Time Travel

Time travel is a fascinating subject. But is it fiction? Actually we do it every day. Our roving mind loves to go back and forth in time. How many times have we heard about mindfulness? And how many of us actually practice it successfully? We work in the present moment but think of either the future or the past. ‘Day dreaming’ is an oft-repeated word, so I’ll give you a little less cringe-worthy replacement for it…Alternate reality! Yes, we dream about what has to happen and often go back in the past to think about the events that has already happened.    But do we always keep the reality intact or dive deep into an ‘Altered reality’? Imagining future is said to be foolish as it is not in our hands…but what about imagining an altered past? We often replay our past in our heads. We give it the flavor that was not in it originally. We change the chain of our conversations in some past incident to our liking. We keep playing with it in our heads. Science says time is linear, philosophy tells me past is immaterial, religion opines I have already sowed the seeds for what is to come and can’t change it. I listen to them and as I move in one direction the mind goes the other way. It understands yet indulges in the pleasure and pains of what is known and suffered all along. It reasons out with me beautifully in why I should think of a certain thought or forbid me to do something I need to do. No, it’s not lazy. It’s spoilt! Right now, in this state, we are just a bundle of memories. We act based on our experiences. What bothers me is the fact that we go for the same experiences that have become painful memories. It’s like eating a bitter fruit again and again. So either the altered past fools us into believing that the experience is going to be sweet this time or we are just doomed in this game of life and death. The answer has already been given by the experts. Our job is to put it into practice. But we suffer from Duryodhana’s inertia (The Kaurava prince who denied his cousins Pandava their rightful share of the land). When Lord Krishna went to drill in some sense into his head about doing the right thing, he is supposed to have answered something like this, “I know what is right, I just don’t feel like doing it”. Well, that sums it up for all of us.  We also need to do the right thing and stay in the present. Most of our problems are created in our heads and have nothing to do with reality. It’s enough if we deal with what is actually happening rather than double our problems by thinking of what could have happened or could happen. But this monkey of a mind that we have loves to remain in a drunken state.