Engelbert J.

Winkler EVERYTHING IN NOTHING AND NOTHING IN EVERYTHING

A Phenomenology of the Moment Free Reflections on Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl 1 Alone Being is. Being is Now alone. Now alone is. Now has no beginning and no end. Phenomena have a beginning and an end. Now is real. Phenomena are unreal. Phenomena are manifestations of the real. Phenomena are the existing. Being is to the existing as water is to waves. Being and Now are indistinguishable, invariable and thus essentially the same. Being and Now are independent from or rather outside of space-time. Space-time is dependent on/within Being and Now. Space-time has a beginning and an end. Space-time is a phenomenon. Space-time is unreal. Real is Now alone. Reality, Now and Being are indivisible and unique: There is only one reality, a Being and a Now. Future and past are conceptions of a past/future Now. Pause Now in its full presence and the interplay of ideas/phenomena reveals the unreality of its content (the virtuality of its worlds). Each idea is real in that it takes place in the Now and is therefore Now again like everything. 2 Now is everything. Now is not perceptible. Now adheres to the perception. Everything is Now. A beyond/before/after from Now does not exist. Within the Now, space-time extends together with all possible worlds as folded simultaneity. You see a stick of chalk, close your eyes and look again; you can see the chalk a second time apparently. Listen to a sequence of tones, you hear a melody sometimes. Like a sequence of individual tones condensed into a melody, a sequence of moving pictures needs a psychic Now to be perceived. The psychic Now is a contraction of individual concepts in a time frame (just under 3 seconds).

A concept is the content of an (inner) perception. It is not possible to distinguish between perception and perceptual content as the distinction itself is perception, consequently they are the same: Perception and the perceived are indistinguishably the same. Space-time is, as a concept, the logical consequence of the psychic Now. Space-time as a concept refers to an absolute, seemingly physical time. This time only seems to be absolute and itself creates a meta-concept, by serving all possible (and occurring) concepts as a coordinate system. Time is a purely psychological phenomenon. It may be evident and obvious to believe that everything that is, after it was, has been, but this is wrong. (Wrong in the sense of irrelevant, as in the question of what becomes of dreams after the dreamer has awoken). The past is mere imagination and therefore unreal. The existing appears real because it is. It may itself only be perception, perceived and thus unreal. Only Being is always (as the same) really Now. Ideas flow as perceptions through the psychic Now of consciousness and appear as real as it (a conscious idea) is possible: by always taking place in the same Now. 3 The appearance of expansion in the unique non-expandable Now as time and space expresses the relationship between the psychic and absolute Now as a false perspective. This false perspective presents the totality of all contents that may be experienced as they are perceived. A time module with the title Present corresponds both to a restricted number of modules with the title Past and potentially to an unrestricted number with the title Future. This deals exclusively with psychological dynamics. The perceivable moment, the psychic Now, is the window of perception of the absolute Now. All concrete perceptual contents remain a psychological abstraction of reality, which itself does not allow describable contents. Like (invisible) light and perceptible colours, the (non-perceptible) absolute Now includes perceptible contents and as colours are obtained only through the psychology of perceiving apparent existence as light elements, perceptible contents appear to be elements of reality. A colour perceived in the psychic Now is not a real colour in the absolute Now. The participation of the colour in reality is not related to the colour as perceived, but exclusively on the perception itself, which, like everything, can only take place in the absolute Now. Reality is a quality of perception, just as non-reality is one of the perceived contents. If the reality character of perception does not refer to its contents, what is perceived, it must relate to the instance of perception: to the perception itself. 4 Since Being can only be in the absolute Now, it is timeless thus past and future Being impossible. The reality of Being explains the reality of perception. The non-reality of the perceived explains the non-reality of the existing. Perceiving remains Being as perception memory.

