Living in the Past Tense

Why do we re-visit the past? Is there something about the past that we have left incomplete, that was left undone, unfinished.? It may be that we actually live in the past tense, revisiting what we know in order to escape. To one who lives in the memory of what was, the moment is a reality that one wants to avoid. We avoid it because it forces us to realize who we actually are and not the illusion of who we are as a creation of thoughts accumulations. The mind is enslaved by the memory of what was. It seems that the only way that one can accept the moment is to revisit selected memory and bring it into the present. It is seeking the security of what was, the known. To escape the present by revisiting the past and projecting it into the moment. The moment is in reality vacuous, it is without the self. But mind cannot accept the reality of a state of non-existence, of emptiness, so it escapes into what was and fills the moment with the illusion of a self created existence. It is the illusion of a projected past as the existence of a defined self that knows.

It is a very difficult thing to be done with and completely free of the past. The "I am" is a product and result of the "I was" or accumulated past. When you are in the moment and aware of thoughts movement as a referencing of the past then it is possible to break away from the illusion. To perhaps see for the first time the how and why of all comparison and conclusion and thus all conflict. True freedom is born out of this understanding which is the simplicity of seeing in the absolute moment. The subtlety of thoughts movement as the duality of a self and what it knows makes it very difficult to comprehend the illusion of knowing. You cannot grasp it and make it part of what you know. Conceptually it makes no sense and seems just a mind game. The reality of it is not in knowing but in not knowing. The key is not to formulate an idea, but to just be aware of thoughts movement. It is an awareness that is not seeking, wanting change, or trying to understand. With the dissipation of a self that is attempting to define there is a quietness that will allow the moment to reveal the truth of what is. In that moment it is possible to realize something that is beyond the intellectual and conceptual abilities of a mind that is seeking. A person must realize that the mind always seeks its conceptual ideal, because that is the substance of its existence. It cannot go beyond its content therefore it cannot escape its conditioned existence. A consciousness that is unconditioned is the outcome of total freedom. Total freedom is the outcome of an "awareness moment" in which the self is realized as a creation of the known. The total freedom of an unconditioned consciousness is realized only in the absolute moment and cannot become a conceptualized method of accomplishment as a repetition of the self that knows. Each moment is the new and never before as is the existence of the unconditioned.