New Thread 7

time doesnt make a lot of sense
the past exists only because we remember it - it doesnt exist in itself - you cant do anything with it, or change it, or inhabit it or anything - it exists purely as an idea.
if the present is now, then what is now? now is the moment between the past and the future. it is a moment when time then stops moving? because if so, for the present to really exist, then time would have to stop moving, which it doesnt.
and what then is the future, clearly it never exists - it is imagined, anticipated, predicted etc, but it never exists in itself.

so how do we relate to time? - if we cannot be said to inhabit the present because this doesnt exist, then we must somehow sit astride the past and the future- two temporal spheres of imagination. and i think we do. we exist at once in the past - our own pasts - because it is this that makes us, defines us and our imagination. we are bound to a reality that no longer exists.
and we exist in the future. if everything we know is bound to the past, we are moved to act, spurred on by the future. in one simple way we are motivated by a desire for pleasure. but what is pleasure but an absence of pain? without pain would we know pleasure, or would everything we experience simply appear constant? so if pleasure is absence of pain, then pleasure exists as an anticipation of an absence of pain. pleasure exists as a concept of the future.
consider the pleasure of satiating a burning hunger. the hunger is pain, the pleasure is feeding it. the pleasure is know as an idea during the period of pain, because once the pain is gone, and the hunger fed, the pleasure is no longer known...who finds pleasure in feeding an hunger that no longer exists?

so we inhabit at once two spheres of imagination that do not exist - we are bound to our past over which we have no control and no opportunity to inhabit, and we are drawn to a future that never properly exists.
such is the human condition as i see it.

Fairly akin to some yogic ideas that ^.
Nice post, try reading 'Yoga Sutras of Patanjali', explains all of that with clarity.