 To see what is at stake here, we must further consider the derivation and entailments of our notion of “different parts or aspects of a thing” in ordinary consciousness. As I lift my coffee mug to take a sip, my normal consciousness will be tracking certain continuities, shaped usually by my practical intentions and more occasionally by more abstract theoretical considerations. I may see this mug as one in a series of drinking vessels experienced in the past; I may think of it as an instance of the general category “drinking vessel.” I may evaluate its effectiveness in containing the amount of coffee I want to have in one sitting and how smoothly it facilitates delivery of that coffee to my mouth, linking it to past and prospective actions and experiences. I may simply think of it as a single physical object, an individual substance unifying a manifold of properties such as solidity, color, smoothness, shape. In each of these cases, I am making sense of this experienced perception of the mug by forefronting its connection with certain other perceptions and conceptions, together with which it seems to belong: other mugs, the universal concept of drinking vessel, the intention to drink coffee in a few minutes, the properties of solidity and the like that also instantiate in other objects. I will want to distinguish between which of these connections are necessary and which merely contingent, and my sense-making will be largely dependent on how and how well I do this. If I shift into Tiantai meditation mode, however, I am to direct my attention instead to the connection of this perception of the mug with everything else going on within this moment of experience. This may include any or all of the above, but viewed as aspects of this moment, alongside everything else in its perceived spatial and temporal surroundings. Viewing that moment as a single indivisible event, I will no longer be able to make a distinction between necessary and contingent: the moment as a whole and every one of its elements are exactly what they are, and cannot be any different—for any difference would by definition simply be another moment of experience. To imagine it with any part removed, added or repositioned is simply to be having another moment of experience, not this one. It cannot be compared to another moment to see which parts are permanent and which transitory, which are necessary and essential to its being what it is and which are merely adventitious or contingent, for any such comparison would again be the occurrence of a different moment. All of it is transitory and every connection equally contingent, but all of it is equally necessarily just as it is, none of it can be otherwise than it is. It will definitely be internally articulated, with what would normally be described as portions that are qualitatively distinct from one another, since experienced contrast is necessary to any and all perception of qualities, or of any moment occurring at all. But none of these elements can be regarded as actually divided into genuinely “different portions” of the moment, since none can be experienced without at the same instant experiencing all the others—any act of zeroing in on and “visiting” one will simply be an additional moment of experience, one that appears as an entirely different moment (though of course in the end it too is to be seen as neither-same-nor-different, as already noted); to be visiting one portion is to visit them all.