Posts tagged illusion

Past, present, and future

Droste Experiment

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

— Albert Einstein

Why? Because now is all that is. The past, the present, and the future, all is contained in this moment, now.

How? What you think as past is nothing but your recollection, from your memories, of what you suppose to have happened. It’s not real, it doesn’t exist now, it’s only your memories. And what you think as future is your imagination. Right now it exists only in your mind, otherwise it is not real. The present is the only time that comes close to real, present is what you perceive to be happening right now, and even all recollection (of the past) and all imagination (of the future) can happen in your mind only in the present moment.

Read also this post.

(Photo by Thorsten)

The illusion of reality

Entering Hyperspace

What in fact is the past? The past is not a reality; it’s just a concept. The future corresponds to projections, anticipations that do not have any reality either. The past has already occurred; the future does not yet exist. These notions affect us as realities, although they have no substance. The present is the truth that we are experiencing here and now, but it is an elusive reality that does not last. We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation in which the present constitutes a border, a limit between a past and a future without any concrete reality. The present is that elusive moment between what no longer exists and what has not yet happened.

These notions that we take as “reality” are pure intellectual fabrications that do not involve an independent reality, existent in itself. According to the Buddha, perceived phenomena exist only from the standpoint of their designation—that is, the names and concepts we attach to them. The functioning of phenomena does not reveal a palpable entity that is uniquely theirs. You could compare phenomena to a mirage: the closer you get to it, the farther away it gets, until it disappears. Similarly faced with the mind that analyzes them, phenomena vanish.

— Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

(Photo by Éole Wind)