Yes I agree. Though it may seem obvious, thinking is always from the past. It is the past. Thinking about the future is a projection from the past. From memory. The brain it seems contains a sort of ‘memory stew’ with different ‘bits’ arising haphazardly. ‘Good’ memories, ‘bad’ memories but all, memory. This is something of a revelation. When the memory is ‘bad’ there is suffering. when the memory is ‘good’ there is pleasure…Thought can never be about the present so thinking is always out of step with the senses that only function in the immediate now. Thought certainly has its place but in the psyche it is a recipe for disaster.
My concern with the new is rooted in the past. This concern is the past.
Seeking is past. Prevailing is the past as well. Yet the question of this thread was if the past exist at all.
Who are we asking? A person who is out of time or in it?
The past prevents perception. But the past provides our brain with the experience of pleasure and pain. What is pain - the deep psychological pain of being hurt in relationship - without the past, without the memory of previous hurts? And what is pleasure without the same involvement of memory?
What does all this mean?
These seem to be the words of the past to me. Should I meet it as if I’ve read it for the first time? Isn’t that pretending?
The memory of these words are here recognising and matching the words being read.
I can interact with these last words only intellectually! I can’t help it. I feel nothing.
Now, there’s the question. What does all this mean? The past, the communication, the dialogue, the enquiry, and also the brain itself - which part of all these various components is capable of finding meaning? The brain is conditioned by the past. So the brain is out.
I am here staring at this page, with my brain out of order. I can’t use it to make sense of things.
The aches are alive, aches that didn’t have a voice before.
Stuck and helpless, motionless.
Not waiting nor anticipating.
But the senses themselves are still in perfect order. Psychologically, the brain is redundant; that’s all it means.
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When we bring the senses in, the brain has to come in as well. I don’t know if, at this point, a differentiation can or should be made. Do you get me with this?
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Yes, it’s a question about the right functioning of the brain, isn’t it?
I don’t know if it’s about the right functioning of brain or it is about the appropriate way to approach one’s moment
The moment is here; there is no approach to it. We only think in terms of approach when we want to get somewhere else, don’t we?
Hmm… Are you saying that there is only contact and the unfolding of this contact?
The moment right now is empty. How does one make contact with emptiness? It is not possible for a busy, fractious, impatient, ambitious brain to make contact with the immense emptiness of this one moment right now. An empty brain doesn’t need to make contact. So in consciousness there is either immense emptiness or consciousness is occupied with its own content. That’s where the contact is: in the occupation with the content. Can I see the fact that I have an ambitious brain without making any contact with the fact? Just to see it without getting occupied in what I am seeing. And my ambitions are all apparent in my daily occupation with the content: my daydreams, suspicions, anxieties, judgements and conclusions. They are all showing me the ambitious nature of the brain, which is the habit of going round from one thing to another hoping to land in the right place.
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I hear you. There is the ambition that I am to get ever so closer to it. But ‘it’ is ‘me’, isn’t it?
Yes, the ‘it’ is me. I have psychological existence when I am moving in time, which is an existence that is totally dependent upon an illusion. Therefore, as an actuality right now I don’t exist at all. Psychologically, I can exist before and after, but never right now.
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