In The Transparency of Thingsyou say, ‘Our experience is one of a stream of appearances in consciousness. These events are thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions, one following another, A, B, C, D, E. Each is utterly unique and each disappears absolutely before the next arises.’
But then you say, ‘Experience is not a series of events, but rather it is consciousness itself taking the shape of hearing, thinking, tasting, enjoying, perceiving, etc.’ The second quotation looks superficially like a contradiction of the previous quotation, but I understand that you are saying that experience is not a series of events in the normally understood sense, as events out there with a discrete observer entity here, but rather that experience is always just consciousness in continual transformation. Is this still not an experience of seriality?
As you suggest, there is no contradiction between the two statements. They are written from different points of view, the former more relative than the latter and in some ways paving the way for the more radical view expressed in the latter.
However, even the second statement has its limitations, because consciousness is always only itself, never taking any other shape, although appearing to do so. In other words, consciousness is never in a state of transformation. Into what would it transform? It is like a TV screen, which never actually becomes or is transformed into anything other than itself, although it seems to take the shape of every image that appears on it.
As for the question of seriality, from the point of view of the mind in the waking state, there is seriality, just as there is from the point of view of one of the characters in the film on the screen. But this point of view is a false one, an imagined point of view.
On the screen, image A is replaced by image B, which is replaced by image C, and so on. When any of these individual images is present, the others are utterly non-existent. What is the relationship between a present appearance and a non-existent one? Obviously there is none. How can there be a relationship with something that is non-existent?
So even from the point of view of the images (the limited mind in the waking state), the idea of seriality doesn’t hold up. Seriality at this level is simply an idea that appears and disappears, like all other appearances, and imagines a connection between all these non-existent appearances.
In this imagined seriality, time is conceived as the background or container on which or in which the seriality takes place. But time itself is never experienced. Like seriality, it is the imagined distance between one appearance and a non-existent appearance, or between two non-existent appearances. In other words, time depends on seriality and seriality depends on time. Which comes first? Neither! Neither time nor seriality has any other substance than the thought that thinks it.
More simply, from the point of view of consciousness (if consciousness can be said to have a point of view) there is just its own ever-present self, never moving, never changing, never going anywhere or becoming anything, just like the TV screen. When there is a series of movements on the screen, does the screen move? Does it become anything other than itself? What could it become? Where could it go?
If we focus on the images (thoughts, sensations and perceptions), there seems to be movement, change, growth, decay, becoming, and so on. If we stay with the consciousness element in every experience, there is just the peace of the self at every moment.
