Why past, present, and future thinking are all distractions. The goal of direct realization sadhana is to become immersed in living, aware presence, not to focus on the present. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
Past, present, and future are aspects of what we call linear time. When we’re lost in thinking about past, present, and future, we’re largely in a state of fantasy—even in present. You can see this clearly about the past and the future. They can only be fantasy or conceptual.
It’s harder to see this with the present. But anytime you’re not relating to what we call Presence—the living quality of a situation, of your circumstances—you’re still locked in your head and in your ordinary emotions. You’re trying to figure things out in an ordinary way that’s divorced from actual communication with the thing that you’re trying to figure out.
So in this tradition we make a distinction between the present and Presence. Ideally, we would have done some practice like mantra, meditation, or kriya yoga, and the result of that practice is that our senses begin to open. Our senses become more acute. We hear with more refinement. We smell, see, and experience touch with more refinement. But those are only the gross forms of the senses.
Then we have more subtle forms of those senses. This means that we can actually have an experience of an energetic situation, or the energy of a situation. This experience is just as palpable, just as real to us as the smell of frying bacon is now.
We can get to that place, that kind of subtlety, by doing practices that open up our subtle channels and create an experience where we have more subtle senses.
