The here and now is not a slice of time.
It is the field in which time pretends to move.
Past does not trail behind. Future does not wait ahead. Both appear as thoughts, sensations, anticipations, and memories, arising where they can only arise: here. The idea of sequence is constructed after the fact. Experience itself never leaves immediacy.
What is called “the present” is often mistaken for a fleeting moment squeezed between before and after. That assumption quietly fractures reality. What is actually happening has no edges. The now does not pass. What passes are the images that claim it did.
Presence does not arrive. It does not deepen. It does not evolve into something higher. Presence is what allows the language of arrival, depth, and evolution to appear at all. Searching for it only reinforces the illusion that it could be absent.
Awareness is not standing inside time watching it flow. Time appears within awareness, as a pattern of reference, not as a container. Memory points backward. Anticipation points forward. Both gestures occur in the same openness, uninterrupted.
The sense of being a someone located here, experiencing a world out there, is another event happening now. It does not stand apart from presence. It is presence, temporarily shaped as a viewpoint.
Nothing needs to be held onto. Nothing needs to be returned to. The insistence on staying present assumes the possibility of leaving it. That possibility has never been demonstrated.
What remains when the effort to be here dissolves is not a special state. It is ordinary beyond description. Breathing happens. Thought happens. Meaning happens. All of it without a manager.
Presence has no memory of itself. It does not need continuity to exist. Forever is not a duration stretching forward; it is the absence of any point where presence could fail to be.
This is not an insight to keep.
It is what is already doing the keeping.
Morgan O. Smith
Morgan O. Smith 