The Mind is a Time Traveler
Photo: NEOM
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." - William Blake
Lets start off with part of a conversation from a "Guru" that I have spoken with as of late:
"The mind's a bit like a time traveler, constantly zipping to the past or future, hardly ever sitting still in the now. Without its chatter, life's events just unfold—no labels, no drama, just pure experience.
It's like watching a river flow; the water doesn't fret about where it's been or where it's going, it just flows. When we manage to quiet the mind, even for a moment, we get a taste of that—life happening, simply, beautifully, without the commentary."
Lets concentrate on the sentence above in bold print, because that sentence holds the key to freedom, happiness, and actually living.
Where do our problems come from? And no I' am not talking about active threats in our environment, I' am talking about the things we hold onto and dwell on mentally. They come from thoughts of the past and worry of the future. In other words, they come from two areas of our lives that do not exist. The past is over and the future hasn't happened.
So for the average person, they have no active problems, they have purely mental problems.
If life was lived with very little mental chatter, with no labels or drama, how would our lives change? They would change dramatically.
We would move with life and not against it, because we would watch it unfold instead of trying to wrestle with it. But there is only one way to do that and its by observing whats happening now, and leaving life as it is. Yes we can strive for goals, gain what we need, and do what we enjoy, but we do it with life and not against it.
In my own life I have come to many conclusions, but there a few that really stand out. One of them is what I said above; the idea that outside of active threats, we create problems from two places that don't exist — our past and future. This is unbelievably powerful when you really grasp it, but lets look at it another way.
If we were put on a couch with food, water, a good environment, and everything we needed, then loaded up with a drug that sedates us and slows brain activity, how many of our problems would still exist? Really contemplate this.
Would we still have all the problems we have if we did what I said above? We would not. Which goes to show that most of our issues our due to our thinking, more than an actual problem at hand. I have had to learn this many, many times. Sadly, I learned it the hard way.
We have to realize as soon as possible that the mind runs in circles and has no real place to go. Its a survival tool that was designed to keep us alive, but never got the memo that most of us no longer need it solely to survive. So it runs and runs all day preparing for the next threat that never comes.
So if the mind is a time traveler, but where is it going exactly? If its going nowhere, then maybe we dont need all of those thoughts and we can let them go. If we let them go, only then do we get to live directly in pure experience.