Past, present and future

The past is over, the future is not yet. As logical as this may sound, it could not hurt to take a closer look at it.

Past
The past is a collection of very limited perceptions of things and movements, noises, taste, smell and feelings through your body. With these ingredients your personality made a thing he calls experience. You will start to judge and label all things: nice, good, warm, pleasant, scratched, dirty, etc., and the result of this process is one of these two basic feelings: good or unpleasant. You have a great number of tricks and tools to differentiate this. But fearful, painful, embarrassing, angry etc. remain forms of an unpleasant experience, and nice, comfortable, warm, jolly etc. will be the labels for the pleasant ones. This is followed by the next interpretation: nice is wanted, not nice is unwanted.

Now when you allow yourself to assign this labeling process a power that reaches into the present, the past "is not over yet". Yes, the physical input may be gone. But when my personality has labeled you in that process as annoying, then he will try to convince me the next time I see you or hear from you, that this label is correct. Thus I project an interpretation from the past on a new experience. By the way, this interpretation needs not be limited to one person. When someone hits you, you are likely to project the feelings that arose immediately on the next person that raises his hand against you. And it usually takes a lot of experiences in which you find that nothing bad happens, to be able to decrease the intensity of this label.

Future
The future, on the other hand, has an aura of makeability. You are not yet aware of what physical input you are about to experience, so the idea is easily adopted that you are now free to create a pleasant life for yourself in the future. You are likely to have quite some ingredients for success at hand: relations, money, job, these should be able to deliver a huge amount of labels in the category "pleasant". Now everybody wants to have a nice life, and there are only very few who can uphold the impression that they live the life they really want to. Now are all the other people losers, or could it be that the future cannot be shaped from scratch in the way your personality wants you to believe? Maybe the bigger picture of what is "you" is not aiming for a future like your personality fantasized, maybe there are other facts that have an influence. Inner peace and personal growth usually come from living through experiences that exceed the control of your personality, situations that your personality would not have chosen, but whose influence on your personal growth is highly valued. And the fact that you may not be very aware of your inner Self, does not imply that it is not there, nor that it does not have an influence on your life.

Now
Thinking and judging and handing out labels can only be done Now, even though you may get your input to do so from the past or the future. Whenever you are thinking, you have less attention available to perceive. So thinking is a distraction from experiencing. But what is it that you can really experience Now? Nothing. You can perceive. Everything that happens is neutral in itself, it is only through judging and interpreting that a meaning comes forth. You may believe beforehand that something is going to be unpleasant, and when you have lived through the experience you may be willing to confirm that immediately. But in the moment itself there was nothing but awareness.

Should you not judge and hand out labels, then your personality would be unemployed, and since that does not meet his interests, he is likely to make you believe that there is nothing there, emptiness. What he makes you forget here, is that there is more than your personality. If you keep on looking at the world through his focus and you should then stop applying labels, then he would be right: there would be emptiness, nothing, and you will not like that. But there is another choice. You can perceive, and the label "unpleasant" that your personality has put on the experience of Now, can be less and less intense. Besides that, you can actively choose to open up to your inner Self. This will come to mind automatically as soon as you make mental space for it, by slowing down your thinking process. As that will bring your awareness more to the moment of Now, and it is only here that you can experience your inner Self. Not through thoughts, not through labels, but though awareness only.

You may notice that it is a different feeling. Thinking is a process that takes place within your head. Being is a different kind of experience, that is not specifically located somewhere in your body. This can help you to learn to tell the difference. Knowing from your inner Self you definitely do locate within your head, even though it may feel a bit light in your head. Thinking and judging can be localized easily as an activity that takes place in your head, and you will experience it as working, an activity in your head.

Your personality will only assign labels when he has success with it, and success means that you give some form of follow-up to it. He is likely to do this less and less when you no longer value the labels that the brings to your awareness, and choose to only perceive them. You will notice that your personality is only a heap of thoughts, and you may ask yourself what the reality of that is. You can choose to let go of your thoughts, your inner Self will remain.