ABSTRACT
In searching for the barriers and boundaries that seem at times to limit what we experience as ‘the present’ we have entered a realm of experience that generates theoretical insights but which cannot be adequately expressed by remaining on an exclusively theoretical level. What emerges is a series of experiences that share a certain quality. The quality cannot easily be expressed theoretically, yet if it is not made central to an understanding of what all this may mean then anything theoretical that we may draw out of it will be both partial and a pale distortion. In following an emerging experience, we were presented with a series of memory glows, each of which represents a mood capsule. That is, each encapsulates the experiential kernel of an alternate consciousness, activated, entered, and lived as ‘present’-time. The quality they reinvoke is of simultaneous time. If we return, however, to the severed time-images of the everyday, it remains true at least in potential that these experiences may enter our ‘present’ from any moment of our ‘past’. Unlike the underlying assumption of our everyday memory, they do not confront us in an abstract form, as ideas, items of recovered information. They are engulfing experiences which involve an alteration in the sense of space ‘contained’, as the capsule which is their experience. They involve a change in the quality of light and colour, as if they occurred on a different focus level. We enter that alternate focal spatiality and are engulfed in it. For as long as it lasts, we are that alternate consciousness. We do not ‘recall’ it; we reactivate it. Or, since its occurrence is not always controlled at will by the conscious (as is similarly indicated by Wolff in his distinction between ‘surrender’ and ‘surrender to’, 1976), it is perhaps better to say that it becomes reactivated within us and around us. We enter another state of consciousness.
