Past/Present/Future

Short Quotes

To finally make peace with your past, you must be building a new life. To finally be able to understand your past and to use it positively and constructively, you must be building a new foundation. To find freedom from the fears and anxieties that haunt you, you must have a new engagement in life.

• Living the Way of Knowledge (Chapter 2, The Four Pillars of Life)

Long Quotes

Every moment with Knowledge brings you into the present and orients you towards the future. Your past cannot be a reference for the future because the past is gone, and your memory of the past and your evaluation of the past hardly represent its reality.... With Knowledge, you will be able to see your past in a new way, with greater objectivity and greater clarity. You will not see the past you want to see. You will see the past that existed. This will give you an evaluative tool and point of view that you would not be able to have otherwise. From this vantage point, you will be able to see the past, the present and the future in such a way thati it will enable you to be in the present meaningfully and purposefully in keeping with Knowledge within you.

• Greater Community Spirituality, chap. 13, p. 155

People who live in the past cannot experience the present and cannot understand the future. And every new experience they have is simply used to fit into the past, to add to their collection of ideas, beliefs and assumptions, and to fortify them as well. Their lives become relics as a result, museum pieces of their own personal history. There is nothing alive, nothing fresh and nothing vital there. Instead, people only amass recollections. Their pain is entrenched, and their decisions have become hard like concrete.

• Living the Way of Knowledge (Chapter 2, The Four Pillars of Life)

Metaphors

Having a past reference is like walking through life backwards, always looking behind you to see where you've been. And of course you crash into things and do not know where you are going and experience all kinds of calamities, grave mistakes and stupid errors. Walking backwards, you cannot see where you are going. You stumble around, fall down and end up in places where you do not belong while always looking to see where you've been. Think of this image and you can see the great disablities that come as a result. Realize how you are not yet able to look out on the horizon of your life and your future and say with any certainty, "This is what is coming. This is hwere I am going. And this is what I must do."

• Greater Community Spirituality, chap. 13, p. 161