centered thoughts
June 1996
The Past is gone, by definition, passed. It cannot be retrieved. But it will come again. "Again" you say? We relive the past through those effects which we ourselves set in motion by the causes we produce. There is no need to try and return to 'the past' for it will come again before our very selves to be 'relived' until we move to compassionate action for the advancement of humanity toward the sublime spiritual goal. -- PNT
Word carved on a stone on John Ruskin's desk: TODAY.
The Past! What is it? Nothing. Gone! Dismiss it. You are the past of yourself. Therefore it concerns you not as such. It only concerns you as you now are. In you, as now you exist, lies all the past. So follow the Hindu maxim: "Regret nothing; never be sorry; and cut all doubts with the sword of spiritual knowledge." Regret is productive only of error. I care not what I was, or what any one was. I only look for what I am each moment. For as each moment is and at once is not, it must follow that if we think of the past we forget the present, and while we forget, the moments fly by us, making more past. Then regret nothing, not even the greatest follies of your life, for they are gone, and you are to work in the present which is both past and future at once. -- William Q. Judge
A harsh word uttered in past lives, is not destroyed but ever comes again. -- H. P. Blavatsky
"Live for today... / we are in the middle of duration, / infinite time has passed before us / and infinite time is yet to come. // Live for today, live for this moment. / It is the only present / The past is dead and gone. / It cannot be changed, revoked, or lived in. / We must move on. / Each day is the evolution of a world. / Each moment we exist, the only present. / All moments before are the past, / all moments to come, the future. // We cannot live in the future any more / than we can live in the past. / Worry is fear. / Fear is anticipation of the negative / (from our own limited experience) / outcome of future moments. // We cannot predict the future / with any precision, / but have the free will to change / the course of the soon-to-be past, / therefore future. // So it is useless to have any fear / (of future events.) / The great Law of Cause & Effect / will adjust the harmony of the Kosmos / with impersonal justice / and complete perfection. // None need worry. -- Zadok Pharaoh
We are the heirs of our actions -
If you want to know the past [cause],
look at your present life [effect].
If you want to know the future [effect],
look at your present life [cause]. -- Buddha
You have infinity before you, eternity. Face it. Thus teaches the god-wisdom: a doctrine of hope, rich with the promise of the future. No man need ever say it is too late -- those terrible words, too late. No man need ever say that. Every instant of time is a new choice. As in the past he has made himself what now he is, so in the future he can carve his destiny and make himself to be precisely in accordance with the vision that he has of himself to become in the future. What a grand doctrine! Man is but a reproduction, a cyclical evolutionary reproduction of himself out of the past, in the present, marching into the future. There is your destiny. -- G. de Purucker
The past, by mind from matter bred, is but a cold museum of the dead. -- Christmas Humphreys
Be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties. -- Kahlil Gibran