A Quote by Laozi
. . . the mind is desperate to fix the river {of events} in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.
Related Quotes
Truth is always here. That's the only way truth can be. Truth cannot be anywhere else. The only time it can be is here, and the only place it can be is now. But the mind is never here and is never now. Hence, mind and truth never meet. The mind goes on thinking about truth, and the truth goes on waiting to be realized, but the meeting never happens. The meeting is possible only if mind stops functioning, because mind means the past, mind means the future. Mind is never here-now. Whenever you start thinking, you are going astray. If you stop thinking, suddenly you are at home.
Ask the river, where it comes from? You will get no answer. Ask the river, where is it going? You will get no answer, because the river lives inside this very moment; neither in the past nor in the future, in this very moment only!
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas - the oldest Hindu philosophy - and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future - it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.
When the mind is full of memories and preoccupied by the future, it misses the freshness of the present moment. In this way, we fail to recognize the luminous simplicity of mind that is always present behind the veils of thought.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you?
If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.
Meteorologists have the right perspective. They ground themselves in the current conditions (today’s highs/lows). They briefly acknowledge significant events of the past (record temps). And they keep an eye on the future (five-day forecast). Honor your past accomplishments, live in the present moment, and look to the future.
Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.
This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past.
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. . . Live each moment completely and the future will take care of itself. Fully enjoy the wonder and beauty of each moment.
For me, the future lives only here in my mind, as thoughts and images, just as the past does, and I love those thoughts and the world that it produces. I am entirely optimistic about the future.
Legends that endure in the future...were events that took place in the distant past.
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.
The past is an interpretation. The future is on illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.
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