“We are caught in psychological time as the memory of the past and the hope for the future. We don’t know what it is to live totally now. Now is life, not behind or ahead.” - Jidu Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti was a philosopher and not a physicist, but through the lens of our most advanced, and to date, irrefutable understanding of the quantum world we understand there is considerable overlap between those two roles. That is, one needs to be both a physicist and meta physicist to attempt to understand reality.
Krishnamurti intuitively understood that the nature of reality only exists in the present moment. To take it further, he points out that the reality of the present moment is also a completely subjective experience of the observer that is heavily conditioned by their “memory” of the past. From a quantum perspective the observer’s consciousness collapses the wave function of the quantum field to create a reality that fits with their conditioning.
This is already getting too abstract so I will back it up.
The past is not real in the way our “memory” works. The past is a narrative, or a story, that our limited and conditioned mind creates to explain and JUSTIFY our position in the present moment, and more importantly how we feel in the present moment. Hence “the past” is a constantly changing and evolving set of electrical signals to the brain that are used to make sense of the present moment. And unless we understand this, it has the potential to create havoc with our lives and rob us of our infinite creativity and potential that is always available in the present moment.
Our clinging to the past leads us to create stories about ourselves, stories about others and stories about the world around us that are likely not true. Even to the extent we have the facts right, we fail to understand that the interpretation of those facts is being ran through our own trauma based subjective filter. We then use these stories to project our reality around us in what is called Maya (illusion) in Eastern esotericism. Our reality is projected to fit the story that we tell ourselves, and the story that we tell ourselves evolves based on the reality we project.
“You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo” – Morpheus, The Matrix 1999
It sounds like a trap, and it is, so how do we escape? First, we need to accept this idea to change it. Some call this taking the red pill. Next, we need to let go of the clinging to the past and come clean with ourselves that we don’t really know much of anything about anything. We have been lying to ourselves our entire life. With our minds open, and free of clutter, we can attempt to objectively observe the present moment. Start by asking “what is trying to emerge out of this moment or what is trying to happen right now?” We need to be committed and curious about discovering as much objective truth as we are capable of to spring the trap. Most of the great philosophers through the ages have arrived at the same conclusion. Enlightenment started only when they began to unlearn everything they thought they knew. That started with themselves, the subjective observer.
Everything we need can only exist in the present moment. Not only does over thinking about the past hinder our ability to experience and observe the infinite number things that are trying to happen for us right now, but it will trap us into a subjective reality that never seems to change.
“Because you have been down there, Neo. You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be” – Trinity, The Matrix 1999
With Love,
The Way
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