Hudson Valley Astrologer

“Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment.”

~ Ticht Nhat Hanh

When I first reached for a representative quote to encapsulate the difference between the past and future, I thought of the book called The Power of Now. I mistakenly attributed that book to Ticht Nhat Hanh, which is of course wrong. The Power of Now was in fact written by Eckhart Tolle.

Here is a more representative quote from Tolle’s book…

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life”

We can pull quotes so easily these days with A.I. tools. I have been using Perplexity recently and have found it extraordinarily powerful. But the funny thing is I never read either Eckhart Tolle nor Ticht Nhat Hanh, However, I vividly recall when The Power of Now was released back in the late 1990’s, and then when Inside the Now was published h Ticht Nhat Hanh around 2013. A dear friend, who is a Buddhist, everyday of the week, except for any day that isn’t Sunday, (meaning he thinks about mindfulness more than he practices mindfulness…) got caught up in the mindfulness movement.

We argued! He vehemently defended the notion that there is “no past” because the past is gone, and that there is “no future” because the future isn’t here yet! There is only now!

My argument was that this view was really childish. Not only is the past not gone but in a very real sense the past is alive and well. The same can be said for the future, which is in fact already here. The trouble with using our minds alone to understand time is that we are forced to think purely in linear terms. There is a sequence of events that follow one after the other, first this, then that, and so on. But when we begin to see the circularity of life, the comings and goings, we begin to understand the SIMULTANEITY OF TIME. This discussion quickly spins into esoterica but it’s not a bunch of woo if you’ve had the lived experience.

The NOW encompasses the past and future in a way that gives relevance to all three movements in time, as simultaneous at every moment.

Mark Twain did not say “history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes.” According to Perplexity the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik wrote in 1965: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”

What Mark Twain did write is, “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” Twain’s remark taken from his 1874 novel called The Gilded Age, blew me away when I considered The Gnostic Circle envisioned by Patricia.