1) Everything Changes and Nothing Remains Still
An irregularity of experience—this is the moment of judgment. Those changes in tempo, those movements and sounds, and tingles to our flesh—the burning tree and the blooming flower! They demand of us, “Look at me. Judge me. I want a value!” These irregularities of experience, these distortions from normalcy, these surges and stimulations demand a reaction; they call for us to alter and shape them. This is the experience of an existence of lability—a push and shove within an environment and between its components. Today it might please us to believe that we are traveling the ancient footpath beaten by Heraclitus; however, sincerity would have us admit that we have only stumbled upon that venerable depiction of movement while mapping our own journey through the forests of interpretation.
And free will?—that will which reacts upon observation, which is forced into action, which pushes when it is shoved—that will is a slave to its stimulation. We are not so empty, we are not a void which must be filled—there is no void of which we know! There is oxygen even in the emptiness of the air, gravity in the emptiness of space.
The word experience owes its origin to the bias of the human perspective—it was, of course, crafted to describe something uniquely human. In colloquial use it expresses a duration within consciousness, or the state which follows a duration within consciousness; however, our thoughts are a single domino in the course of the physical exchange of simulations. Here, I am mindful not to qualify experience solely as human experience. Our lability is guided by every object in our environment—and don’t you think the same experience extends to every object in our environment? Don’t you think we say to it, “Look at me! Hear me! Feel Me!”—and then it reacts? Is it so hard to imagine ourselves as the stimulation which forces the burning of a tree or the blooming of a flower?
