 This has interesting consequences that pertain also to the devotional and ritual aspects of Tiantai practice. Let’s imagine that I am thinking about, say, a Buddha; my one instant of experience includes an apprehension of both the poor suffering being I am now, along with whatever objects— the tables and chairs and ceiling and floor, possible and actuals, pasts and futures—are within my present purview, and also a beatific Buddha somewhere else whom I am not, or the possible existence of such a Buddha, or the Buddha I will be in the future, or even one I might be in the future. As in the case of past, present and future, even to experience myself specifically as not a Buddha is also to be apprehending Buddhahood in some mode or form. To see myself as deluded and suffering is to also be experiencing the absence of some contrasting state; in our example, if part of what I think about is how very not a Buddha I presently am (perhaps in the context of a repentance ritual, but also in simply noting the magnitude of my own greed, anger and delusion), then my apprehension also includes this Buddhahood in the mode of its not-presence, internal to this present moment just as the sense of contrasting pastness and futureness in general always are. But the copresence of both my delusion and suffering and the imagined bliss and wisdom of an imagined Buddha whom I am not, both present in this single instant of experience, is not to be imaged like the case of a durational object with two distinct and opposed qualities to it, like, for example, a piece of pastry with both a sweet portion and a bitter portion (due to a baking mishap, perhaps!). If I bite into this pastry and happen to take in both the sweet and the bitter at once, I can conceive of these as genuinely separate because I can compare to other pieces of pastry which are either completely sweet or completely bitter, or the sweetness and bitterness separated out from all pastry and present in other foods, and I can resolve to henceforth, in my next bite, take only the sweet and not the bitter, for the pastry will persist through time, waits for me to relate to it in another moment in a potentially different way. Alternate ways of experiencing the pastry, or of zeroing in on one portion rather than another, or comparisons to other experiences, are available due to the fact that a durational object is something other than the moments of its existence; the different moments of its existence exist in a neutral shared medium, either space and time for a physical object or, even in the case of a purely mental object, at least time. As we have seen, this is not true for the instant of experience, which shares no neutral medium with other moments; again, precisely because they are themselves nothing but time, two moments of time cannot be compared except in a third moment which differs from both (although this difference is immanent to all three moments, and therefore the two differing terms is immanent to all three moments—and in that sense they do not differ, as we shall see in more detail below). I cannot revisit this moment, and I cannot compare it, and I cannot abstract from it. There is never even the possibility of an instance of encountering one of these without also encountering the other. If I experience both the sweet and the bitter once, however fleetingly, though they are both instantly gone in the next moment, in another sense they are eternally together, indeed they are aspects of a single thing, always and exceptionless encountered together. For in general, when we judge two things to be “the same” we mean that they it is impossible to encounter or even consider one without considering the other; they are inalienably and always together. When I say “water is the same as H2O,” I mean that these are two names for the same thing: whenever anyone encounters water they are encountering H2O, whenever anyone encounters H2O they are encountering water. They would be distinct entities only if it is at least conceivable that they can in fact be separated, that one might occur without the other. This also applies to different “aspects” of a single fact which are always encountered together—for example, the pitch and the volume of a musical note. We might think that, although every pitch has a volume and every volume has a pitch, so they are always encountered together, they are still meaningfully said to be different aspects because I can distinguish between them, enumerating different parameters and characteristics of each. But again, this distinguishing of aspects happens only after the initial apprehension of them together—in a subsequent moment—and depends entirely on the possibility that the pitch and the volume can change in different ways, i.e., that the pitch might remain constant while the volume changes or vice versa. This is not possible when the two are apprehended only as existing together in a single moment: there is no possibility of any change in either of them. The distinguishing of different “aspects” requires hypostasizing the note as an entity with some kind of existence independent of its momentary appearance, a durational object of contemplation. The thought about the different aspects of the note belongs to another moment, and is a new object in its own right which belongs inalienably to its moment, just as the initial apprehension of the total note, with its exact pitch and volume and none other, belonged to the first moment. They can only be considered different if they are in principle separable in some way, and that is not the case for the elements of the moment. They are therefore not different from one another.