The Past Can Never Contain The Present

What is awareness and what is thought?

Everything is outside of awareness. There is no "inside" of awareness. Awareness is the singularity. The "I am".

Thought is one of the many things that passes before awareness. It is an object, like the senses and emotion that is fleeting and passes with time.

Why is this even important?

If this is true, then at my most fundamental essence, I am not my thoughts or emotions. Pulling awareness away from thought or emotion and just watching them puts me in touch with something else that is not made up of them. Something else is there. Space, peace, stillness, sacredness, aliveness.

Thought has its place but to be run by thought is to be lost. To give thought so much of my awareness that I cease to be aware - that is the deep human problem that causes all suffering. That has been my experience.

Thought and emotion make up fear, hurt and violence - all the imbalances of the human psyche. They are of the past and have no relationship to the present moment. Thus to live totally within the turmoil - no matter how slight - of thought and emotion is to live in the past, never being able to relate actually to the present moment. The present moment will feel empty, not enough or it will be painful, anxious and I must resist or escape it. The mind will need to get more, to run away, to numb itself.

To live in the past is to pour water into a bucket with a hole in it.

The past can never contain the present.