I. The Past
Focusing on the past – all the mistakes you have made and regrets does completely nothing to change anything. It does not matter your reasons for glancing backward. Sarah looked backwards in the Bible and she was turned to stone. The same will happen to you if you looked back into the past.
It doesn’t matter if the past is a decade ago, a year ago, a month ago, a week ago, yesterday or even a minute ago.
Even a micro-second backwards is the past, and it’s going to hurt you. Let the past passes away in peace.
When you look backwards do you know what’s going to happen? Fear’s going to happen. Disappointments, regrets, anguish over what could have been, would have been, should have been. The longer you dwell in the past, the more magnified the negative feelings are going to manifest itself.
The past is the devil’s playground. It’s not the place for you to have fun.
II. The Future
Then there are the dreamers. The idealists. The futurists. Those who dream grand dreams, somewhere far off into the distance. Those who pour hours, if not hundreds of hours into creating vision boards. Those who play hypnosis tapes and let them be mesmerised and lulled off into a fantasy land, a land of make-believe where everything is possible and nothing is off limits. Except, those places aren’t real. When these people finally get off the imagined worlds that they choose to escape into and find themselves back in the real world, they become disappointed and disillusioned with what’s happening in their present moments. They seek, crave for the better world like a drug and goes wandering off into the other-world for relief and respite of their current dull world, not realising two things.
First, that the imagined world does not exist except in their mind and that second, there is no mind to be in the real world.
The mind – or Mind, the All Is Mind as the Hermetics believe in is a world in an alternate reality, and unfortunately it will always be an alternate reality, and there is no way of getting there except through the mind.
III. The Present
In the present there is no mind, or Mind. There is only Awareness, and all that will only be. Awareness is the place where real changes can take place, where real changes are taking place, but those who stay in the mind are stuck in the matrix can’t see their way out of the mind.
They are forever caught by the trappings of the mind, and would rather stay there because the mind provides endless entertainment. It is the playground of emotions.
People ride rollercoasters every day, every single moment and they are so used to it, they can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to get off the trains. When you are riding the rollercoasters, you feel emotions of every kinds. First there is the wait when you are queuing up for the “ride”, followed by the anticipation when you first get on the train – whichever train you are on.
You could get on a romance train, a career train, or any other trains you like. As the train ascends, you start getting butterflies in your stomach, and when you are finally at the top of your first ascent, about to drop, you feel this great unknown.
As the train drops off into the ground, lurching at great speeds ahead and around curves, fear, giddiness, ecstasy ensues. As the “train”comes towards an end, the emotions subsides, followed by relief, calm and then boredom.
Now what’s next? There is no more “trains” to ride, no more emotions to be experienced. And you get onto the next train, and the next train, and the next trains. You get on and get off all kinds of trains your whole life, hundreds, if not thousands of them. Some train rides are as shorts as days, while some as long as decades.
When you are in the mind you are forever riding trains and experiencing emotions, and you like it. Until you don’t. Until you decide you have had enough. Until one day you come to a realisation, what’s the point of riding all these trains? They go nowhere. They just go up and down, and I’m back where I started, in the theme park called “Life”. But this theme park, as fun as it may seems, you eventually tire of it.
Eventually you come to a point where you know every single ride there is in the theme park by heart. You know every ascent and every drops, when it’s going to happen, and then you realise “I don’t want to ride trains anymore.”
The moment you realise this is the moment when the mind start to lose control over you, Awareness creeps into the theme park, and the theme park disappears, leaving you with the field of pure potentiality. Where everything is as-it-is, the present Now.
