Too Late to Be Here
Not monks with disciplined posture.
Not mystics with faraway eyes.
Not neuroscientists backed by scanners and confidence.
What everyone keeps calling now is already used goods.
A stitched report.
Signals arriving late, cleaned up by a nervous system whose only real job is simple: keep the organism moving.
Touch comes in early.
Emotion kicks the door open.
Thought strolls in afterward, acting like it planned the whole thing.
Vision lags.
Meaning lags more.
The brain does not hand you reality.
It hands you something workable.
Close enough. Fast enough. Good enough to keep you alive.
That is why the strangest thing people claim to have direct access to, the present moment, is the one thing nobody has ever touched cleanly.
Silence feels off because nothing ever fully stops.
Danger sharpens time into a blade because delay suddenly costs something.
Love feels immediate because it bypasses narration.
Regret arrives late, every time, like a witness who missed the event but insists anyway.
Everyone lives slightly behind themselves.
A fraction of a second in debt.
Then the spiritual industry walks in, smiling, like this can be fixed with breathing.
“Be here now,” they say.
That is not advice.
That is a category mistake with incense.
This is where Immanuel Kant still matters, even if nobody selling enlightenment wants him in the room.
Kant drew a hard line.
Time is not a thing you encounter.
It is the form through which anything shows up at all.
I’m not arguing with that. I’m just playing with it.
The present is not called noumenal by classification, but by function.
It occupies the same role Kant gave the noumenon: a necessary limit that cannot appear as such.
Not because it hides behind experience.
Because it is never given.
The “now” is inferred.
Reconstructed.
Reverse-engineered after the fact so action can continue without falling apart.
You do not stand in the present.
You operate from a model of it.
That is why you cannot locate it.
Cannot hold it.
Cannot enter it.
And cannot miss it either.
It is not hidden.
It is unavailable by design.
Kant placed the limit between phenomena and things-in-themselves.
This places it inside experience itself, between what happens and what gets registered.
Once you see that, a lot of noise drops away.
Meditation does not remove the delay.
Psychedelics do not remove it.
Silence does not remove it.
They just make the stitching visible for a moment.
That moment feels deep.
People confuse the feeling with truth.
So the market fills with techniques promising arrival.
Arrival where?
Into a place no one has ever been.
Mindfulness turns into performance management for the nervous system.
Spirituality turns into latency denial.
Everyone claiming to be fully here while still reacting, still narrating, still polishing the self that insists it has vanished.
You can always spot the bullshit by the obsession with immediacy.
Immediate awareness.
Immediate clarity.
Immediate peace.
Real clarity shows up late.
It does not glow.
It does not save you.
It just stops you from lying in one familiar way you no longer need.
Freedom does not come from being present.
Freedom comes from realizing you never were, and dropping the pressure to pretend you should be.
Once that lands, something loosens.
Not into bliss.
Into honesty.
You stop chasing a mythical now.
You stop performing wakefulness.
You stop demanding purity from a system built for speed, not truth.
You orient instead.
You act inside a system that is always a beat late.
You correct without drama.
You move without waiting for certainty.
You let understanding arrive when it does.
No transcendence.
No glow.
Just fewer false moves.
That does not scale.
It does not sell.
It does not support ladders of who is more awake than whom.
Which is why almost nobody teaches it.
They would rather sell presence
than admit it was never on offer.