can have its source and only setting of manifestation.

First of all, we shall suppose that unless I am contemplating the fact that I am a human being - at this very moment - I do not know I am a human being. For where does this knowledge have its existence, if at the moment I am not conscious of it? I am not in certain moments aware of this knowledge, from the perspective of our thought experiment; it has no living reality in which it subsists. I do not, then, know I am a human being, unless I am presently contemplating this knowledge. Let us suppose further that in order for me to know what a year is, I have to experience a year. As St. Augustine observed in his Confessions, a year is never an object of experience at all. Nor is even a day. Recalling Augustine's very lucid argumentation, a day, insofar as it is experienced, is always partly in the past and partly in the future; the whole of it is never in the present, but is either remembered or anticipated. A day, then, cannot be experienced; and so if only what is an object of consciousness has any real being to consciousness, there is no such thing as a day. A day is constructed by means of memory and anticipation; it is never experienced at all, for in all human experience a day will be partly in the future and partly in the past, never in the present Now which is the only horizon of consciousness.

And what exactly is a "life"? I say that I am living; I have lived more than 31 years and I possess a life, a life I will continue in till its term is up. But what is a "life" in terms of the present moment? The present moment is a mishmash of memories and thoughts and perceptions that come to me in a rather confused manner - considering their bare manifestation - from which I abstract this idea that I have a life. A life, in terms of the present moment, is a phantom thing; if I suppose that a life is consists in memories I have in the present moment, these are only dwelt upon haphazardly and randomly at best. If a "year" or a "day" is never an object of experience, then neither can there be a thing called a "life". What I call my life is abstracted from a chaotic present moment from which it would seem impossible to deduce the actual existence of this object of such a long duration as a "life". In the present moment I am tired, I smoke cigarettes, perhaps something will occur to me about a time I was on a bus in California when . . . but this passes from me and I decide to do some reading, then set the book down to get something to eat. What ultimate cohesion can be abstracted from such a confused Now to tell me of such a solid unity as a "life"? What can this thing "a life" be? I never experience it at all; such a time as 60 years is impossible to ever experience, nearly all of it only remembered or anticipated. Does this present Now, then, in which those memories are manifested, mostly randomly, justify the proposition that there is such a thing as my "life"? Certainly not, if all that really is, is that omnipresent Now.

We say also that "The United States of America" is a thing. Of course, it only exists in the minds of human beings; it is a truth by convention - albeit very strong convention - that there is such a thing. But supposing we went into the minds of all Americans, and tried to deduce from this collective "Now" the nature of this thing, "The United States of America". This very moment suppose there is suddenly a collective cross-section of the Now of all Americans. If the existence of "The United States of America" truly subsists only in the minds of those who believe in it (since, as we all admit, it only exists by human convention), certainly in the "Now" of every American we shall find this thing, "The United States of America".

What we find with this thought experiment is one man jogging down the street, wondering if he will have time for a shower before dinner is ready; a woman is in a store staring at various bags of bread and their prices. Somewhere else a man is sitting in a funeral parlor nervous about the eulogy he is about to make; somewhere else a policeman is in his squad car staring at a suspicious character on the street. In an airport a man is massaging his neck and wiping his weary eyes; even the President is perhaps only at the moment drinking coffee and daydreaming about his college days; a US senator somewhere is noticing that his waistline is a little larger as he fixes his belt; a mayor is straightening his tie before a mirror. As we see from this cross-section, in the present moment we can find not even in the minds of all Americans anything that coheres into that object, that conventional entity, "The United States of America". If you ask a person, "What is the United States of America?" you will get answers having to do with US history, the Revolution, philosophies of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution. Such things, at any given present moment, are being contemplated explicitly by less than a thousandth of a percent of the world's population, and yet near to 100 percent of that population, if asked, will say there is such a thing as "The United States of America". Where, in the present Now of all the world's minds, does this entity subsist, if those things above that we said define it (the Revolution, the Constitution, etc.) are being contemplated presently by so few of them?

