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Eckhart Tolle wrote a book titled “The Power of Now,” and many years prior a person known as Ram Dass wrote a book titled “Be Here Now.” Both of these were very popular books, but all I can truly do is speak to my own experience and understanding.
As far as I am concerned the here and now is eternal. Time is circular; the Earth does not travel in a straight line from past to present to future. It spins on its axis in a circle, and we humans call one rotation of the Earth a day.
The Earth also travels in a circle around the Sun, and we call one circle around the Sun a year. We mark time by the rotation of the Earth and how the Earth travels around the Sun. The past and future are but reflections.
We go to sleep and we wake up and reflect on things we may have done before previous sleep cycles. We call a previous rotation of the Earth “yesterday,” and reflect on previous rotations of the Earth, or project on upcoming rotations of the Earth, calling them “the future.”
In the quiet stillness of meditation we can have a direct experience of the eternal now, and we can get to a place in our meditative state where we constantly see that eternal now during our waking hours. All it takes is keeping our mind quiet. Mind is trapped in the reflections and projections of what was and what may be, reflections on what we call “time.”
In my opinion everything, for centuries, has happened in one cosmic moment. In the eternal now there is a dance of shadow and light, and we call the light “day” and the shadow “night.” But it is all just a circular motion spiraling on a single point. This is my experience; the present is all there is, was or will be.
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