The 3 Tenses of Conscious Movement

Change is the engine that drives us - it's what turns future to past. 

Eastern wisdom may regard it as impermanence and Western science as entropy — it’s as inevitable as much as it is both daunting and inspiring, not to mention the only way we can really discern our movement through time itself. 

We navigate atop this ability to make change — filling voids, building somethings from nothings, materializing the unreal, destroying or deconstructing, growing or creating. 

The past allows us to compare and discern such change — to understand it.
The present functions as our realm whereby we actuate such changes or experience them. 
The future holds our vision for the kind of changes we seek to actualize.

And things can get needlessly difficult if we approach this formula unconsciously — letting one tense over-impose itself against another, or mishandling our maneuverability between them all. 

If we figure out how the past, present, and future are most complimentary to our variable states of consciousness, or to our efforts of effectuating change, then we can navigate more flexibly, all the while avoiding the pitfalls of the human experience that typically trip us up in our default (albeit mistaken) march through a linear progression of past to present to future. 

Ironically, it seems as though it takes a lifetime to figure out, but progress is noticeable as we move away from letting our past muddle our present or discourage our future; from letting our future impose too much of a prospective shadow over our present or distort our past. 

All amidst an interesting caveat: his applies both on an individual and collective level — for whatever that’s worth. 

So what’s needed?

A hyper awareness of all three tenses isn’t necessarily convenient nor practical, but an overarching and persistent understanding that: 

a) the entire past, as mistake-laden as it may be, has brought us to whatever current moment we find ourselves in; 

b) from said moment, we can move anywhere; 

c) the future is never confined to the trajectory of the past and present — that potential is as open as can be and can turn towards anything we decide to pursue. 

As such, an intention can be said to be the necessary pre-requisite. 

We impress upon our surrounding reality whatever intention it is that we bring to the table. If our intention is to be productive or constructive, we will build our families, businesses and physical capabilities alike; if our intention is to be inquisitive or learned, we’ll seek truth through our action and catalogue our experience as we explore the world around us; if our intention is simple survival, we filter the world through a scarcity dynamic and compete with those around us. 

The tenses are used, consciously or subconsciously, to effectuate our intended narrative. We derive identity or self-definition from the past; we use future potentiality as a compass, with each direction being a part of our overall intention. 

Also helpful amidst it all is the reconceptualization of how time works — that it grows and increases rather than diminishes each day (something I’ve taken to describing as Zero+ Time). 

Necessary too is the idea that the three tenses can be synchronized into a kind of harmonious symphony, orchestrating our fluid movement through time, atop a natural (not so much forced) conscious awareness of this triad dynamic. 

It’s a simple suggestion but a difficult practice, especially in the face of cultural constructs that try to keep us either distracted or operating under a scarcity-of-time (or a linearity-of-time) perspective. 

Fortunately, persistence to reconfigure things pays off pretty quickly, and it especially noticeable.