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+--- Thread: The present isn't real, therefore we live forever (/thread-20698.html)
The present isn't real, therefore we live forever - Magical Realist - Jun 23, 2026
It is apparent to me that we never really can be conscious of the present moment. What we think is the present is really just a fabrication or prop we make by projecting the fleeting memory of past happenedness as futural more happening. As if there is this infinitesimal sliver or gap between memory and anticipation which never changes and contains our very existence.
But such static present being is an illusion. The present is empty of all substance, like the lingering afterimage or phantom of the past. This is not to say that the present isn't an a priori or necessary idea or principle that structures our very being-in-the-world. Just like the horizon that the traveler can never reach and isn't real but which continuously persists and makes possible his whole journey to elsewhere. It is the repeatability of the just fading moment, as the barren possibility of projected "againness", that creates the illusion of immediacy in which the repeated and its repetition get confused with each other and fuse together in one seemingly timeless and changeless moment. The present is the blurring together interlude --the distorting static or liminal limbo zone-- that haunts where past touches future.
"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.---Henri Bergson
edit: Contemplating this further, the past not only is projected in possibility as "againness" or repetition but also as "never againness" or finality. Relatively rare, it is a largely negative experience implying the futurally projected and absolute cessation of the present as non-existence or death. But this is paradoxical in that the present already entailed being an illusory eternal state of staticity or non-change. How can this ideal state of non-change itself cease to be in itself? The answer is that the present was never really real or "in itself" to begin with and so it is inherently indistinguishable in its persistence and in its oblivion. It is roughly analogous to thinking we could kill a ghost. Or like trying to destroy energy. What never existed in itself thus can never not exist in itself. A lingering hint here of our immortality then? Only as we re-cognize ourselves not as static and changeless objects but as the inherent lunge of pastness into future becoming. We are, iow, transcendental in essence--the enablement of what is fading away to renew and encounter its own return in the form of nascent and novel possibility.
"Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been."--Heidegger
"Be ye in the world, but not of the world."--paraphrase of Jesus
RE: The present isn't real, therefore we live forever - C C - Jun 23, 2026
The specious current experience is what's "real" to itself and the applicable chunk sequence of neural processing that correlates to it. Because it biasedly excludes all the other experiences we slot into past/future categories (it manifests only itself). But language-based thoughts about it actually extend beyond it rather than reside within it, invading and protruding through other moments.
That extended train of language-based cognition accordingly interlinks distinct presentations together like a chain, creating the sense of unbroken continuity or a flow. In contrast, animals whose cognition is not so language-dependent might be apprehending their life in more of a scrambled way akin to a nonlinear narrative. The consistency that our language template demands forces events and hijacks memory to be arranged in a conventional, orderly manner (barring any psychoactive substances that might psychologically mangle that coherence).
RE: The present isn't real, therefore we live forever - Magical Realist - Jun 24, 2026
Here's a helpful metaphor for what I mean.
Think of the film running over the light of a projector. The film is only ever what is coming and what is going--beforeness and afterness. But there appears, where the light shines thru the film, to be a single enduring frame, a sort of window, from which the movie is projected as happening as one thing. The whole movie is just the extension of this illusory "stilled" frame as projected on a screen. So it seems there is this abiding static now in which all that happens IS happening. But in actuality this is just an animated illusion created by the frames as they are being run over the light. The reality is that the movie as a present and yet morphing event isn't real but only a seamless apparition or shadow of the moving before and after frames. The present is like this, an impossible island of timeless stillness--a seeming little eternity or cartoon-- amid the continuous flow from past into future.
The brutal yet curiously liberating conclusion to all this hullabaloo is simply this: the present is all a mirage of our past. Nothing present is real or lasting, not even ourselves. Everything you've been told or indeed can be told is a lie. The only thing that IS real--the only truth to live for-- is whatever is happening next. The only thing to say is what to say next. And the only thing you need to know is what to do next. Everything else is a noisy gawdy illusion with no substance and no permanence. A big theatrical farce with coming and going bit players. Camus was right. Life is a grand absurdity. So quit chasing rainbows. Quit hoping for some distant future that never comes. Quit living in a past that is dead and gone. And quit closing yourself off inside meaningless and time-consuming games. Open yourself up to whatever is simply arising before you in whatever new form it takes. Just go with the life-giving flow. There is only energy. Fluent, scintillating, creative energy. It is all there is, and all there will ever be.