The now and before.

The concept of something 'proceeding us' and the importance it has, symbolically, is that it places us in a time frame, the recurrence of which, (regardless of our presence), proceeds without us.
Being of "mind"  and relying of this mind to provide us with all we know about ourselves and the world around, we naturally get stuck with our own importance. We become omnipotent, supreme in our contemplation of the nature, of life and it's meaning, (if indeed it has any meaning).
There has to be a moment "before" the moment we are experiencing at this moment.

There has to be something which allows us to "recognise" what we see and experience. Something which cognitively allows us to know "what we see" has meaning.

There is no void in which I am bereft of "experiential" recognition.
If the world lies equally outside my own experience then it places me, (in relationship to the experience), as something simply "composed" (but not essential) of that experience.
It is this world of the other experience, (related to but separate), that I have to understand.
It places me like a leaf on the surface of a pond dependent on the waters surface tension to keep me floating, eventually I will become heavy with the moisture (accumulated experience) in the pond and sink out of sight.  My substance changes as I become silt at the bottom of the pond, I become something else, another option in my passage through time.

To assume that I am the centre of anything is quite ridiculous. Copernicus and Galileo were ridiculed and their lives threatened when they suggested that the Sun was the centre of our planetary system and not the Earth. Knowledge of our Galaxy and it's place in the Universe makes us seem even more insignificant. Our galaxy is judged to be on the edge of the group of galaxies (not the centre) which make up the Universe and even this Universe is perhaps replicated by another duel Universe. Perhaps the sub atomic partials which  have no mass, only a 'charge' but which when combined produce mass, is clouded even more by the introduction of "dark matter", matter which has the ability to be quantified without having any sense of substance.

To say the world and our almost incidental place in it, is complex has to be the greatest understatement ever.

How do we marry the 'moment', even its colleague the 'pre moment' with the enormity of the Universe and the greater riddle of a quantum world ?