Are you lost in the illusion of past and future time?

Is time the construction of the ego which holds you back from creating the life you want? If so, training your mind is crucial. Only we humans received the gift from the divine to create through our minds. Mary Morrissey said: Everything in this world is created twice – first in thought, then in form.  We can only create in the present, not in the past; With our mind, we create the future through consciousness, the universal mind.

In this guest post, our friend Ryan Biddulph will share his view and experience. Do human beings lose themselves in time of the past and future?

Thank you, Ryan

Human beings have developed an odd “talent.”

People seem to get lost in the past and future.

Past loss gets marked by regret. Or maybe past pain warns you to never do that again, even if doing that intelligently, generously, or with trust *now* brings a far more enjoyable outcome.

Future loss rests on worry, anxiety, and the general malaise associated with thinking forward to what might happen tomorrow in order to defend yourself from now.

How can you be present if you project your mind back in grief or forward in anxiety?

And how can you move on from the past if guilt tethers you? How can you stop focusing on the future if worry fastens you to this ghost of time?

Be present. Train your mind now by staring around you. Note things. Note people. Feel sensations in your body. Observe your mind.

This is the starting point to avoiding loss to the past or future. Observe now. Be present now. Focus on the moment by noticing what few notice: the world around you, clearly, without a split mind dancing between death and birth.

Being Lost

I intend to be fully transparent now.

After feeling inspired to write this guest post for Erika, my mind immediately thought back to the past. I remembered writing a handful of guest posts for you fine readers. How did writing the posts feel? Fun! I deeply enjoyed delving into the science of the mind to help you learn how to go within versus wandering aimlessly into the without.

Anyway, the ego began assessing past experiences on this blog quite fondly but also considered my personal return on writing and submitting the guest post. I did not even think of money. I just wished that someone would want to read it. Readership and comments had been excellent on my past guest posts here; what of the future-past? 

Do you see how sneaky the ego is? Instead of immediately firing up my laptop, opening a Google Document, and writing the guest post, this slithery little no-thing tried to get me to lose myself in the past, remembering, replaying, and figuring out if I could be helpful in covering the topic. Meanwhile, if I were in the now, I never would have chosen these past thoughts.

Of course, Erika built a large, loyal tribe here. Her readers certainly read and enjoy all blog posts here. I simply wanted to explain how the ego mind loves to make a horse race out of everything by focusing on the past, dawdling around, versus acting immediately in the moment.

The Past and Future-Past

The future is really the future past.

Few understand how the past and future are identical.

Here’s why: any time you think about the future, you frame it exclusively through past experience.

One seems ahead and the other behind, but the future is simply the past replayed in your mind.

The ego loses you in an imagined past to attempt to predict an imagined future based on past experience.

Does this sound confusing?

If you give yourself 30-60 seconds to think about this idea, you will understand that the future is your past ideas, formulated, appearing to be made concrete in your mind. Every future possibility is based 100% on your past experiences. 

The past and future-past both rob you of the present. How can you be open to now, in a space of no-time, when focusing on the time of the past and future-past?

Time Is an Illusion

The past and future-past are illusions because time is an illusion.

If time existed, a bird would need to consult a calendar to know when to migrate from Canada across the Gulf of Mexico to Costa Rica.

If time were real, bears would need to honor the same calendar to know when to hibernate.

Animals know. 

Humans possess an identical knowing but bury the knowing under a time addiction.

If time were real, then how in the heck can human beings set up 24 time zones? Do you see how ridiculous it is that something “real” has 24 versions of that “reality”. Don’t get me started on daylight saving’s time. Time is arbitrary, a make-believe fantasy devised by the ego as a distraction device. 

God is real. God is eternal. How can the eternal make up time, let alone 24 time zones or daylight saving’s time, in the United States?

Are you beginning to understand how asinine it is to run around like a chicken with your head cut off because of a made up idea called “time”?

Addicted to time

People are addicted to time. The addiction appears to be quite odd for eternal beings because people are spirit enjoying a quick stopover in the body.

Peeling open your mind to enlightened teachers, mystics, or anyone who’s had a near death experience clues you in to this truth: we can’t die. Spirit is abstract and completely beyond time and space. You are abstract and completely beyond time and space. Go ahead; repeat it with me again and again.

Spirit appears to move into bodies and out of bodies, but it keeps living forever.

This is why a time addiction and, more clearly, an obsession with past and future appears to make you “lose” the eternal essence, which laughs heartily at the ideas of time, future, past, and death.

Each moment you think about the past, you seem to lose the now and all of its love, fun, and richness. Every moment you dwell upon the future, you lose the joy, peace, and freedom of the eternal moment. 

I hear the complaints bandied about from the peanut gallery. You have kids to care for and a job to work and bills to pay and relatives to call, and 101 other worldly responsibilities. But it is not the worldly stuff that pulls you toward the past or future. Your perception of the worldly stuff loses you in the past or future. You are using your mind to filter these events through the ego and its obsession with fear, time, and space to keep you out of the now. In the now, you feel relaxed, and the answers to any worldly problems are all around you. 

Mind Training

Mind training feels uncomfortable at first, if not entirely radical. Few really think, and even fewer understand that the mind is so powerful that it makes everything up, including time and space.

Quantum physics explains how the entire universe of time and space is literally entirely empty until you perceive it. You, through your powerful mind, see forms or images, within this purely empty space, by choosing to perceive it.

There is no one out there. There is nothing out there.

Does *that* guy or gal seem like they should be worrying about a piddly $25 USD credit card bill to pay in the future?

Does that eternal being with a limitless mind seem like one who should grieve for loved ones from the past?

Expression of fear plays a big part in the mind training process. Training your mind to let go of the past and future to focus on the now involves facing, feeling, and forgiving all fears that try to lose you in the past or future. Guilt is one chief fear. You feel guilty about the past and fear repeating the bad feeling again in the future past. Meanwhile, right now, you are, in reality, as guilt-free as a little kid or puppy in a state of blissful play.

We gradually make our way into the present moment of love and peace by pinpointing our mind wandering to the past and future. Note grieving a loved one who’s since passed on. Feel the emotions arising from a profound sense of loss to rage, anger or even guilt about not helping them enough during their struggles. Expressing and forgiving each fear is the way to feel relaxed, happy, and truly helpful now. 

Clearing past fears instantly saps future past fears like worry, anxiety, or trepidation. 

As you begin refusing to get lost in the past or future past you know peace, calm, and a sense of happiness no matter what appears to be happening in the world.

Ground yourself in the now.

Begin taking mind training seriously.

Time, no matter how real it seems to be, is a trick created by the ego to make you forget who you are.

Worrying about the future or regretting the past are sleight of hand magic tricks to get you lost in these illusions instead of remembering the eternally powerful mind that you are in the now.

The now is real.

All else is illusion.

About the Author

Ryan Biddulph sells online courses and eBooks and publishes tips for bloggers at Blogging From Paradise.

Time, as a function of the mind, is defined through its correlation with the ego. Time is seen as a creation and manifestation of the mind contributing to those vital symbols by which the ego maintains its role as an organ of orientation, coherence, and relatedness.  – Cohn, F. S.

Do you lose yourself in the Past and Future?

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