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| flickr photo, Light Chaos by KevinDooley |
I know it's been said a million times already, and that a million people after me will say it, too. But all my past experience is concentrated into this one precise moment called the present; and all my future actions begin at this exact moment, too. Pleasure, pain; love, hate; right, wrong; bliss or damnation - everything that possibly can be exists right now, compressed into a present so infinitesimally brief that you could say it does not really exist at all. Therein lies wonder, love and freedom, for in the transitory nature of the present lies our ability and our inalienable right to choose.
A strange thought came to me after writing this rather cliched entry on the calculus of the infinitesimal present. So strange I hesitate to put it into print. But here goes. What if the mental constructs or theories we have used to explain the world around us are actually true in the moment they are believed in by an observer. So, to use an extreme example, what if the world really was flat when people believed it so, merely because that is what they believed? And if the sun circled around the earth actually, not just in our imaginations, until Copernicus and Kepler came along and 'proved' something different? What if there were multiple, juxtaposed worlds, each as valid as the other from the believer's perspective, and one certitude was no more reliable or valid than another? Not a very practical unifying theory, but an interesting one nonetheless.
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