As human beings, we struggle with being present. It’s just a simple fact that we allow the past to create our futures. There is no getting around that. When I listen to enlightened people speaking about this sort of thing, they inveriable say something like, “The past does not exist, and the future does not exist, there is only the now”, and they are quite right about that.
Books have been written, and people spend hours in meditation in pursuit of enlightenment. There is not a pill you can take to get you there either. The real challenge is to turn of that inner voice that is always listening and always on. That running commentary in your head that judges and assesses, well, everything.
Take the question of time. We all run around with wrist watches and our phones giving us a running commentary of the passage of time. At a glance we can see how much time has passed since the last time we looked. Here is the thing of it though, time itself is a made up concept. You are sitting reading this in the now. If you think about it, time extends back before the now, into infinity. Same with the future. From the now, time extends infinitely into the future, and like time, both the past and the future do not exist, That is not to say that time as a concept isn’t useful. It is, just ask early mariners who relied on accurate timepieces for navigation. Then consider the suspension of disbelief you experience in a movie theater, for example, when you watch a film that really captures your imagination, and before you know it, 3 hours has passed. Accept for the moment, that time is simply a label not an actual thing. Early people used a candle that burned predictably to measure something they called “time”.
Saying the past does not exist, is not saying the past did not occur, it did. Yet, in the now, the past does not exist. Same with the future. We say, “the future does not exist,” and it does not mean that the future will never occur, of course it will, but in the now, it does not exist.
So, the past does not exist in the now, and the future does not exist in the now and time does not exist at all.
How does one process that? By being present to the now. One might ask, “How long is the now?” The now is eternal. Even so, people tend to break it up into units of time. Today, tomorrow, the next day. But it’s not like that. It’s an eternal state.
I heard a great description of why we do not experience time while we sleep. Simply put, it’s because time is a construct we created, not an actual thing. The past is not a series of moments leading up to now, and the future is not a series of moments leading away from now. Now is the only occurring that exists.
The past does not exist. The future does not exist. The present moment exists. Or, as I like to say, “This is it, and it’s the only it!”
Being in love has shown me that time does not exist. When we kiss, or make love, there is no sense of time passing. It can be a minute or an hour or several hours and we will say, “Wow, its been 4 hours!”
What has made my life feel amazing, it living with my sweetheart in the now. Each day is a new day and we get to create it as we would like it to be. That has made the last 6 years go by in a flash.
My Life: A Memoir 