The Infinite Point Of Now

The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I’m doing now.

I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.

Alan Watts, the British philosopher, wrote that those thoughts in his 1957 book The Way of Zen. We find ourselves in a conundrum when it comes to knowing who we are. We are the past and we do celebrate parts of it, but we also vilify other parts based on our selective memory of our experiences. We are the present as we piece together perceptions that define our now, but those perceivable pieces vacillate through several experiences. The pieces don’t stop moving until we look back at them.

We are the future. Our future is the unexplainable now that waits for us to move through the duration of objects until we reach the pinnacle of our projections. When we reach that pinnacle, it changes to the present, but the present becomes the past, as we stand in the now. We are part of an elastic reality that jets us through the energy of consciousness. This energy deposits us in the infinite point of now. We never leave the now or the memory of our memory of it in the future.