The past is mostly artificial, so when we continuously construct our “self” it is based on transfigured delusional remembrance.
We then encounter each moment not as it is but from a “deluded self” reacting to a subjective narrativization, a private myth only tenuously touching on reality. This “self/ego” approaches interactions –either wounded or emboldened– attempting to correct our myth, to make the imagined real.
Thus, we seldom pay attention to the present but busily imagine an improbable future from a distorted past, which traps us in quirks of our own making.
If we can pause remembering and cease imagining, we could be free to see the present moment.