Now let us look to natural laws. We say the seasons come about due to the Earth circling the sun, its axis slightly tipped. But where is this thing "the seasons" in the present moment? Right now it is night outside my window and the summer air is cooling down from the day. The idea of "season" or "now is summer" only has reality in long term memory; stare as I may at the leaves in autumn - I could stare all day - and I'll never see the slightest alteration in color. But let me wait a week and look, and I can compare it to a memory of a week ago, when they were a little greener: I see they have changed. This is how natural laws, things like "seasons" come about: they are deduced not from this "only thing that is real" Now, but from living in some larger perspective. Mentally we are aware of all the Earth's history, ice ages and the like; in terms of actual manifestation, these things are mere thoughts. If thoughts about ice ages are really just thoughts, how do such things gain a status of reality for us equal to the reality we sense in daily perceptions?

Ask any scientist whether, if you were to drop a feather and a wrench from the same height on the moon, they would fall with equal speed, and his conviction that they would is as firm as are any of his beliefs. But ask him what actual experience - that he himself has had - which backs up this conviction, and he will perhaps say he's seen the astronauts do so in the Apollo mission tapes, as well as read about such laws in books. But obviously if he is so convinced by seeing such things on a TV screen, we have to wonder why such beliefs become as firm in his mind as his belief that his own heart is beating. All he has experienced in that Now is having seen some black and white images on a TV, and read a few volumes of books. Is this really how we come to believe in laws of nature, and become so incredibly assured of their absolute universality and necessity?

Obviously, if we assign the only true reality to the Now, so much becomes impossible for us, absolutely absurd in fact; so much which we take for granted all our lives. And yet, it remains true that whatever consciousness we develop, whatever beliefs we come to have, whatever we learn of the world far and near is only, and can only, come down to experiences we have had in this Now. The Now is the only horizon by which we become conscious of anything and everything, and the only horizon in which we can subsist at all.

Of course we do not live in the Now as the Buddhist tells us we should; we live with one foot in eternity. While never leaving or living outside of that omnipresent Now, we escape from it, and live in a world that would be impossible to deduce from the Now alone. In our consciousness we make firm entities out of things like our "lives"; we make solid beings out of entities like "The United States of America". We believe we know many things which we are not presently contemplating, know them even while we are not contemplating them. We know things when we aren't conscious of them, remember things when we aren't remembering them, live lives that go beyond the phenomenal present Now, which is all we have at our disposal with which to go beyond it.

All of this eternal awareness we have - all of what we suppose exists - things like "a year" and "America" and "the sum total of human knowledge" - all of it only, and can only, take place in the present Now. But within that present it seems we do the impossible - we reach beyond it, we transcend it, we assign to reality a Platonic stability. We do all this within the present moment - the present moment is transformed, through mostly long-term memory, into what can never be deduced from that present moment alone; a present moment that is, paradoxically, the only thing we can deduce anything from.

The cardinal question now becomes, If the present Now is all that we experience, and the "whole entities" of the world in which we live, such as "lives", "nations", and "laws of nature" and "histories", can only arise out of this Now, just how are they possible? We have seen that strictly ontologically such things are not in fact present in the Now - and yet the Now, as conscious beings, is all we have with which to construct them. That we live with one foot in eternity is clear; just the process by which the Now can give rise to this more encompassing consciousness is not.

From the studies done in cultural anthropology, two things (among others) become clear: 1) That human beings everywhere have beliefs about everything of which experience, among that group, is common; and 2) That these beliefs are organized systematically. If you go to a tribal horticultural group, and you point to any plant, river, stone, or heavenly body, and ask, "What is it?" there will be an answer. Everything within the sphere of their experience is spontaneously systematized by their mental life; those things outside of it remain unknown and incomprehensible, unless they become subjects of common experience, at which point these alien experiences will be assimilated into the systematic pattern of belief.

I call these patterns of belief systematic, since each entity within the system is analyzed and seen to play a part in terms of all the other entities. It all must, ultimately, end either in tautology or an irreducible. By irreducible I mean the following example. Ask a biologist how traits are passed down from parents to children and he will say things about chromosomes or DNA. But ask him why messenger RNA acts with the behavior it does, instead of the microstructure of the cell just doing whatever it pleases, DNA code be damned, and he will say, "Because that's just the way it is!" The nature of the system of belief can only be either ultimately irreducible after this fashion, or tautological (contingent truths mutually self-explaining), when speaking of the system as a whole. This is because ultimately the nature of contingent truths is to rest on other contingent truths forever (as Leibniz observed), something beyond the capacity of every human belief system.

