A Moment in Time

I’m interested in exploring the moment-in-time experience. We ordinarily think of time as progressing from past to present to future. But when you think about it, past and future exist only as memory and rehearsal. Outside of mind, past and future don’t exist. What exists as real experience is only the mentally initiated present moment-in-time.

I’m particularly interested in this moment in time. We ordinarily think of moments as separate units (like seconds) that flow one after another undistinguished from other moments. But when you think about it, some moments are radically different from other moments. That’s because a moment is really a confluence of karmic cause-and-effect conditions that create who we are as a self in momentary time. 

Our self is defined by the moments we’ve created with our mind. Since karma accrued by past behavior affects us every moment of our life, no moment is the same and, as a result, our lives are shot through with impermanence. There is absolutely nothing to hold on to from moment to moment because every moment is unique. Of course, this ever-changing self flies in the face of everyday experience. Our human continuity seems so obvious: I’m the same person I was yesterday, and so are you.

Actually, our minds are simply not quick enough to parse life’s moments. So, we are conditioned to conflate our perception of one another as unchanging beings with life stories we’ve created since we were born and will continue making up until we die. Life is partly that to be sure. But it could be more were we able to poke a hole in the story, using meditation as a hole-poking process. In other words, during silent meditation, it’s possible to fashion momentary gaps between thoughts. The calm mind resides within those gaps, unfettered by disturbing feelings that accompany thoughts in our life-story.

Besides enhancing a calm and peaceful mind, I’m interested in what happens during those momentary gaps. In my experience, by creating a gap between thoughts we enter a deeper level of ourselves. The excitement in this for me is what occurs at those progressively deeper levels. First, there is always a thought that inevitably arises from the inner space. Second, the deeper levels reveal progressively more powerful thoughts—insight we would have missed had we not taken the time to sit in silence.

Returning to the confluence-of-karmic-conditions idea, I’m interested in what makes for especially powerful moments. Could it be that in creating our life story with our mind, we can also create the conditions for truly exemplary life moments? Again, it’s easy to think one moment is the same as every other. But we know they’re unique because conditions will never be the same as they are within this unique moment.

Moreover, we ordinarily think of our mind as contained within our cranium. But suppose the mind extends beyond the physical self and intersects with other minds. Could karmic influences overlap in time like powerful ocean waves that wash into present life as a completely unanticipated, yet life-changing event? 

It’s easy to dismiss such events as merely coincidental, until we take the time to reflect on narrative connections with earlier events and important people in our life.