I’ll expand on Dan Armak’s issue with using “moment”. When I try to imagine this, I end up with this conceptual image of a series of consciousnesses, each going “Oh-wow-i-finally-exist-oh-no-I’m-dying”, but that’s totally wrong. They don’t have near enough to time to think those thoughts, and in fact to think that thought they would have to break into several more moment-consciousnesses, none of which could really be described as “thinking”. If each moment-consciousness is continuously appearing and disappearing, they’re not appearing and disappearing in the same sense that we use those words in any other situation. It seems analogous to watching a ball move, and concluding that it’s actually a series of balls “appearing and disappearing”. Why not just say it’s moving?
The other thing that I always have to remind myself is that even though it feels like there’s a consciousness moving, in reality my “consciousness” is present at every moment in time that I exist! And moving is a word that means position changing as time changes, so talking about moving through time is talking about “time changing times as time changes”, which doesn’t really say anything.
Lastly, if there were a thread connecting all past and future consciousness, how would you know? Would it feel any different than your experience now?
Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince” about the similar dilemma of advice. If you let everyone give you advice, you seem like a pushover, but if you don’t take any advice, you’ll probably do something stupid. His recommendation was to have a circle of people who you take advice from, and to ignore everyone else.
A similar system could work well for offense. If you want to be high-status, when most people lower your status, get offended. But for a select few (probably the people who you work with when you’re seeking truth in some form or another) practice never taking offense, as the original post suggests. Ideally, these people would know they could offend you, so they wouldn’t censor potentially helpful ideas.