Why can't I live in the present? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Acharya Prashant

4 min
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Why can't I live in the present? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2013)

Speaker: The question asked is that why can’t the brain be in the present? Because the present is not. You see, your mind makes sense of the world around. Your mind continuously makes sense of this world all around. But can your mind make sense of this moment? This moment is outside the domain of your mind. Mind never lives in this moment. How do you know that your mind is functional? How do you know that you have a functional brain? How do you know? Through your thoughts. Right? That is what the mind is always doing. Thinking. All memories, all hopes are nothing but the thoughts. The mind lives in these thoughts, these images. Right? All of that is past.

The mind exists in time: in past or in future. The very existence of mind is time and this moment is not time. You go into your mind, observe it. Whatsoever it does, it has to do with time. Let me you give an example. You can never think of something which is not there in your past. Try it. The mind falls flat, falls absolutely dead when it is asked to go beyond time. Try thinking of something which is beyond your past. Can you do that? Can you think of anything which is not there in your past? The mind falls dead the moment time is taken from it. Another example, try imagining anything which is not in space. Try. Give me a single example.

Listener 1: Happiness.

Speaker: Imagine it. When I say imagine, there must be an image with it and surely happiness has an image in your mind. How do you know that somebody is happy? So, there is an image of happiness. Expression on the…

Listener 1: Face.

Speaker: And the face is in?

Listener 2: Space.

Speaker: So happiness is in the space. Images are in time and space. Do you see this? The mind becomes dysfunctional the moment time and space is taken away from it. It is because the mind is nothing but time and space. Are you getting it now? Why the mind cannot be in the present? The very substance of mind is the past. All that the mind thinks, all it thinks comes from the past. It knows no way, nothing else except its own data and programming. All of that is there in the past.

Listener 2: Sir, you are saying that one cannot think of anything that is not time and space. This means that time and space are in the mind, but that doesn’t mean that mind is only time and space.

Speaker: If we say that there are two sets A and B and we want to say that A is anything other than B, then A must have one element which is not in B. Are you getting it?

Statement 1: All of B is in A.Statement 2: A has nothing which is not in B.

Then this means that A is identical with B. A and B are same.

Is there anything in the mind which is beyond time and space? Going back to the same examples. Your question was that I understand time and space are in the mind but mind can be something which is beyond that as well; time and space ++. What is that ++? Find it out. Is there anything which is not in time and space? Imagine anything which is not in space and think of anything which is not in time. Can you do that? Can your mind do that? Every single bit of the mind, every single thought is of time and space. So, mind in that sense is time and space. It does not even contain time and space. The mind is time and space. If mind is A, and space and time is B, then A and B are identical.

This article has been created by volunteers of the PrashantAdvait Foundation from transcriptions of sessions by Acharya Prashant
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