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The mind is the center of the living being. It is the perceiver, and translator of information. It is always working to organize and collect the knowledge we need to move through our lives and relate to the world around us. What is similar about our minds is that they all have a method of visualization. Every person's mind conjures up abstract images to comprehend complex concepts such as the flow of time. However, every mind is unique in how that image represents itself because something like time cannot be documented in a uniform way. Yes of course, there is the clock, and the calendar…. the standards for measurement of time. But how each person experiences the flow of time varies, and thus our mental pictures are inevitably egocentric.
For much of my life I have viewed the flow of time as a straight line that flowed up a slight grade from the beginning of time till the end of the 1970's. In the late 70's time curved to the right and flowed horizontally through the 80's till it came to the 90's at which point it curved left again and continued in the direction it had always gone, only at a different longitude. Of course in the context of my own cognitive development this concept of the flow of time makes perfect sense. Still I am aware that the flow of time was not diverted by my birth and redirected as I Living in the "present moment" is the goal of meditation. It is what many enlightened people strive to do in their daily lives. It is a nearly impossible destination that we live in and yet continually fail to experience. It requires focus and concentration, and yet the only way to get there is to not try at all. It is a concept that is difficult for our mind to categorize because it is constantly in motion. In fact, the mere attempt to ignore the past and future inevitably draws our mind to those forbidden places where we continue to fight against our own fixations. So if the present moment is truly all that there is, then why is it so difficult to grab a hold of?
My new visualization of time as a single dot has led me to believe that the present moment is no more real than the past and the future. In fact they are all the same moment. We could not have arrived in the present moment without the experiences of our past or our trajectory into the future. To invalidate the past and ignore the future is to deny the present moment the context that makes it so unique and special.
As I sit here and write in this moment, I am simultaneously the person I was, the person I am, and the person I will become. I am the child who felt empathy for inanimate objects, I am the writer contemplating her truth, and I am the traveler who will seek out new perspective by leaving behind all comfort and familiarity. Trying to distinguish this moment from all those that brought me here, and all of those to come no longer seems like a path to enlightenment, but rather another distraction from the relative meaninglessness of our definitions of time.
Lately I have been remembering. I have been rediscovering moments that I had thought were gone forever that seem to have some relevance to where I currently find myself. The experience has reminded me that all of these moments including this one right here, exist only in my mind. To beat myself up for reflecting on the past or pondering the future is as lethal to my peace of mind as failing to recognize the present moment could ever be. If all of time is a single moment than what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen are all occurring at once, and the boundaries we place around moments are as arbitrary as national borders. All of time is as tiny as an atom, and as expansive as our infinite universe. It is all there is, and it is nothing.