You are exactly right. Each sensation is here for an instant. The timeline is assembled by concepts/processing.All that remains is a single thing: a physical tension.
Take a look at what ist happening here. The thought process acts as if there were an assembly line of events: first a sensation, then a thought, then another thought, then a sense perception, and so on. Thought Process reconstructs everything retrospectively as a timeline.
And supposedly, someone sits right in the middle of this assembly line, experiencing it all in sequence. [
It is this that gives rise to the very feeling of a "tension waiting for something" or an "expectation that remains unfulfilled."
These are all concepts of time.
…
When exactly does the past end—and when exactly does the future begin?
Try drawing this dividing line based on pure experience:
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Can you find a boundary anywhere in your raw sensory data—or is there, without exception, only this single, boundless Now?
Even a single breath spans many “instants”… and the mind assembles it after the fact (or imagines it before the fact) to be “one whole breath”.
Even the word “even” can’t be heard as one sound perception. It is constructed after the fact or predicted/preemptively completed as “one word” by processing.
Yes, the same exact “I” doesn’t survive from instant to instant, but changes from instant to instant.Regarding the "I":
Is the "I" that currently feels the tension (or anything else) exactly the same "I" that thinks a thought a second later—or is that merely a mental assertion made after the fact?
Can you find any fixed, continuous "I" in the pure sensory data that travels from one moment to the next?
Or does the feeling of an "I" simply appear as an isolated moment—passes away—and in the next moment something entirely new emerges?
Where is the wanderer in time—except as an idea in the mind?
Answer me based only on what is perceptible in the current fraction of a second.
Sorry to jump into an analogy but it’s like the saying “you never walk through the same river twice.”
The “river” isn’t a fixed thing, and neither are “you”!!! The saying is typically pictured as a person coming back to the same river years later… but even a millisecond will suffice to change everything!!
I’ll play more with the experience of this.
Warm regards,
Josh
