“You have all the time in the world, don’t waste a second of it”
Ram Dass
Person 1: “Do You Remember?”
Person 2: “Remember what?”
Person 1: Remember!
Person 2: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Person 1: “I’m talking about ‘remembering’, the ability to sense, think, feel about something that happened in past time. Now do you know what I’m talking about?”
Person 2: “Yes, of course, I know what you’re talking about. You’re talking about the ability of the mind (remember I’m not saying ‘you’, I’m saying ‘mind’) to go back in time”.
Person 1: “Right. Now you’re getting it. So, my next question is, do you know how you remember?”
Person 2: “No, I just know I can remember. I can track what we’re saying, that’s a form of remembering but I don’t know how that happens, it just happens, or more rightly, “is happening”.
Person 1: “Right, we all have this capacity to remember and we call it ‘memory’ and the faculty that memory uses is ‘mind’.
Memories can take the form of ‘impressions’ with images associated with them or just ‘thoughts’ (image-less impression with and an understanding that is associated with words, that then form a vague sense of impression/image.”
Person 2: So, what’s your point?”
Person 1: “My point is we live primarily in the ‘past’. Our remembering is automatically reflecting what we just did and then ‘we’ connect it to what we are doing ‘right now’.
But if you notice – right now is also in the past. There is never a ‘now’ that we can ‘grasp’ or have a sense of because it is passing ‘through’ us in such a way that we never can understand it, it happens too fast. Not only too fast but it doesn’t have a place. The present is ‘no where’, it doesn’t have a location.
Where is the present moment of experience? Is it in your head? Maybe. Maybe you think, therefore you are! But we all know that’s just language and words. Experience and the ‘now-ness’ of IT is a totality outside the reaches of mind and perception. And the joke (which is on us) is we think we do understand the mind, the past, and how it all works. And to boot, we are in charge of it!”
Person 2: “O.K.”, you losing me here! What are you saying!”
“Person 1: “I’m alluding to the fact that most if not all writing, speaking, intellectualizing, and remembering is ‘dead weight’! Dead and gone but we live 95% of the time IN IT. Which when you consider IT, it means we perceive the future backward.
It’s as if we are looking into a mirror, projecting the image into a ‘frame’ of now (and real) with the mind (memory/reflection) and taking it, slowing it down, making it a concrete ‘thing’ (with meaning) and manipulating it in such a manner so we can use it in the ‘future’. Now, do you get it?”
Person 2: “Yes, but so what!”
Person 1: “Right, that’s the problem! Now, listen up.”……
“We are not present in our experience. In other words, acting, or experiencing, is not a present activity. It has nothing to do with the present, the absolute Moment of Existence. It is the past. All experience is the past. There is nothing new, and there is nothing real about the mind that experiences. The mind is simply memory, past association. It is not perceptive, nor truly sensitive to anything. It is just the mechanical record of patterns. The body is exactly the same as the mind, but because we think so much, we imagine that the mind is something different from the body. Actually, the body-mind is one, a simultaneous coincidence. Just as the mind is past associations, the body is past associations.
The body is the past. It is like a star-the rays of light that we now see were generated light years before now. The present form of that star is not visible, because it is so far away that the light it generates today takes eons to arrive. Likewise, these bodies are the reflections of the distant past. They have no present significance. They must be transcended before we can Realize the Present, or the Transcendental Reality.” – Be Relieved of Your Seriousness