I am what they call an every-day mystic. Every day for me is special, for I know, in the very depths of my being, that every evening, I am poorer by a day.
What has been, no longer is; it as little exists as that which has never been. When you die it will be as if you had never been born. But everything that is, is the next moment, regarded as having been. Thus, the only thing that marks out the present as special is its immediate reality. To his astonishment, a man all of a sudden finds himself existing after countless thousands of years of nonexistence and, after an all too brief time, must again pass into nonexistence just as long. The heart of man says that this can't be right. But it is.
Of every event in our life, only for one moment can it be said that it is; for ever afterwards we must say that it was. As I said earlier: every evening we are poorer by a day. On the consideration of the foregoing it is clear, that to enjoy the present moment and to make this the object of our life is the greatest wisdom because the present alone is real, everything else being the play of thought.
But we could just as well call the enjoyment of the present as an aim of life a great folly. Why? Because that which in the next moment no longer exists, and vanishes as completely as a fart in the wind, is never worth a serious effort.
The fact that time always shifts us from state to state, from the present to another present, and then ultimately to our deaths, is indication, if any were needed, that when we strive - we are striving towards something that will never be ours. Our fortune will one day leave us. Yet we strive for it as if we will take it with us to the after-life. Love will one day depart us. Health will eventually forsake us. What then do we struggle for? Phantoms?
But it is not all doom and gloom! To be alive - here, now, is inevitable. To be alive and know it, is ineffable. To be you or me, is magical.
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