Time is divided into these three tenses: past, present, future. The division is basically wrong, unscientific because present is not part of time.
Past and future are only parts of time. Present is beyond time, present is eternity.
Past and future are part of time. Past is that which is no more, and future is that which is not yet, both are non existential. Present is that which is existential cannot be a part of the non-existential. They never meet, they never cross each other’s way. And time is mind; past accumulated is what your mind is.
What is your mind? Analyze it, look into it. What is it? – just past experiences piled up, accumulated. Your mind is just a blanket term, an umbrella term; it simply keeps, holds your whole past. It is nothing else. If by and by you take your past out of the bag, the bag will disappear.
If past is the only reality for the mind, then what can the mind do? One possibility is that it can go on chewing, re-chewing the past again and again. That’s what you call memory, remembrance, nostalgia. You go again and again backward; again and again to the past moments, beautiful moments, happy moments.
They are few and far between, but you cling to them. You avoid the ugly moments, the miserable moments. But you cannot do this continuously because it is futile, the activity seems to be meaningless. The mind creates a meaningful activity;
The mind says, “Yes, past is good, but past is finished; nothing can be done about it. Something can be done about the future because it is yet to come.” So out of your past experiences you choose those which you would like to repeat again, and you drop experiences that were very miserable, painful, that you don’t want to repeat in the future. So your future dreaming is nothing but past modified, better arranged, more decorated, more agreeable, less painful, more pleasant. This your mind goes on doing. And this way you go on missing reality.
Meditation simply means a few moments when you are not in the mind, a few moments when you slip out of the mind. You slip in reality, in that which is. These existential moments are so tremendously ecstatic that once you taste them, you will stop daydreaming.
OSHO