All our activities are serial, all our thoughts are serial, all our functions function in seriality: we neither know nor do anything that is not subject to the sequence of time. Even God, although called 'eternal', is seen as everlasting.
I think we have to admit that 'intemporality' itself, being a concept, is in fact thought of as enduring forever in time. The furthest we can go is to think of intemporality as 'outside time' or as 'timeless', but is not such a thought just a blank? And the next moment, and the next, we may think of it again; since it is 'still there', is still 'outside time' or 'timeless', we are unable not to think that it has 'lasted'. In fact, as 'duration', is the only manner in which we can conceive the absence of time as well as its presence. In the abstract, therefore, conceptually seen from a phenomenal centre, 'time' and 'timeless' are not different since both are subject to duration, whereas noumenally, on the contrary, they are also not different, and neither is subject to duration. In short, they are not different as regards what they are assumed to be, whatever that may be, their difference being in the fact that both are subject to duration phenomenally and to the absence of duration noumenally. But duration and non-duration are their only attributes; these are in fact all that they are or can be said to be.
We have already understood the reason for this, which is that the source of conceiving is not subject to the concept of 'time'; what is conceived is temporally conceived, so that every conception is temporal, but the conceiving, like all '-ings', is intemporal, is is-ness, is what we are, and so-being, cannot conceive the conceiving which has no objective quality which could be conceived as a phenomenal conception.
Does it not follow that whatever we may do phenomenally, in action or in thought, can never effect our noumenality? How could any deed or any concept reverse its temporal character which makes it what it appears to be? How could it remount the stream of 'time' and be retransformed from an objective concept into the intemporal subjectivity which it has never left? It must necessarily still be there, whatever it may be in appearance, since it is the source of conceiving. Sad as it may be to consider, we must nevertheless ask ourselves what on Earth all these good and earnest people think they are doing, practising this and that, some of them from morning to night? Perhaps they are becoming very worthy, even holy phenomena - but that is all, for phenomenalisation is one-way traffic. There is no such thing as noumenalisation.
Why is that? Presumably that is because what we are has never been anything but noumenal, which is intemporality, and what we appear to be is phenomenal, which is temporality, and phenomenality is the temporal aspect of noumenon, that is the serial aspect, for the reversal of which no mechanism is known or recorded or can readily even be imagined.
But what we can do, which is what we cannot not do, is to remain What-we-are - and to BE it.
Nothing we do in a time-context could have any noumenal significance, let alone be what we think of as 'true' or 'real'. No positive gesture or concept could effect noumenality. All we say and all we do and feel is confined to our own little dream-world of phenomenal nonsense.
That is why the negative way alone can help us, since it negates the positive, whereby - every positive impulse and concept being negated, or 'emptied' as it is called - our noumenality remains and is revealed.
And our supposed 'bondage', is it not bondage to all the conceptual rubbish in which we groutle from birth to death like piglets hunting for truffles? When we find one, is it not seized and taken from us at once?
