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"The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us" -- Eugene O'Neill, "Long Day's Journey Into Night."As Joshua Engel says, it's hard to argue with a vague statement. If "living" means "what we're experiencing in this moment," then the statement is true but tautological. It basically means "The experiences we're having now are experiences that we're having now."I assume Tolles doesn't mean it literally. Maybe he mean one of these two things:1) Live in the moment! In other words, try not to dwell on the past or worry about the future.This sort of cheerleading energizes the self-help industry. Particularly in America, we're fond of affirmations: "Don't worry. Be happy!" "Yes we can!" "When you wish upon a star your dreams come true." "Accentuated the positive. E - lim - inate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mr. In-between."Blah.My argument against this is "If it works, it works; if it doesn't, it doesn't." In other words, if you're worried about tomorrow, it's unlikely you'll stop worrying just because someone tells you, "Don't worry about it." Though wouldn't it be ducky if the world worked that way?Bob: I'm worried about tomorrow.Jim: Don't worry about tomorrow.Bob: Oh, okay. I won't.So many people claim to find "I think I can ... I think I can ... I think I can ..." helpful, that I'm not going to dismiss it. Like I said, "If it works ..." for you, "... it works."It doesn't work for me: Marcus Geduld's answer to What is one thing you don't understand about yourself?2) What we think of as the past isn't really a record of an earlier time. Rather, it's something our brain is building right now. It's a fiction, created on-the-fly, based on stored data. Similarly, what we think of as "the future," is just our brain running a simulation. That simulation is happening right now.Just as the novel "1984" is really a satire about England in 1948, your "past" and "future" aren't really telling you much about the past and the future. They're telling you something about you right now. You can think of your memories of the past as metaphors for something you're concerned about in the present.My argument "against" this is that it's true but not terribly useful. Yes, the past (and the future) are fabrications of our minds. But so is everything we sense, experience, and feel. Everything we perceive, remember, and predict is filtered (augmented and altered) by our brains.If you step on my toe, my brain is manufacturing the feeling of pain. But you know what? It still hurts! If I have a traumatic memory of something that never happened, it's still traumatic.I'm going to use the phrase "the past" as a label for those experiences (which are at least partially fictions). I'm going to use the label "the future" to point to our story-like (and real-feeling) expectations about what's forthcoming. I'll use "the present" to mean "the movie our brain shows us what seems to be happening right now."Verb-tense is a good way of thinking about it. Our brain lets us read three novels: one written in past tense; one written in present tense; one written in future tense. The novels might be total fictions. Still, they affect us. They affect or moods; they affect our thoughts; they affect our action. In a sense, they are us.They also all influence each other. So I could rewrite O'Neill like this:"The present is the future, isn't it? It's the past too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us."or"The future is the past, isn't it? ..."or"The future is the present, isn't it? ..."or"The past is the present, isn't it? ..."or"The past is the future, isn't it? ..."This makes sense from an Darwinian prospective. Organisms that can tell a story about the past have a survival advantage over organisms that don't: as long as their stories are generally useful for predicting the future. And it's pretty obvious that a story about the present is a survival advantage: imagine a person who couldn't think, "A car is about to hit me right now!" And our future-story is useful for taking action now in order help coax or avoid certain imagined events.We're never going to be able to live in the novel called "Now," because we're built to live in all three novels. People who claim to "live in the present" must mean in specific ways, otherwise they wouldn't be able to find their own bathrooms. How do you know where your bathroom is unless you remember? And modern neuroscience tells us that memories spark the same neurons that got sparked when we first experienced. Remembering going to the bathroom is, to some extent, going to the bathroom. So we do live in the past.No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?... And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in ... lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.- from "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcell Proust