August 12, 2019
The past is raw material for the present, not something to be obsessed over or enshrined for its own sake. You live now, in the living present tense. Nobody lives then, nor in the times to come. It is quite possible and, in fact, common, for people to live obsessed by (frozen in) the past or future, but past and future do not exist as separate things, the way language tempts you to think of them. Every moment of past and future is a present-tense moment. Every moment lives and continues to live, as a stitch in a tapestry does not cease to exist when the needle is busy elsewhere, or has not yet laid down that stitch as seen from a given point of view.
You may spend your present-tense moment thinking about past or future, and the point is not what you are thinking or doing but whether you are present while doing or thinking, or whether you are in a sort of trance. Not that full attention can’t alternate with what might be called slackened attention, or sleep, but that full attention is the only space you can work from.
As Gurdjieff said.
Bear in mind, Gurdjieff lived long enough ago that the mental raw material he had to work with was radically different. The electronic age has its drawbacks, but it has already transformed average human consciousness. Yes, people’s attention-span is shorter. Yes, they are distracted by millions of thought-baubles (TV, internet, games, continual telephonic communications, etc.). Yes, they are ignorant of their ignorance. But they live in a different kind of world, with different sensory perceptions that now routinely extend to ideas and experiences that would have been mind-stretching in Gurdjieff’s day
What you were built who you are, as who you are builds who you can be (that is, lays out possibilities and forecloses certain paths).