Mind feeds on past and future
With powerful cleansing processes, you can throw out all your accumulated samskaras. But if you are not alert, you will keep accumulating new samskaras to replace the old ones! The only way is to avoid this is to live and function in the present moment, in moment-to-moment awareness. Be very clear: every moment of your life that happens without your awareness is suffering.
Have you noticed that your thoughts are always about the past and the future?
Your thoughts about the past are usually regrets or guilt about what happened, what you did or didn't do. Your thoughts about the future are all based on your desires, your plans, your worries about what is going to happen.
This is the most useless activity that the mind can pursue – because you have no control over either the past or the future.
Can you alter the past by thinking about it?
Can you alter the future by worrying about it?
We feel, the past is gone, but at least the future is in our control!
Even if you want to control your future, are you going to do it by worrying?
No!
You will be shocked to know that 99% of your worries don't come true. 99% of your fears never materialize. And the 1% that does materialize is usually a good learning experience for you!
But we are not so intelligent to learn from life!
All we try to do is, we use our memories of the past to handle the future. We respond to life out of our inadequate cognition of the past, not out of our spontaneous awareness in the present moment. It is like driving a car looking only at the rear view mirror! You know for sure where you will end up!
Please understand, neither the past nor the future is real. The past is dead and gone. The future has not even happened. The only moment available to you is the present moment.
But just observe yourself.
Are you ever present in the present?
Only your body is in the present moment; your mind is continuously oscillating between past and future.
You are always jumping, even when you think you are resting.
Your mind never wants to rest.
If your mind rests for a moment, you will know you can do without it!
When your mind rests for a moment, you will see that you are in a state of bliss. That state is the present moment!
Your mind is always trying to escape the present moment. You don't understand, the only thing you can actually experience is the present moment.
You cannot experience the future until it becomes your present!
All your future has to happen in this present moment. It is what you decide now in this present moment that makes your future. If you take care of the present moment, if you live this present moment consciously, you have taken care of your future. Not only that, you will no longer have cause to regret your past.
When you live in the present, you take care of both past and future.
Every moment, the future is slipping into the past.
At the junction of past and future is the present moment.
When your mind is filled with thoughts of past and future, you don't catch this moment!
Again and again, you miss the present moment.
In the diagram, the shaft in the center represents 'time'. Your thought frequency is measured in terms of the number of Thoughts Per Second (TPS).
The greater the frequency of thoughts, the further you are from the awareness of the present moment. For example, if you have 100 TPS, it means that your mind is doing nothing but jumping between past and future. (Of course, the numbers are just to give you an idea; who knows, you may be having even 1000 TPS or 5000 TPS!) As your TPS comes down, you come closer and closer to the present moment. You start relaxing into the experience of the present moment.
When this happens, you have a clearer vision of the past and the future.
Don't think that being in the present moment means forgetting about past and future.
No!
The present moment is all-inclusive.
Being in the present means, bringing both past and the future into the present, and handling them while remaining rooted in present-moment awareness.
Understand: only when you can relax totally into the present moment will you have clarity about your past and future.
You may wonder, what is there to gain clarity in the past? One can understand that the future may not be clear, but why the past? I have lived it, so why should it be unclear?
Be very clear, what you now remember of the past is only your judgment of the past, not the way it actually happened!
We saw how our inadequate cognitions filter reality and create their own idea of every event. This distorted idea is stored in our mind, and recalled later as the 'past'.
How many times we talk about the golden past!
We don't realize, there is nothing particularly golden about the past. Just like the present moment, it was also a mix of joy and sorrow. We just choose to remember the good parts, so it looks golden!
BOX: Have you ever experienced this? Suddenly, for no rea-
son, you think of a person you haven't met in years – maybe an old friend. A few moments later, the telephone rings – and it is that person on the line!
Or you are at a party, and suddenly you get a strong feeling that something is about to happen – maybe a particular person is going to walk in, or a certain person is about to drop something – something like that.
And immediately, exactly what you expected happens! Usually, we brush off such incidents as coincidence. No!
If it happens to one or two people, it can be called a coincidence.
But more than 80% of people have experienced this at least a few times in their lives.
Why does this happen?
When you are in a relaxed mood, your TPS naturally drops. You come close to the bottom of the time shaft.
Then for a few seconds, you actually fall into zero-TPS – the zone of enlightened consciousness.
It is at such moments that you suddenly catch the signals from your past and future. You are able to see at least a few seconds ahead!
As your TPS goes down, you relax into the space of intuition. Intuition is not the understanding of the future. Intuition is clarity in the present moment. When you have clarity about present moment, naturally you will act to shape your future also in a clear way.
Understand: time is nothing but your mind!
All your thinking is nothing but the movement of your mind between past and future.
Actually, mind cannot exist in the present moment.
When mind falls into the present moment, it can no longer be called mind.
It is the state of pure awareness.
When your TPS touches zero, you step out of mind.
When you step out of mind, you step out of time.
Understand, you cannot control or suppress the mind. It is not a permanent solution. At the first chance, your mind will spring back again!
You can only transcend the mind.
When you transcend the mind, it can't play games on you anymore! Not only that, you can play with the mind and make it behave as you wish.
Meditation liberates you from your mind.
BOX:
In meditation, we work consciously to free ourselves from the continuous movement of the mind. But all of us, whether we are meditators or not, are trying unconsciously to jump out of our minds!
At least for a few minutes, we want to break free of our minds.
Our obsession with sex, extreme sports, horror films – all these are for the same reason! In moments of extreme desire or fear, the mind stops for a moment. When the continuous flow of thoughts is broken, the bliss that is naturally in us bubbles up to the surface of our consciousness. In those moments, we become aware of ourselves, we taste ourselves. The 'high' that we get out of these activities is nothing but the bliss of our own Self!
We can also reach this state in the presence of an enlightened being. This is the easy way!
It is the shortcut to living enlightenment! The enlightened master is always in is the zero-TPS state. That is why, in his presence, your own TPS also drops. Just by being in his space, you can imbibe his state.
Awareness in the master's space is natural meditation.