Re: I will answer your questions about the meaning of life.
Time seems impalpable. The instant someone tries to cherish the moment, it becomes past. Why am I still alive and experiencing now?
The word "still" is something we bandy about. It's great if you want to inquire or insult - "Are they still together?" "Are you still writing that novel?" but it doesn't describe reality well.
Each moment that passes, each unmeasurable change in a vast motionless ocean, is a break. A discontinuity. You are not the you of 5 seconds ago, much less 5 days. The past is a foreign country, and you are just an incomprehensible foreignor to your past self the moment you change at all.
Cherishing the moment, or better, cherising now, involves continually and unconciously forgetting the moment that has just been thought of, just now remembered, just now figured out, just now experienced. Unceasing release of moments is all that presence is.
This is why the rejection of doctrine and the embrace of mysticism can be so initially helpful and ultimately distracting - If you rely on moments of inspiration and transcendence to guide you, you will cherish the memories of those moments more than now and now.
And now.
Self-styled intellectuals and mystics are quite similar in this regard.
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