Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream. - Khalil Gibran
It's been six days since I posted anything, but things were bubbling around in my head and I didn't want to commit them to blog until I had a clearer sense of what I needed to say. It will take a few posts to get it all out so here's a start.
Consciousness is a very slippery concept. Thinking about thinking can really get you thinking, am I right? I could write pages of thoughts on the phenomenon of consciousness but I want to focus here on a crucial aspect of it, namely our perception of time.
We know what the Past is (I'm going to capitalize these terms), at least if we have properly functioning minds. It is composed of memories of all that we have already experienced. There are some very interesting stories about people whose short and long term memory is compromised. Oliver Sacks has a number of good books about these things and I refer you there. Studying pathology often gives us a clearer sense of what "normal" really means. But for our purposes we're discussing the Past as we experience it. And the Past is more than our own memories. We learn that other people have had experiences and we learn this by talking to them and even by reading accounts of things that happened long ago. The Past is real and those who love history love a real thing.
We also know what the Future is. It is, for the most part, a mental construct, an extrapolation of our Past, forward in time. In other words, we experience the Future as a projection of our Past. It is a sense that what has happened will again happen in some form or another. More on that later.
But this thing called the Present is a slippery beast indeed. We all have a sense of what it is but the more we try to experience it, the smaller it gets until it seems to have no substance at all. How can something so real have no dimension? Here's an analogy that helped me.
Suppose you are looking down at a lake. You can certainly see the surface of that lake, so it really does exist. But how thick is it? Even when you get down to the level of the atoms that compose it, at some point there are water molecules below and air molecules above and the surface of that lake becomes the surface of atoms and where does that leave us? No further ahead than we were before.
If you think about it (and mostly we try not to) the surface is nothing more than a boundary, a point of transition from one material to another. It is real, but not in a tangible sense. It is a construct of our minds. And it is the same way with the Present. There is a boundary "in time" where "what has yet to happen" becomes "what has happened." The Present is the boundary between the Future and the Past. And no matter how closely you observe it, there is never a measurable length of time that is the Present. It, too, is a construct of the mind.
Yet we live our entire lives there, and there alone. We cannot live in the Past, nor can we live in the Future. We live in that infinitesimally small place called the Present, and everything that we have ever done or ever will do happens there. But we often completely neglect it. We are constantly thinking about the Future or "dwelling" in the Past and are rarely, if ever, mindful of the moment that separates them.
There is a somewhat vulgar aphorism heard around AA to the effect that an alcoholic has one foot in the past, one foot in the future and is sh***ing all over today. It's repeated because it speaks to the same truth I just elaborated, only reduced to its essentials. And we've all heard the same thought expressed various other ways, "living in the Now," "...that's why they call it the present," and most certainly "One Day at a Time," which we often shorten to "one minute at a time" or "one second at a time." We can shorten it ad infinitum until we reach the same conclusion: that we must live our lives in the one instant we are given and in which to choose how we will live.
When we look at it this way, our Past is not merely memories of events. Instead, it is the recollection of the myriad choices we made in that place called the Present. (If you've ever had a severe regret you know what I mean.) So in one sense, the Present is eternal. There are an infinite number of "Presents" that make up the past. And there are going to be an infinite number composing the Future as well. If we truly live in the Present then we are, in one sense, living in the Eternal Now.
But, as I said earlier, the Future is no more than an extrapolation of our Past. To phrase it another way, the Future is illuminated by the Past. Why do newcomers feel so hopeless? Because the dismal gray light of their Past is the only lamp they possess to see the Future with. However, as we work the program, we make better and better decisions, and our past begins to grow brighter and brighter. And soon our vision of the Future is bright indeed.
A lot of our defects of character arise out of our distorted sense of time. That's why I took so much time (pun intended) laying it out. I am going to do some posts on resentment and worry, so I wanted to make sure I explained my concept before launching forward.