Human behavior, following after human belief, becomes dominated by systematic patterns as well. When a multitude of human beings find themselves together in one place, spontaneously they organize, create stations, divisions of labor, ultimately cohere into governments, create social structures, make patterns within which all the members naturally and spontaneously act. Human beings go beyond the purely logical, some might say real, organization in nature. The concept of government really exists nowhere but in the minds of the human beings in which it subsists; it is not real the way trees are real; government only exists insofar as humans believe it does and will act in accord with that belief. Perhaps the natural sciences are correct that there are natural laws in the world that determine biological and physical events. But no one supposes that the social organization in human nation states rests only on this. It rests in the fundamental nature of the human mind to act and behave - as well as think and believe - in an organized, systematic way.

I believe such systematization, when applied to the present Now discussed above, is the secret as to how we have that "one foot in eternity". When everything in my daily experience reaches beyond the facts of that experience, so that it fits into a mostly unconscious systematic pattern, this is how I derive that Platonic stability of my world from a constantly changing and otherwise unpredictable Now. If I were to step outside my building at present I would most certainly see nothing that comes as a total surprise; I know just what to expect; and what I see will be comprehensible to me as fitting into a larger, and more complete, overall organized system. If I see a car it will be no surprise; I will be so certain I know what a car is that I will not even be aware that I know. When I see a car, a house, a street sign, I do not even realize I know what these things are at all; in fact, I know what they are so well that I am not even conscious that I know. They fit into my systematic worldview so intimately that I do not even realize that I know what a tractor trailer is, what fuel it uses, what the sidewalk is, and so on; such things are so intimately ingrained in my system of beliefs - in which each thing fits together with every other thing - that I am not even aware that I know all of these things. These things are very present aspects of my personal "Now", but my consciousness has built up such a vast system of knowledge that they form only the tiniest part of all that I am aware of. And so a car I see does not seem any more real or present than a car I read about in the paper that, say, caught fire in some suburb of my city yesterday. My consciousness - through this vast systemization of beliefs - has built up an entire system of awareness such that the present Now seems but the tiniest fraction of what there is to my "reality".

Thus, each section of the present Now is merely a small glimpse at an all-encompassing system of belief. I know the "what it is" of just about everything I ever see, know it so well that it does not even cross my mind that I know it; and I feel I know all the reasons for the reasons for the reasons for everything that strikes my senses. I am not conscious that I am conscious of the whole system of belief; if you ask what is on my mind at any moment, the mosaic of my entire cognitive reality will not be what I report, though it undoubtedly exists in my intellect on some level all the time. I am perhaps too conscious of it, too close to it, regarding it as too fundamental, to even know it is on my mind at all.

I see through the actual manifestation of the Now the tiniest fraction of what comprises my whole human awareness - I have never seen with my eyes more than 99.9% of the cities I am aware of, for example - and the Now is reduced to a tiny fraction of my total consciousness. Everything experienced in the Now fits coherently into my system of belief, what I think of as my world, but my awareness of the system as a whole goes far, far beyond my daily perceptions. If anyone doubts this, I only ask if he or she has ever seen the universe. Everyone believes there is such a thing as the universe, but not one human being at any given moment has seen such a thing. It is abstracted from the tiniest fractions and glimpses of it, but we take it for reality every bit as much as I take the feel of these keys under my fingers as I type.

The only place this construction of a systematic, coherent whole, what we call a "world", can come about and subsist in, if we are speaking ontologically, is within that Now. The Now is all I experience; subtract it completely forever, and I would not be alive. But our consciousness of a systematic totality - most of it never experienced at all, only heard reported in books or the media - is so completely omnipresent that we are wholly unaware even that we are conscious of it. These things are fixed in us - in our memory - in a place so firm that we are unaware even that we are aware of them. This is how out of the Now we live with one foot in eternity.

Angelhaunt.net: Because earth's madness is heaven's sense.