The past is a phantasm.  The future is a demon.  The past and the future, with all their guilts and sorrows and regrets, their desires and fears, are both makyo, demons of illusion spewed up by the self to save itself from the silence and peace of the empty mind. As I meditated today, with a new sense of touch suffusing my still sitting and my deep listening, I felt and dwelt in the present moment more easily; and when I could not—when thoughts arose—I found myself drawn easily back from those thoughts, as if by gravity, to the stillness of the present moment.  The thoughts could not spool, drift, self-replicate.  The present moment, free of all forward and rearward burdens, almost glistened.

In the block theory of time and the universe, of which I know little more than its name (and which I believe is now somewhat discredited, despite its conceptualization by Einstein), the past moment exists alongside the present moment; the future moment is also happening now, elsewhere, in this four-dimensional block.  There is no actual linearity in time; the past has not vanished, the future is not about to become now.  Those illusions are created by our bodily limitations of perception and consciousness.  The present moment is not the only moment.  But as the past is not lost, is still unfolding, and the future is already happening elsewhere than where I am in the block, the shallowness and vapidity of my makyo are suddenly clear.  They dissipate more easily.  I need not listen to their guilts and frantic need.  One is many times at once.  One is freer.

17 April, 2024.