Past & Future

Welcome back to POV Zero. This is episode eight of this podcast, which was born three days ago. I love it, as Ahmed, because it’s a place where I can say things and record them and leave them there, knowing they will remind me at some point when I lose focus again. That is a very rewarding feeling at the human level. It’s also a beautiful way to interact with others, because I’ve been receiving many messages and reactions and reflections over these topics. They’re simple but at the same time heavy, and we all have some sort of thought on them. I’m very happy to receive your reflections and continue thinking about them with you, knowing I don’t have any answers. If you experience friction listening, the best thing you could do is sit with it and ask yourself where it comes from, what lingers behind it. Go engage with it, look at it with mercy and curiosity.

The second thing is the importance of reminding yourself — as I remind myself — that this is really detached from Ahmed as a person. Ahmed is just the small human who is now privileged enough to be standing where he is standing and able to speak from this point of view. None of it really belongs to Ahmed. Ahmed is a small human being with limited resources, limited energy, and a nervous system that gets triggered. When you talk, the “I” is a different one from the self. Speaking from the soul will never be the same as speaking from the ego, but the vehicle that is speaking is part of the human body, and so there will always be tension between seeing and feeling the essence and then expressing it. In that expression, there will always be a distortion. Keep that in mind.

This is the first episode that is kind of co-created — I asked what topics would resonate, and I suggested past and future, restlessness, and God. These were the three topics most on my mind. I’d like to start with my human situation right now. I spent a day and a half with my daughter who is sick as well. She really needs a lot of physical closeness and attention. What I’ve been allowed to experience with her has been truly amazing. I’ve been observing it, and one thing that struck me is that I felt like time had stood still in a way it never had before.

I’ve always tried to be present and mindful around my daughter, but there was always something going on in my mind. For the first time, I felt silence. There wasn’t any noise. When thoughts came, they were focused, not jumping. It felt much lighter to walk through them, knowing the center was the silence and the silence was perfectly fine. I was holding her a lot, sitting together, lying around. It felt like a meditative state where I was allowed to perceive everything happening at different levels. It wasn’t doing nothing — it was doing so many things at the same time while physically not doing much. I was observing how she looked at me, how she said things. I could look at her hair, her skin, her eyes, the perfection of her body. The fact that she could ask for water and drink. The way she held my hand or pulled me towards her or made herself a nest between my arms and legs. All of this was pure magic, a spectacle, because I was allowed to be fully immersed in the present moment.

That is the thing about being in the zero: once you let go of all the noise, the obligations, the things you should be doing, and you fall into a place of doing nothing — which from the perspective of shapes and forms looks boring — once you stand there, because it’s the zero and the zero contains everything, all your senses open up to everything again. That’s a very humbling position and an immensely beautiful, peaceful state.

At some point she wanted to play makeup games — she wanted to draw faces on my face. We didn’t have any tools, so she took the cord of a hoodie I was wearing, with the metal tip at the end, and started drawing on my face. That moment was pure magic. Then she asked me to draw on her face and said she wanted to be a leopard. I started drawing with the points and everything. She was fully immersed, properly acting as if I was drawing on her face. She wasn’t impatient at all — I drew for about three minutes. Tears were running down my face, and I was glad she had her eyes closed because during makeup she keeps them closed. She didn’t complain a second, just following the touch, so present. There’s so much I can learn from that little kid, the way she is present in the moment.

I was thinking a lot about being present, and that led me to the role of the past and the future. When we are not present, from the point of view of the singularity, it’s because we are somewhere else — usually either the past or the future.

Often it’s the future: things we will be doing, goals we want to achieve, places we want to be in 20 or 30 years, or even just thinking about an appointment in one hour. As soon as we think about something in the future, energy goes away from the present moment. We are physically here but our mind is somewhere else. From the point of view of the zero, we’re hopping to one of those shapes out there, and perhaps justifying our absence from the present through another concept — responsibility, professional obligations, loyalty, preserving status, validation.

And then there’s the past. If you’ve been in a painful relationship, there might be a tendency to say, “I’ve been hurt. I’m still hurt from what you did last week, a month ago, a year ago.” Or intergenerational pain — “because I’m a member of that community, I carry their pain.” Or, “because I was treated like this as a kid, today I feel like that.”

