Micro-transformation: Collapsing the past, future, and present 💥

Here’s a practice that I’ve been loving. It takes much longer to explain than to do:

1. Consider my whole past — all of the stuff I’m worried about, feel guilty about, the stuff from my day and week and childhood, all the good memories, my ancestors, the whole of evolution, and bundle the felt-sense of it all into the word “past”. 
2. Now I think to myself “past collapse” and let the whole of it (ideas, emotions, body sensations, memories) all whoosh away. If you prefer you can imagine placing it on a beautiful altar before God and saying “I give this all to you God”. 
3. Now I do the same with the future – what I want, am afraid of, expect, imagine, from the next moments, to days, to years, to eons. I don’t spend long collecting this all, it’s more of a vibe that takes 3 seconds max. Once I’ve got something of a felt sense, with no attention to thoroughness, I “future collapse” and let it all go. 
4. Finally, I collect up the “Present” and think to myself “Present collapse” as I release whatever is left of “my” experience and enter a state of nothingness.

With surrendering the past and future, I feel physical and psychological relaxation. But with surrendering the present, I feel the real state-change. If there’s no past, present, or future, what is there? What remains? What’s it like? The idea is to enjoy the experience, not to litigate the ideas with the mind.

I suspect some mechanisms behind the transformative aspect here are (1) the psychological entanglement with the concept of time, which is usually so woven into our assumptions of reality. Who or what remains to "have" this experience without a self persisting in time? (2) The subject-object split’s requiring time; a subject that persists “over time”.

Credit to Richard Dotts, whose book titles make you want to run and hide, but whose content is basically mystical pointing out instructions. I can’t remember if I learned the “present collapse” bit from one of his books or I iterated on it.

With love, Jordan