“in the NOW we stop living in the past … or the future”
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
Lao Tzu
Eckhart Tolle agrees with Lao Tzu: “To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment. … The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.”[i]
“Asking outer conditions to make us okay will never bring happiness, because outer conditions are always changing. We are asking instability to bring about stability … [and] that’s impossible.”[ii]
Insight # 83 comes to us from Roy Charles Henry (b. 1938). He is the creator of The Simple Reality Project.
“The present moment (Paradigm-A) is transcendent [which means] we are no longer having the past/future experience of time. … The all-too-common reactions of guilt, shame and regret related to an imagined past or reactions of fear and anxiety related to an imagined future are replaced by responses. … In the NOW we stop living in the past that is over and done with, or the future that contains our fearful imaginings that may never come to pass, and if they do [come to pass] we find that we are capable of responding to them in a Self-Reliant and powerful way.”[iii]
Additional Reading:
- Depression, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
[i] Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. Novato, California: New World Library, 1999, p. 40.
[ii] Rinpoche, Sakyong Mipham. “No Complaints.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, November 2004, p. 11.
[iii] Henry, Roy Charles. “Time.” Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community, 2015, pp. 259-260.
