Alan Watts: The course of Time is very much like the course of a Ship.
Here's the ship, it leaves a wake, the wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been.
The important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn't drive the ship.
"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions,
In just the same way that our past tells us what we have done.
But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back, to prehistory
and we use all kinds of instruments & scientific methods for detecting what happened.
We eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away
in just the same way as the wake of a ship.
Anymore than the tale waggs the dog!
that they exist in the present,
which is what there is and all there is."
Alan Watts
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