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The trouble is time. When the Buddha first turned the wheel of the dharma with his inaugural discourse at Varanasi, he articulated the first pressing reality (i.e., the first “noble truth”) of life as the truth that “Life is suffering.” He could just have easily said, “Life is time.” Gotama claimed this “stainless insight” into the order of experience on the basis of an intensive, first-person phenomenological investigation of life as it is lived. 20th century phenomenology is in fundamental agreement: the transcendental horizon of experience is time. Time is troubling. This being troubled is the stuff of life and the condition of possibility for experience. This trouble marks the impossibility of any pure presence or direct immediacy. The ceaseless rush of time constitutes the present moment as real but always passing. As pass-ing, the present is given as suspended between the past and the future and constituted by their mediation. The “immediacy” of the present moment depends on the troubling loss of what has passed and on the troublingly open character of what is not yet given. Experientially, the focal character of the present as focal depends on a network of only tangentially given background objects, feelings, memories, expectations, and signs. This withdrawn background is what structures the present as coherent even as it bars the present from being definitive. The present, in order to be present, can never be self-sufficient or definitive because, as present, it is always passing. Chapter…
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