Time, space and Self...

In meditative practices there is so much talk about being in the present. Even after decades of working with this concept, I often wonder if, within our relative perspective, there is such a thing as the present?

Consider the way our perception functions. Your vision clarifies and sharpens what we see by adding what isn't grasped by the eyes, from memory. Our hearing works the same way.

Consider the Cosmos and how we perceive it.

The moon we see is that of 1.3 seconds ago. The sun we see is that of 8 minutes ago.

Some of the stars we see have probably changed positions, or turned into black holes thousands of years ago.

Looking up at the heavens, we are looking at a tri-dimensional vista of macroscopic time.

Consider the way our minds function. Every thought we have contains within it a comparison, an analysis that is based on past memories.

Consider our creative intelligence and the ways we express it. Our ability to recognize patterns and use them relies on our exposure to past patterns.

Consider our psyches, and how our bodies, minds, and even lives are shaped by past emotional traumas. Every dent, every tear, every fissure in our psyche is reflected through our choices and behaviors sometimes all the way to our last breath.

Truthfully, I wonder if, in relative consciousness, there is such a thing as a pure present moment, devoid of its past.

For certain ancient mystical traditions, being here and now, meant being at peace with all of it, (meaning with the emotions, the conditionings, the remembered past and all the possible imagined futures).

They were not talking about a sort of dismissive, approached-from-a-safe-distance, non-participatory kind of peace.

Rather, the peace that is called for here is of the kind that stems from being fully receptive and available at all levels of the conscious experience, feeling it all, being it all.

For this to be possible, one has to be willing to turn one's attention inwards (towards one's own thinking, feeling, believing, and coping processes).

One has also to learn to quiet down the mental chatter, or mental monologue, which itself is intrinsically intertwined with our emotional state, and the current exchanges between us and our environment through our senses of perception.

Basically, the ancient mystical traditions invite us to get to really know ourselves, and to relate to life from this clear knowing of self.

Of course, the ancient mystical traditions had a very different conceptualization of what Self is, in comparison with our externally determined one.

By externally, I mean, our tendency to judge our worth through our external achievements, accomplishments, possessions, looks, networth of our financial portfolios, the friends we have around us, our children, our spouses, how others see us, how we think others see us, etc...

Whereas for the ancient mystical traditions, the self was that aspect of us which never changes, from birth to death, and which they referred to as Spirit.

As usual there is so much to add, but I'll just stop here.

May we all be at peace with our world, our lives, our pasts and the uncertainty of our futures.

We are one.