The wrong perspective of the psychic Now leads like an inverted funnel from the dimensionless constancy of the absolute Now to the (structured from the grammar of spacetime) apparent realities of the content of perception. Perceiving is the Being aspect of the absolute Now. Perception is in its immediacy the primary memory of the perceived (or its components). The psychic now forms as a conscious experience a primary memory with the title Present. The reflection of the perceived forms as a conscious memory a secondary memory with the title past, just as the reflection of the reflection creates a tertiary memory and so on... The past therefore stands for the (meta) reflection of that which is remembered. This takes place, in the absence of alternatives, in the itself not perceptible (or recallable) absolute Now. If absolute distinctions are not possible in the absolute Now, itself remains the only nameable quality of perceiving primary instance of perception - the psychic Now primary perceptual contents. The absolute Now can not be perceived because it is perceiving. Time arises in the (or through the) memory as the essence of perception but not of perceiving. Perception thus takes place exclusively in the past, which thereby introduces it (as a kind of false perspective) into the absolute Now. Nothing can exist in isolation, because it must always first be seen (identified): a thing in itself is impossible. A not-Now can not be, because it can only be (in the absolute) Now. Being holds everything firmly in the Now. Being defines the event horizon of the absolute Now. This also applies to the past, whose contents can only be Now (as they really are) - the same applies to the future. Without contents the past and future remain empty concepts. 5 The infinity of Being contains energy (waves), matter (particles) and consciousness (perception) as physical states (of being). The perceptible appearance of that which does not appear, and its fading from perception (or as that which is perceived), reveals its Being as an introspection of the absolute Now. In the introspective act of self-perception as Being, the absolute Now experiences itself at the same time as the subject (perception instance) and object (perceptual content). In the boundless multiplicity and mutual entanglement of subjects and objects, the unity of diversity shows itself as a double nature of perception: to be able to be experienced as such, each subject requires an object perceptible to it (in order to make a distinction). If the subject itself is perceived it manifests itself as an object (perceptual content of another subject) While subjects and objects represent no conditions (as defined for oneself or from the existing) and can thus be unreal (because perception-dependent and therefore not Now), perception as a bridge between subject and object remains always Now and thus real. A localisable perception instance (I) does not exist or is not possible. The perception instance as a non localisable quality of the perceiving (not the perception!) can be thought of as a real connection (Now of the perceiving) between two non realities (subject and object). The variety of subjects and objects is indicative of a variety of such individualised perception instances in the sense of self. (That the sun casts fingers of light over the smooth surface of a lake to all walkers on the banks, following each individual, could indeed lead to the idea that the sun has just as many fingers as there are walkers.) Just as the world (the totality of all subjects and objects) appears as perceptual content of the introspection of the absolute Now, an I represents a perceived perception instance the contents of the introspection of a subject.

6 Since there can be no reality outside of the absolute Now (because an outside of Now is not possible), movement cannot be real, yet more than one Now would still be needed for it to take place. Movement describes the connection between memories / perceptions / ideas. Movement combines perceptions as a fading away of the introspective focus of attention of Now. Perceived movement is the result of a neural process and different to movement as a phenomenon. The evidence of the perceived movement disturbs the reflection of movement as a phenomenon if one fundamentally assumes its existence. Now is immobile and real. Perceived movement is the result of a selection: which (apparent) aspects of reality fall into which sequence in the focus of neural attention? Focus of attention is directed to the conventions of socialisation - as part of its psycho-physical requirements. Thus, it is - via psycho-sensorial or intra-psychic feedback loops - a self-steering process. Since not-Now and not-Here are only possible as a concept, but can only occur in the Now, every time and every space is located in the absolute Now. If one wanted derive a kind of existential imperative from this, this could mean: "Be precisely that which you are and surrender yourself to perceiving the now!" The fact that the existence of everyday experience vehemently contradicts this is because of the nature of the neuropsychological apparatus. The "realisation", associated with this characteristic, of the unreal perceptible and the "un-realisation" of real perceiving, can be dealt with psychologically exclusively with radical immersion into the actual state. If the reference point of a perception (of an object or a partial aspect of the subject) of any perceptual content (subject, which thereby sees itself as I) is moved back into the Now of perception, everything is instantly in its proper place. As the only real time is Now, and the only real place Here, movement as a space-time phenomenon remains not real and not physically tangible. The same is true with speed as a measure of the ratios of two mutually distinguishable facts / phenomena. Since all the facts / phenomena, in order to be comprehensible as such, must be perceptual content (and as such observable or measurable), we are once again dealing with non-realities. Thus, movement and speed as psycho-physical facts (or concepts) are not objective conditions, not real. The physical non-condition of movement and speed is due to the arbitrariness of the reference point and is fundamentally different from the same noncondition of acceleration or braking. Movement and speed are physical qualities of the measuring process ("along" physical objects) and psychological qualities of observation ("along" perceived contents of consciousness). The acceleration of the measuring process corresponds to a slowing down of the measurable speed and vice versa. The acceleration of the psychic moment (the neural processing of stimuli) corresponds to a slowing of time. In summary: Being encompasses the totality of all physical states / aspects of Now. Interactions of these physical states / aspects manifest themselves as a cause and effect of the measuring process / observation and appear as the world.