Acharya Prashant addresses a question about the concept of living in the moment, explaining that our actions and desires are fundamentally tied to a belief in the continuity of the self. We think that the person we are today will be the same in the future, which is why we make plans and have aspirations. If we knew that we would not be the same person in the next moment, we would not make plans for the future. He uses the analogy of being in a house that one knows they will have to leave in the next moment; in such a situation, one would not order food to that address or wish for it to be painted. All our desires and actions are for the future, either to attain something good or to avoid something bad, based on the assumption of a continuous self. The speaker then refers to a verse from the Ashtavakra Gita, which discusses 'Kritam' (what has been done) and 'Akritam' (what has not been done). We remember our past actions (Kritam) because we are either waiting for their good results or trying to escape their bad consequences. We remember our unfulfilled desires (Akritam) because we plan to act in the future to satisfy them. Both these remembrances are tied to the future. We do things not for the love of the action itself, but to gain something from it later. This entire cycle is based on the illusion of a continuous self, which is reinforced by the relative stability of our body and the faculty of memory. Memory, he states, deceives us with a sense of false continuity. Acharya Prashant clarifies the distinction between 'living in the moment' and 'living in the present'. He explains that 'living in the moment' is a flawed idea because the moment is part of the stream of time, which only has two parts: past and future. There is no 'present' within time. What we perceive as the present is actually the past; for instance, the light from the stars we see now is from millions of years ago, and many of those stars may no longer exist. Therefore, everything we see is the past. 'Living in the present' or 'living in the Truth' means to be neutral to the flow of time, to be outside of it. It means to stop getting attached to anything that is changing, which is everything in the stream of time. This is the real meaning of living in the Truth.
