Having partial thoughts which haven't been fully noticed or thought through will cause misperceptions and hidden expectations which can severely let you down because you forgot to discover it & promptly justify or discredit the presumption. you refuse to investigate why or what it really means because you're too busy & frustrated trying to deal with the perceived inconvenience to actually reflect deeply on it.
I forget or ignore past stages & events of my life as though they aren’t me; infancy, toddler, prepubescent, pubescent, beginning adulthood, etc. even though they were me, they were all real at their times. when recalling this, it’s clear how empty this stage is & how it will end and i won’t be who i am anymore. only to proceed into continuous impermanent stages.
Serious question, please don't be offended.
How can one see their past lives seeing as there is no persisting self, where do the memories go, how are they accessed, etc.? or is this something not answered by the Buddha and remains speculation?
Assuming you're the type to have any behaviors of restlessness, mindlessness, or procrastination, this relatively short reflection may be of some benefit to you, hopefully as much or more than it is for me. this is just a view, don't try and take it too literally if you don't like it.
When the future eventually becomes the new now, you face the same dilemma which you put off before. give yourself permission to be present with this moment, without waiting, without conditions, without planned expectation and ideals, and end the perpetual cycle of baseless concepts to push away and cling to. you will never be in the future, no matter how much you may subconsciously believe or hope for that to be true. when the future is the new now, it's still now and you still are waiting for the future.
If you can't change it, then wishing for it to be otherwise is an impractical stressor. "Accept it as though you had chosen it" -Eckhart Tolle. false expectations are the trap, inherently 'designed' to go off from the moment they’re formed, setting up the trigger for resentment, attachment, definitive identity, fantasies and other delusions leading to stress. when you are not present, you allow the mindlessness to increase. therefore, giving the mind access to cyclically expect its perfect ideals, even more so than normal. thus, it influences the determination of why or why not you should feel stressed before you can consciously catch any subtle false expectations. do not help the mind forget to not suffer, when you can.
Maybe there is nowhere else to be, there is nothing to do, to complete, to have, to crave, to be, we already have everything we need, everything we had at birth, & will have at the time of death.
The mind may imagine scenarios which are not real, thus creating conditions which were not there to begin with. doing so with the hope to escape them if/when they come. but what if there is no ultimate purpose in escape. what if the discomfort has no true solidity, no landing pad, just the fear of the landing pad, thus magnifying the concept of it and then the fear of it again, therefore limiting our more objective views in order to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. but maybe the fear is just emptiness floating around waiting to be projected as the fearfully certain landing pad by our conceiving minds.
(Obviously some of you may say that your fears are of very real things (which of course is 100% understandable). try and think of this as only relating to only stresses which you can apply it to, rather than every stress.)