My take is that the universe exists as the experience of it. So, apart from an experience of it, ‘it’ does not exist. The universe, in effect, is experience. This is not to say we are incapable of deluding ourselves. But dying men in the desert don’t waste precious energy crawling to illusions, delusions, or mirages. They crawl towards water. The ‘delusion’ only exists in retrospect. So, to say the dying man was experiencing a lie is in fact wrong. It ‘is’ a lie now, having found sand, not water! But it wasn’t a lie then; it was the experience of water (or hope for water!), as experienced at the ‘time.’

The same for ‘self.’ It exists. It is real. No lie! That it can be said to exist as an abstraction makes it no less real. Thoughts too are real. In retrospect, from some wider perspective, perhaps we could say that we were ‘fools’ to so believe we had a ‘self’ back ‘then.’ But I think it would be foolish and short-sighted to say that. It would be like a 1st grader calling a kindergartener foolish for thinking the ‘alphabet’ referred to an internet company(!).

Time and space are flip sides of our standard experiential format. If from my house it takes no ‘time’ (literally) to walk to the coffee shop one mile away, then that distance doesn’t exist for me because there is no experience of it. Both ‘here’ and ‘coffee shop’ are (in my experience) here! No time, no distance. No distance, no time!

To think of NOW only in terms of the ‘moment’ is a mistake. NOW is like a flower, blooming. Inherent in its being, in every petal and graceful shading, color and curve, is every aspect of its life. The soil, gravity, the moisture, sun, temperature, the bugs, the birds, everything, and over ‘time.’ And all those things to exist as they do at the ‘time’ of blooming must include all the elements that made them what they are or were for the flower. NOW includes all time. All space.

For our dying man to find water, that water has to be an inherent element of the desert within the entirety of the context of that NOW. It has to correlate with other contextual experience.

Our experience may be ours alone. But an essential element of my experience, anyway, is that many elements of it are shared with others. It is all of us together, all those shared experiences, that ‘builds’ each unique experience NOW. And it’s not only humans who enjoy ‘experience.’ To be alive is to experience and to experience is to be alive.

Thanks for your thoughts!