Beyond Perceptions and Reactions

If we observe keenly, we see that most of our time and energy is spent in reaction. We react to events, to people, to the world as it appears, but more fundamentally, we react to our own perceptions. These perceptions are never raw; they are filtered through the inner self, be it called the soul, psyche, Citta, or thetan, the intimate space where all our experience is processed. Consequently, the quality of our life is dictated by the quality of our perception and the reactions that follow.

There is a profound truth in what the saints say: that man is a “walking machine.” Consider our daily life: how we wake to an alarm, rise, brush our teeth, shower, have breakfast, and drive along familiar routes. These actions are so deeply etched by habit that they require no conscious awareness. We become sleepwalkers, to work, to meetings, to the gym, to the beach. Our mind does not settle into presence; instead, it flickers aimlessly, kept going back and forth between memory and anticipation, rarely landing in the now.

This mechanical existence traps us in a specific relationship with time, one that philosophers have long puzzled over. As Aristotle articulated, time presents a paradox: “one part of it has been and is not, while the other is going to be and is not yet.” In our habitual state, we are perpetually leaning into a future that does not yet exist or clinging to a past that is no more, missing the present entirely. This is the very mechanism that keeps us trapped in reaction.

Beneath this layer of perpetual, mechanical living lies our raw nature: the soul itself, a space of pure being. We touch this state of nature only by resting in a state of collected awareness. Yet, awareness alone is not a guaranteed sanctuary. If our past remains a country of unreconciled memories, what some call trauma, others simply painful experience, it taints the very ground of our presence.

A true state of being, therefore, depends on freedom from the known; it requires that we observe these thoughts emerging from their root, simply witnessing them without judgment. This process is not one of battle, but of dissolution. Like diluting salt in water by pouring in more fresh water, the intensity of past conditioning fades not by forceful removal, but by adding the pure, spacious solvent of conscious awareness.

Herein lies the great struggle. Catching the now is a constant, subtle contention with our own programmed momentum. It requires us to shift from Aristotle’s “number of motion” to Henry Bergson’s concept of duration, to experience time not as a series of discrete instants, but as a continuous, qualitative flow where the past permeates the present and the future is being creatively born. In Bergson’s view, real time is lived from within, an indivisible stream shaped by memory and consciousness, grasped through intuition rather than measurement, making the present not a knife-edge moment, but an “elastic interval” in which freedom, creativity, and becoming unfold. In this state, the paradox of time softens.

Such integrated presence is rare. For most, moments of unclouded presence may last only seconds in a day , or be absent for months or years, until reality strikes forcefully, violently jolting us into the potent, undeniable now.

True freedom, therefore, is not freedom from our conditioning, but freedom within it. It is achieved not by erasing our past, instincts, or habits, but by changing our fundamental relationship to them. It is the ability to move through routine without sleepwalking. This is an invitation to what philosopher Martin Heidegger called authentic temporality, a way of being in which past, present, and future are woven into a coherent whole, allowing us to meet each moment with fresh, unburdened immediacy.

A life lived in self-aware presence is the only life in full color, depth, and authenticity. All else remains Māyā, the grand illusion, unless we step into awareness and recognise ourselves not merely as beings within time, but as the very temporality that breathes meaning into each moment.