eThoughts : More About The Now: The Use of The Tool of Time

Did the past happen, did it exist? If so, how could that be if there is nothing but the present moment?

But the past did happen, right? We can see it in old shorelines, ancient bones, and the wrinkled facescape of the elderly. We can remember being 3-years old or 12 or last week (well, maybe). We know that previous experiences can affect our present experiences.

Let’s try this organizational clothing on and see how it fits–perhaps it’s a new style and will help us to feel and see differently.

All right–there were other shorelines, not the ones we’re looking at now. There were other days for those bones we’ve uncovered, but those bones as we see them now, didn’t exist that way before. And that wrinkled facescape–it didn’t used to be that way, it is that way now.

So–are all of these things about the past? What if we looked at them as representative of other nows? If we donned that idea, we might see the world and the universe as composed of many Nows, and the view of a linear time with a past, present, and a future as an organizational tool for our experiences. However, one can only experience time in the present moment.

Perhaps we’ve gotten lost in the use of tools and have forgotten what the tools are for.

Let’s get a bit crazy here and see what happens.

What if we also saw the world and the universe as consisting of many nows (the law of parallelism)? What if the past, the present, and the future, exists now, is going on now, simultaneously with other nows? What if we simply (though we don’t seem to know how) dart back and forth between nows?

Memory may not be about the past, though that may seem impossible at first blush. If all things exist in the now, then we just retrieve another now.

For instance, your clothes exist in the closet though you may not be thinking about them. If you “remember” something you’d like to wear, you can simply go and retrieve it.

That they were stored doesn’t mean they were stored in the past.

That you retrieve them doesn’t mean that you retrieved it from the past.

That you have encoded or represented your clothes as symbols in your mind doesn’t mean they occupied another time. They existed simultaneously with your now, though you didn’t know it, unless you thought about it.

Can that now influence your now?

Of course, as surely as your desire to wear a particular article of clothing comes to your attention.

What if you can no longer retrieve or access something or someone (as in someone has died)?

Sometimes we can interact with another now and recognize it as our current reality (as in the clothes in your closet). Sometimes we can only interact with the representation or the symbol in our mind (as in those physical things or beings now changed to dust).

Was the dust ever something else? Will it ever be something else again?

Very tricky. The very nature of the question pre-supposes past and futures and may dupe us into the illusion of time (and all the emotions that can arise as we think about things or beings in time).

Perhaps to entertain the notion, we would have to expand our reality. Is there a non-physical representation of a physical representation?

Obviously, at least in our minds.

Can such representations live anywhere else besides our minds?

Now we would have to re-define reality to include the reality of dreams or the reality of minds–the existence of non-ordinary reality. Perhaps we would also have to redefine substance and objective reality. For instance, is that dust we’re looking at representative of what used to be, what could be, or both–all at the same time?

Freaky!

At the heart of this idea about time is change. That something changes doesn’t have to mean there was a past–it could be the sign of another now. That something can, could, or will change doesn’t have to mean there is a future, it could be the sign of another, potential now (at least for us in our now).

Why do we have a time tool? Change that is chaotic cannot be organized into time frames, there is no arrow of direction. Apparently we’re not real adept at traversing a chaotic field–we are easily confused and lost. However, change that is orderly can be organized into time frames, there is an arrow of direction. Now we’re not so confused and lost–we’ve got references! But our ability to organize, to create file cabinets or closets, does not mean that time exists as we presently tend to think it does.

I’m guessing that one of the great human guffaws is how we represent time. The tool has become the reality instead of the appendage. And to make matters worse, we’ve forgotten that we’ve got other tools, other appendages with which to apprehend and create our reality (an elephant described as a smell from only one part of the animal, described as a sound from another, as a touch from another and so on). Let’s face it, we create and embrace so many different laments, beliefs, and hopes based on our notion of past, present, and future. Why lament, believe, and hope unless they orient, direct, and illuminate us to a different way of looking at our now?

Perhaps another evolutionary step involves our re-representation of time. That would create a different biological, psychological, sociological, and environmental vehicle for sure.

That may require a different kind of attention.

That’s what the time-tool is for—as a helpmate in shifting attention. And shifting attention is a tool of awareness. That’s a tool, folks—not the entire enchilada of creation. The quality of awareness is related to the clarity, depth, creation, and apprehension of reality. The tool is a helpmate. So, let’s remember there is more than one tool in our toolbox, let’s use the right tool for the job, and let’s remember that the tool is not the outcome.

Lovely, if we get it.