Chapter 1 made the case, preliminarily, that it was possible to describe moments of truth, bits of pristine experience. We discussed what we called a Catch-484: You can't really understand moments without first understanding experience and genuinely submitting to the constraints that the apprehension of experience imposes; you can't genuinely submit to the constraints without first understanding moments and experience; and you can't really understand experience without first understanding moments and genuinely submitting to the constraints.

We said that the way out of a Catch-484 is to start anywhere: Start, say, with a little discussion of moments, so that then we can have a little discussion of experience, so that then we can have a little discussion of the constraints, so that then we can have a deeper discussion of moments, so that we can have a deeper discussion of experience, and so on. It is a screwy (meant literally) approach; each turn of the screw takes us a little deeper, a little more securely, into exactly the same moments ↔ experience ↔ genuinely-submitting-to-the-constraints place that we started from.

The present chapter will focus primarily on experience. However, moments, experience, and the constraints co-determine each other, so every discussion of experience is also a discussion of moments and the constraints – we can never talk about one while completely ignoring the other two. The illustration at the top of this chapter is intended to convey this: Chapter 2 will focus primarily on experience but will always keep moments and the constraints in mind.