Every passing moment is "different" yet "the same". Think of a river. The river is not the same river today as it was yesterday, yet the mind we use to see it is the same. Or is it? "Mind" itself is only a word, so how can it be something eternal?
Even if we use the term "eternal present", we are fixing something that is ultimately unfixable. We need to find some provisional metaphor, so we say "eternity" or "now", but is there anything that "stays the same"? What exactly is the same from one moment to the next?
There is a boundless potency to each moment, but I lose it when I try to a) connect one thought to another, forming a chain; b) try to fixate on one thought called "present moment" , "empty space", etc. Both are things we are abiding in. They are only thoughts that have already came and went.
To stay away from pat answers is to welcome a sense of doubt. The enemy of doubt is a kind of weird crystallizing of concepts, a kind of fixating mind. To pay attention to that fixating mind is the beginning of seeing there may be something else beyond it.
Certainty is the great enemy of unity, certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end :”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”He cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing, precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt ,there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith ~
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