Let’s do something together. For this, you’ll need your phone. Go ahead. If you need to retrieve it from your pocket, I’ll give you the chance. This shouldn't take long.
Now open your photos app. Your most recent photos are probably at the top or bottom of the screen. I've got mine open and aside from the accidental screenshot I took while listening to last week's On Being podcast, I'm looking at hundreds of pictures I intended to take. The most recent are from Saturday. Just a few days ago. I went with my family down to New Harmony. So here are pictures of us goofing and the sign outside the Roofless Church.
I keep swiping and I see a video my wife took when she stole my phone, some pictures of the kitten, some of the church I took a couple of weeks ago, some more kitty pictures, a sign I wanted to remember, more family, more kitties, and you know, all the other stuff. So many pictures of family, moments, and things I wanted to remember. It all going back years.
Looking through my photos, arranged as they are in reverse chronological order, I can travel back in time to experience again some truly incredible memories.
Of course, not everything is incredible. Some of it I can’t even remember. (Seriously, what is that?)
Time Travel
This really is a form of time travel. To use our memories to re-experience the past. And because the past exists in our memories we actually change the past every time we remember it. How does this happen? Because every time we recall a memory, we engage with it. We are creating a new experience in the present as we reengage with that moment from the past. Our present experience overwrites the memory on our mind’s harddrive!
In other words, we don’t just travel through time, we travel through time and can’t help but change it.
This leads to a couple of essential ideas:
- We are all locked into the present. We can’t actually dwell in the past or be focused on the future because our minds keep us always rooted in the present. But our past also, isn’t only what has happened. It actually only exists as memory. Which then means…
- Our sense of the past keeps changing as we change it. That idealized past gets rosier and rosier. The terrible events get…terribler. Because we are not re-experiencing the past each time, we are re-experiencing a re-experience of the past. This is why our memories are not reliable sources of information. Even eyewitnesses.
That’s the past. What about the future?
That you and I live in an eternal present doesn’t just mean that we experience the past in the present, it is also how we experience the future.
Those of us who struggle with anxiety know this better than anyone. Thinking about the future brings a present response in our bodies. Often a tightening in the chest and a foggy brain.
This is, in part because our present selves look at the past to interpret the future, so it draws on those re-experienced re-experiences to predict what tomorrow will look like.
To protect our bodies from danger, our brains create obvious physical responses. But we aren’t born with these canned responses. Nor do our bodies maintain the same responses, unchanged throughout our lives. Our bodies learn from each stressful situation, remapping the neural pathways in our brains and even rewriting the epigenetics in our DNA. Traumatic experiences traumatize our bodies and transform them at the cellular level. Changes that we can pass on to our children through our DNA.
In other words, victims of abuse, enslavement, and great trauma pass that trauma onto their children and their children’s children. So the descendants of enslaved persons may today bear the victimhood of their ancestors.
Past and Future collide in our present.
Which is both scary and strangely comforting. Because it means that we are capable in our present to deal with our past and invite a future that is healed from its trauma.
This doesn’t happen when we ignore our past or pretend it was different. It happens when we seek to be healed from our past and refrain from revictimizing ourselves and our loved ones.
We can embody Margaret Meade’s famous guidance: that we become the change we want to see in the world.
This is the human context for the word “eternal”.
A word flush with spiritual significance and metaphysical certainty. We prop it up with heady concepts about the perpetuity of existence and the changelessness of the cosmos.
As a philosophical concept, the way we usually define eternity and eternal existence actually resembles an existential prison, trapping the imperfect now in an imperfect forever. It is also a kind of prison of the mind in which our present awareness is replicated out into a potential never ending perpetuality.
And then we have the audacity to think that is comforting. Even as we read stories with vampires who crave the death they can never experience—cursed by immortality which has them experience over and over the agonies of life without the relief of life having an end. We recognize that this vision of eternal life is torture.
Defining eternal as perpetuating our present imperfection forever is not just a mental prison, but a spiritual one as well. It stunts our growth and discourages an awareness of our persistent need to change. We become locked in who we think we are while our body and world changes around us.
But…if we remember that we experience eternity in our present life, in our bodies, and in our experiences with other people, eternity takes on a whole new meaning.
It sounds like living. In the now. And choosing to become who we dream to become. Because none of us ever stays the same forever.
