 So to summarize: we start by mulling over all that we can think of as possible states of experience, enumerating all these Three Thousand states of conceivable entities and all their interrelations, pausing to visualize whatever is possible or actual, in part and in whole, what I am and what I am not. But this mulling over requires some time to go through. When we have finished thinking of all we can think of, we are asked to pause and consider the present moment of consciousness, which is now in a position to recall all that thinking as having happened in the very recent past—i.e., at “another” time. We try to isolate this single moment of looking back at the long process of mulling, squeezing it down to a single flash to which all the previously recalled contents are external—“the slightest wisp of mental activity” (介爾有心), as Zhiyi calls it in that key passage, arising in the instant when the organ of cognition first takes notice of its object of cognition. In focusing on the instantaneousness of the flash of cognition engaged in recalling the process of mulling through the list of all that could exist, considering that mulling as past, one is attempting to locate and focus on a moment that excludes those moments when the mulling was going on. But in the very act of excluding them, we find all these contents present to us, precisely as contents to be excluded. At once consciousness is squeezed down to the tiniest possible flash and simultaneously experiences the upsurge of all its excluded contents extending to infinity. The rabbitness of the duck and the duckness of the rabbit surge forth at once. Are the previous moments spent mulling over all conceivable being the same as or different from the present one looking back on them? Neither. All those other moments are present here as this moment of excluding them—neither same nor different. Are the Three Thousandfold contents within this moment the same as or different from each other, from the moment as a whole, or from the contents of putatively other moments also included among its contents? Neither, as we’ve explored at length above. But this is now present to us directly in the singularity of the temporal moment and its indistinguishability from its multiple contents.