We think of present events
As being caused
By past events
And therefore
We tend to regard ourself as
The puppets of the past
As driven along
By something
That is always behind us

Now, to overcome this impression
It's very simple
You begin again with an experiment
Approach the world through your ears
If you shut your eye
And make contact with reality
Purely with your ears
And you will realize
That the sounds you arе hearing
Are all coming out of silencе

You hear [Gong sound]
And it fades away
Fades, fades, fades, fades
And finally disappears
It's a curious world, this, isn't it?
Because you hear all the realities in it
The sounds
Suddenly coming out of nothing
You don't see any reason for them to begin
They just appear
And then they echo away through
The corridors of the mind
Which we call memory
Now, if you open your eyes
It's a little harder to see this with your eyes
Because, unlike sounds
The eyes sound static
Or rather, they look static
Everything looks still to your eyes
But you must understand
The world you are looking at, say, when you look at a light
That light is vibrating
All material things are vibrations
And they are vibrating at you now
In the same way as the sound is vibrating on your ears
In other words
The present world that you see
Is a vibration coming
Just as the sound comes out of silence
The light is coming out of space
It's coming out of nothing straight at you now
And echoing away into the past
So, the course of time
Is really very much like the course
Of a ship in the ocean
'Cause here's the ship you see
And it leaves behind it
A wake
And the wake fades out
And that tells us
Where the ship has been
In just the same way
As the past, and our memory of the past
Tells us what we have done
But as we go back into the past
And we go back and back to pre-history
And we use all kinds of instruments and 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 the ship
Now, the important thing to remember in this illustration is
That the wake doesn't drive the ship
Any more than the tail wags the dog