Every living thing on Earth is inescapably here and now. There is no alternative to be being here and now because there is no other where or when to be. But we humans choose to believe we can predict the future and review the past; that we have the supernatural powers of precognition
and time travel, despite the preponderance of evidence that we have no such powers.
So if I can’t tell the future and I can’t be certain about the past, why can’t I just be completely here and now? Is that too much to ask for? Must one practice meditation and live in an ashram or in a cave just to be here now?
What could be more simple and straightforward than being wholly present, undividedly here now? How is it that something so simple and effortless is impossible?
Since we are always ‘here and now’ , ‘wanting’ to be here and now means we have an image of what ‘being here and now’ looks like , feels like etc, but those images are also always here and now? Desire to be anything, anywhere, anyone other than ‘what is’ is conflict and suffering?
Like a disease. The desire for ‘what is’ to be different than what is is what we can do in technology: make it better. Psychologically we thought the same would apply: amass knowledge and make a better ‘self’. Not realizing that it would hamstring the brain and keep it ‘meeting the present moment with the past ‘accumulation’? And never being able to realize its potential to be free.
I can only desire what I can imagine, and I can’t imagine being nothing but choiceless awareness, so it isn’t desire or fear that prevents it from happening.
Agreed that they ‘can’t’ be imagined so we imagine what it would be like to have them …with ‘desire’ we psychologically imagine something away from what is…and that imagination creates a psychological ‘time’ that doesn’t actually exist…only in our head. But as was said, this is all going on in the moment, now, the only moment there is.
Is there anything at all in the here and now, including you and me? Fear comes from the past and creates the desire for a better future. But the future is now. So what is fear without any future? What is the here and now of fear?
I hear the ‘messengers’ saying that our ‘sole purpose’ is to see that the darkness and division that has been created in us was a mistake, a ‘wrong turn’…
The one trying to ‘escape’ the darkness is the creator of the darkness.
Paying ‘attention’ to darkness is bringing light to darkness?
Hopefully we can agree that there is something rather than nothing. “You” and “me” are what we call certain movements of this something.
Yes, we sometimes say : “fear is the past struggling to become the future”. In other words : imagination moved by memory. What we call the conditioned self (conditioned by natural selection aka survival)
All this is happening now, and this process is reflected in what comes next.
Fear and desire cannot be separated, they are the same movement.
Our desire for progress and security cannot be separated from time, we call this hope, or suffering, or the movement away from what is.
Are we saying the same thing Mahesh? Or am I reading too much into your questions?
And do you and I exist outside of time, outside of fear, outside of thought? Physically, we may be occupying the same space. Psychologically, however, it is only when we look to time that we have any existence. Otherwise there is only the space of here and now.
I exist only as the central subject of concern, in order to give meaning to suffering.
Because if there is no movement away from what is, I has no meaning (it has been transformed into something else)
The problem that people usually raise at this point is that there’s a huge difference between saying the words and deeply living the fact.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.