Awareness.

He’d been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter.  This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn’t mean to be mysterious.  He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality.  You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag.  The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans.  The present is our only reality.  The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal.  Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place.  There is no other reality.  This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly defined as Quality.  Since all intellectual identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.

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