Can You Perceive The Present Moment?

Consider this: From the linear perspective of time, with your five senses you can not perceive what is actually arising in the present moment. It’s technically impossible.

Everything you’re seeing happened a fraction of a second ago or more. It takes time for light to travel from what you’re looking at to your eyes. Thus, you are not actually seeing the present, but the past. You’re seeing something as it existed some time ago.

When you look up in the sky at the sun, you’re not looking at where the sun is now, but where the sun was 8 minutes ago. When you look up at the stars at night, you’re not looking in the direction of where the stars are now (if they even still exist and haven’t exploded since), but where they were hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years ago!

The same applies for sound. It takes time for sound to travel through the air and vibrate your ear drums. So again, you are not perceiving the present, but the past.

What about taste and touch? Perhaps they’re different because in order to experience those senses, you have to be in physical contact with the object. Thus there’s no delay as the vibration travels through space to your body.

Well, it takes time for the nerve’s impulses to travel through your body to your brain so that they may be perceived by the mind. This process too takes time.

To recognize this more clearly, why is it that when you touch a hot stove, you almost instantly pull your hand back? That’s right. Reflexes. Your body knows to pull your hand away before the signal makes it up to your brain, is processed as pain and danger, and the brain then sends a signal back to your arm to pull your hand away. Thanks to our reflexes, physical responses can happen even before mental perception.

Perception takes time. What we perceive is actually the past. You can not perceive the present moment with your physical senses. It’s physically impossible.

Perceiving in Time and Space

With your senses, you’re clearly not perceiving the entire universe at once. It’s like you’re only perceiving a tiny fraction of all of time and space at a time.

What you perceive at any moment depends both on where you are and when you are there.

If you change when you are in a particular location or space, what you perceive in that space changes. You can’t just be in the right place, but you have to be at the right place at the right time.

Similarly, if you change where you are physically relative to any object, what you experience about that object at any point in time will be different. For example, if you’re far away from a loud noise, you’ll hear it later in time than if you were really close to it. Thus, when you experience something totally depends on where you are in space.

Time and space are inseparable. They truly depend on one another. This is why people call physical reality a time/space reality or refer to time more accurately as spacetime. You can’t have one without another.

What you are perceiving at any particular moment in time is not actually what is arising in the present, but your own version of the universe, depending on where in time and space you happen to exist at any moment. It’s almost like being in your own little world!

Thus, if you want to experience the Now as it is in its pure and undistorted essence, if you want to see Reality as it actually is, a deeper part of yourself must be awakened, a part of you that exists beyond time and space. It is what is Here and Now.

Awareness, Here and Now

As long as we approach the the Present moment through the content that arises in the present, we will always perceive the past. We won’t be experiencing the Now.

Even if we think about the future, we’re looking at a thought that arose in the past, but we’re looking at it now. The looking happens now. What we are looking at happened in the past.

Let me repeat this because this is so important.

The looking happens now.

What we are looking at happened in the past.

As long as we look to experiences, memories, or perceptions, we’re not seeing the Now itself, but rather the mind’s stuff that happened in the past. The mind exists in past and future, and yet awareness is seeing whatever it is seeing, right now.

The content was created in the past, but awareness is seeing it now.

Right now, Awareness is looking at these words, regardless of when they were typed or when they showed up on your computer screen.

Awareness is aware of this moment. There is a big difference between awareness which is aware, here and now, and the content and experiences that arise within awareness.

Awareness is present. Awareness is always present. It is impossible for awareness to not be present.

The only thing awareness can be aware of is what is, here and now.

It’s not something to think about. It’s not something to understand. Thinking and understanding are all more mind-stuff that arise within time, are subject to time, and exist simply as passing content within awareness.

All satori moments, glimpses into your true nature, sudden realizations, feelings of oneness or love.. they’re all experiences that arise within awareness. None of that is what you are. None of that is it.

Connecting with Who You Are

To connect with who and what you truly are,  just be.

Be still.

Rest as awareness.

It sounds utterly simple, and it really is.

Just rest as the timeless awareness that is here and now, for that is what you already are anyways.

By looking consciousness straight in the eye, it will come to know itself clearly.

This remembrance, this reconnection to the I Am that I Am, this is the foundation of awakening.

Consciousness is peering into this world, but it is not of this world.

Awareness is like this witnessing presence that is looking through this body/mind, like a watcher of a movie looks at the screen of a movie and is immersed in the sounds and colors.

But awareness is completely independent of the movie.

Rest as awareness.

There is nothing to understand. There is nothing to figure out. Just simply be. Be who you really are. Be still. Be.