The Aleph - Paulo Coelho

This is from a chapter in The Aleph by Paulo Coelho, my favorite author.  Please take time to read the book, or at least this small portion from the book.  The impact from reading his books are tremendous and each time, it has made me discover something about myself that inspires me to change myself for the better. The author gives insight to human phenomenon that we experience but can't explain ourselves or we ignore "thinking too much" because we think we'll get too crazy in our own thoughts.  But it makes us more open.  So I want to share this to my loved ones and hope that their past is not holding them back.

Enjoy :)

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"It doesn't matter.  You need to think about where each of us is right now, in the present moment.  We're accustomed to measuring time in the same way we measure the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok, but that isn't how it works.  Time neither moves nor is stationary.  Time changes.  We occupy one point in that constantly mutating time - our Aleph.  The idea that time passes is important when you need to know when a train is going to leave, but apart from that, it's not very useful, not even when you're cooking.  After all, however often you make a recipe, it always turns out different.  Do you follow?"

 ... "Are we the result of what we learn?"

"We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that.  We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present.  The present has its challenges, its good and bad side.  We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now.  Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences.  It's always new."

"Is it possible to fix love and make it stand still in time?  Well, we can try, but that would turn our lives into a hell.  I haven't been married for more than twenty years to the same person, because neither she nor I have remained the same person, because neither she nor I have remained the same.  That's why our relationship is more alive than ever.  I don't expect her to behave as she did when we first met.  Nor does she want me to be the person I was when I found her.  Love is beyond time, or, rather, love is both time and space, but all focused on one single constantly evolving point - the Aleph."

"People aren't used to that way of thinking.  They want everything to stay the same--"
"--and the consequence of that is pain."

"We are not the person other people wish we were.  We are who we decide to be.  It's always easy to blame others.  You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.  You can try to stop time, but it's a complete waste of energy."

....

"But there are all kinds of problems I need to resolve now."
"They lie in what you call the 'past' and await a decision to be made in what you call the 'future.'  They clog your mind and slow you down, and won't let you understand the present.  If you rely only on experience, you'll simply keep applying old solutions to new problems.  I know a lot of people who feel they have an identity only when they're talking about their problems.  That way, they exist, because their problems are linked to what they judge to be their history."

"It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you're capable of far more than you imagined.  You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems.  Visit your soul; don't visit your past.  The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it.  We call each of those mutations a 'life,' but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.  You think you're the same person you were in Ekaterinburg, but you're not.  I'm not even the same person I was when I began talking.  Nor is the train in the same place it was when Hilal played her violin.  Everything has changed; it's just that we can't see it."

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