Obiter Dictum

The past is not some instant, frozen in the distance, unchanging. It is not, either, an image receding in the mirror as we pull away, speeding into the future, which doesn’t even exist, really. We are constantly, perpetually creating our past in every instant. The now is the past.

There are no empty moments.

Each passing moment is pregnant with life, giving birth, in a flash, to a past. Our past. Do we ever leave the past? Do we ever leave it alone? Do we fictionalize and idealize those moments? We do. We don’t strand the past on a street corner with a look of bewilderment on its (our!) face, as we burn rubber into the dark night of the next moment.

We bring it along. All of them, along for the ride. Repainting, redressing and recasting them to fit. If we, as individuals, are the sum total of our past, a past which is clearly malleable and ever-changing, shifting according to our whims, then we can equally say that we are the sum total of our now. Our many nows which buld up and weigh on us.

Or, are we the sum total now of all of our future nows? If you can change your past, now, with naught but a thought, the merest hint of desire to remember things differently, then how can your now be truly your own? Isn’t your now the product of some whim, some random thought in your future?

How could we know?

It is 5:29a, Saturday, October 03, 2009 and I am sitting in my favorite chair. I look through the window and there is nothing. No light. Blackness. It is still. My right foot is somewhat cold.

I have been sitting here for one hour and eighteen minutes. I am not my ego, I have realized. I am the medium on which my ego exists. I am the stage on which the ego acts out (ha) its dramas. I understand, but that makes the ego kick into high gear. “You do not understand.” The resistance tells me that I do.

The ego fears. The ego is angry. It induces physical response to the fears it generates and then feeds on the resulting cascade of chemical reactions. The ego is Pavlov and Pavlov’s dog, rolled in to one. It wants to induce a reaction because the reaction induces the need to induce a reaction. Without induction of, or reaction to, there is no ego. It fears this.

It is dark. The ego pretends to imagine itself as one with everything. I laugh. There is no orchestral soundtrack, building to crescendo as realization dawns. Silence. The head tilts slightly to the right. A single light in the distance winks into life. Ego tells me this is real, not the emptiness.

I am the light the ego has summoned. I hang in the black cold, unwavering, wan, weak for now. I am a pinprick of golden light on the black velvet curtain that fronts the stage. I tell the ego to tilt the head a little more this way. The light brightens and ego retreats.

The body relaxes. It is dark outside the window again. It is 5:45a, Saturday, October 03, 2009 and I am sitting in my favorite chair. I am still. And, still I am.