“Be in the Moment”

Life, experience as it were, is only happening in this present moment. The present is renewed continuously, and thus experience with it. In a sense, there is no present moment, only perpetual experience. It is a reality of our world. However, our psychological reality is a much more complex one as it exposes us to the idea of time. Time, encompassing past, present, and future, is a concept that we do not understand well. Our mind is able to access the past and future from the present, but this is accompanied by a psychological shift in what we experience. We are physically present, applying our intelligent thought in the present, experiencing emotions in the present, but the subject matter of the thoughts being experienced, and frequently the emotions that coincide with them, are of the past or future. In other words, our experience is in the present but not of the present. If you strongly identify your thoughts and emotions as you, this can lead to tremendous suffering. To think back and suffer what is already done, or conjure up and suffer what may happen, is just being identified with a memory or an imagination spiraling out of control. Your intelligence has completely betrayed you. This need not mean that you shut your mind down and turn your brain off. We have evolved a most wonderful intelligence with fantastic capabilities, and only a fool would seek to go backwards and not use them. We simply want to use these capabilities correctly, not allowing them to run amuck causing self-inflicted harm. You can learn from remembering the past without the torment. You can also plan for an imagined future without the anguish. We should, therefore, aim to harness this ability to recall the past and envision the future, in order to enhance our experience. Such aspiration requires our intelligence be finely tuned so as to be totally involved with life around us while simultaneously exploring new possibilities, unbounded by the dimensions of time.