The past has a lot of weight at both the individual and collective levels. We are truly convinced the past exists. We get socialized into thinking it is as important as the present and future. We learn about history, and at some point realize it’s history written by the winners — just a distortion. The things I learned in history classes were so far from the things I learned later through my own research about all that has been done from the European metropolis to the rest of the world. From inside the metropolis, the narrative will always be biased.

The past is really just an illusion. The only thing we know is that the past does not exist in the now. You can take a picture of a moment, but that moment doesn’t exist anymore. We grow so attached to shapes and forms that we think this is the absolute reality. We think there is some mechanic past lying around with an objective truth.

But what you do with the past lies entirely in your power. Terrorist groups often justify their violence through atrocities that happened in the past. Those are not to be justified or downplayed, but it’s always a new action. You can never delegate part of the responsibility for your present action to something that happened in the past. Because the past is truly an illusion.

At the individual level: if you don’t remember hurtful episodes, you probably won’t feel particularly about them. When you remember them, you reproduce a memory and thereby produce a certain emotion. If you forget about something, it stops producing the same feeling. The past really doesn’t have any weight other than the one you attribute to it. The past is only what you make of it.

This is not to downplay any trauma. Your body can store pain, and painful memories leave marks. But these marks can also go away over time. By reproducing the memory, you re-traumatize yourself. The past doesn’t have any other weight than the one you attribute to it. Anything you hear, anything that happens to you, is only what you make of it — it’s only how you hear it. We will always hear things the way we want to hear them.

The past is perhaps the easiest to deal with, because it’s truly gone. You can’t do anything about it. The future is yet to come, and it’s understandable to care about it. But what does caring about the past have as a purpose for the present? Usually just friction and suffering. A desire for justice, for re-establishing something — but these are concepts in the world of shapes and forms that are never fully attainable.

What helps is to get rid of the past as fast as possible. There’s really nothing to gain from it. Now, this might sound careless. But as a human being, you feel like you have some power over the present moment. What helps is to say: I fully embrace the present moment and do everything in it with full attention. If something produces joy and good feelings, stay with it. If it’s negative, the best thing you can do is let it go the second it happens, because it is actually already gone.

From the zero, there is no space and time. But as a human being: be fully dedicated to the present moment. Whatever happens, let it go. If a glass breaks, it breaks. Let it be. If you get hurt, accept it immediately. Don’t resist anything that happened — that’s friction. You move away from the zero, get stuck with something that already passed. You might act from frustration in a way that creates new friction. It’s a vicious cycle. All you can really do with the past is let it go. All you can do is stay in the present moment.

The future is trickier because for the human mind, space and time are how we navigate the world. But from the zero, since it’s all nothing, there’s nothing to be done about the future. It has all already collapsed. For the human being who wants to live close to the essence: whatever feeling is lost to a future moment is energy taken from the present. Once you direct all energy to the present, the future will sort itself out. The only thing you control is being in the now. Whatever you do, do it with full attention. If something takes you away from a state of flow, lightness, focus, full immersion, mindfulness — then you are probably stuck in the future, losing energy there.

The future will sort itself out. If it doesn’t, we’re back at the zero point. If you fully dedicated yourself to the objective and were fully immersed in the present moment, you’ll care less about what happens. You know you did everything you could, and the rest you leave to God, as they say.

It all falls back into the zero. The now overlaps with the zero. And then we have infinite mercy, unconditional love, absence of friction, non-duality. Bad and good — it’s all the same. You take it with humility and mercy. The positionality from which you go about daily activities is one of constant awe. Everything becomes a gift. Your ability to write, read, see, listen, smell — all a gift. From the point of view of the zero, you perceive it as such, feel it in your entire body, get immersed in it. And anything you do from that perspective will be as full as it can be.

That’s how nothingness becomes divine. Nothingness is not cynical. Nothingness is worship of everything. If nothing is, then everything matters equally. Every small gesture. Nothing is taken for granted. And if that’s the energy you carry in your daily activities, things will sort themselves out. If they don’t, they were not supposed to be. And that’s a space where friction vanishes and dissolves.

We didn’t really talk about restlessness. That might be the focus of the next episode. Peace out.