Past, Present, and Yet to Come
It was a night of restless thought, where the mind, wrapped in the heavy chains of its own making, drifted in uneasy slumber. It had labored long in the counting-house of reason, tallying its justifications, its grievances, its fears—every ledger filled with the careful arithmetic of self-preservation. Thought upon thought, record upon record, all bound together in the cold ink of prapañca, that ceaseless proliferation of meaning where none was needed.
Yet on this night, in the fog-laden stillness, something stirred. A flickering presence, an opening in the veil. And as the mind turned, it found itself face to face with a visitor, silent and pale, cloaked not in flesh but in something more subtle, more elusive—a shifting presence on the edge of perception.
“Who are you?” the mind whispered, though it knew the answer before it was spoken.
“I am the Ghost of Awareness Past,” came the voice, like the rustling of pages in an old and forgotten book. “Come, let us walk.”
And suddenly, the walls of thought fell away, and the mind stood at the threshold of its own beginnings. Here was the child-mind, unburdened, its perceptions fresh, its awareness not yet shackled by habit. Here, the world unfolded as it was—not named, not owned, not categorized. A bird was not “a bird,” but a fluttering of color; a shadow was not a “thing,” but an invitation into the unknown.
But even as the mind marveled at its own unconditioned nature, a tremor passed through the scene. The world began to form—words clothed experience, labels pinned down the fleeting. Thoughts arose, not as gentle waves, but as laws and boundaries, and before the mind knew it, it had grown into something smaller, something tighter. Meaning had become cage rather than conduit.
“Do you see?” whispered the Ghost, its voice sorrowful. “The walls of self are built stone by stone, name by name, until nothing can move freely.”
But before the mind could respond, the presence shifted, dissolved, and reformed, its contours sharper, its gaze unwavering.
“I am the Ghost of Awareness Present,” it said, and now the mind saw itself as it was in this very moment—caught within the great machinery of cognition.
Endless cogs of habit and association turned, spinning thought into form, collapsing possibility into fixed decisions. The mind, believing itself free, was bound by the momentum of its own making. Where was the decision space? It had been reduced to the well-worn grooves of expectation, to the known and the named, while awareness—vast, luminous, and infinite—waited just beyond the reach of grasping.
And in this moment, the mind understood: it was not suffering for lack of freedom, but for its own unwillingness to step beyond the known.
The Ghost watched in silence, then turned, lifting a hand toward the shadows.
“And now,” it said, “you must meet the Ghost of Awareness Yet to Come.”
A chill passed through the air. The future was not a fixed place, not a story already written, but a vast and shifting terrain. And in this vision, the mind saw two paths before it:
One, a narrowing spiral, where thought continued to coil inward, ever more constrained, ever more defined, until nothing remained but the repetition of what had already been. The mind became its own echo chamber, its own mausoleum, sealed within the certainty of self.
The other, a widening expanse, where experience flowed, neither grasped nor resisted. Here, thoughts arose and fell like wind across an open field—nothing held, nothing bound. There was no need to name, no need to claim, only a vast and unfolding awareness where the mind moved as both the watcher and the watched, the dreamer and the dream.
“Which shall it be?” asked the Ghost.
And suddenly, the mind was alone again, standing in the quiet stillness of the present, the weight of its chains still upon it—but now, something different.
The key had always been in its hands.
Would it turn it?
The night stretched on, the dawn waiting just beyond the horizon. The choice had not been made—but for the first time, the mind knew it had one.