The Present

This is now. Whenever and wherever you access this page, that fact doesn’t change. You’re reading this now. Even if this page were written in the past, you’re reading it in the present. That is to say, now.

Stop thinking for a moment. Close your eyes, and just breathe. That’s it. In. Out.

There is no future. It doesn’t exist. No matter how hard you look for it, you’ll never find it.

There is no past. It, too, doesn’t exist. Whatever concept of the past that you hold is constantly being reshaped and redefined by the present, that is to say, now. This very sentence, in fact, held no meaning until it was in the past. You’re reading here, right now, and only at this point does the preceding sentence have any meaning whatsoever.

Breathe again.

In.

Out.

Isn’t that something?

Now, I’m going to leave you with a few selected excerpts of quotations from Alan Watts, a man who will truly blow your mind the more you hear from him. You’ll find a few articles on this site that pull from his wisdom as well.

The future is a concept, it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find that there is only present, only an eternal now.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.