You think the present is where you live. Mostly you're somewhere else — replaying a past or rehearsing a future. Nondual Śaiva Tantra names four specific exits from the now, and the surprise is that two of them feel good, so you never suspect them. The four "flights from now": guilt/regret and anxiety (the obviously stressful ones), plus nostalgic reverie and fantasy (the pleasant ones).1 Most people, Wallis notes, "acknowledge the stress and dis-ease caused by guilt and worry but think there is nothing wrong with nostalgia and fantasy." Yoga psychology disagrees: "losing ourselves in fantasy is as detrimental to us as being obsessed by worry because fantasizing is equally effective in removing us from full awareness of the present."2 All four, pleasant or painful, do the same damage — they take you out of the present, which "is what is real, and what we are called to respond to."3 This is the kañcuka of kāla (Time, tattva 10): the fourth veil of limitation.
Kāla as the contracted experience of Time, and the practice of transcending it:4
The teaching's sharp edge is its refusal to exempt the pleasant escapes. Guilt and anxiety are easy to indict — they obviously hurt. But nostalgia (sweetly revisiting the past) and fantasy (pleasantly rehearsing a future) feel like harmless or even nourishing mental activities. Wallis's argument cuts underneath the feeling to the function: the damage of fleeing the now isn't about whether the elsewhere is pleasant or painful — it's that you're not here, and here is the only place that's real, the only place you can actually respond to, the only place the divine is available. A pleasant escape and a painful escape are equally escapes; they cost you the same thing (presence), and presence is everything, because bliss, contact with reality, and the divine are all and only available now.
There's a further logic in why the present is uniquely real. "The only way your hopes for the future can ever become a reality in the present is by careful attention to the details of present-moment reality."11 A more accurate view, Wallis says, is "that there is no future per se but only a constantly flowing present" which, through reverent attention, "reveals its divinity ever more." So fantasy about the future is doubly self-defeating: it not only removes you from the real (the present) but actively undermines the future you fantasize about, since that future can only be built by attending to the now. The escapes aren't just neutral detours; they're the mechanism by which you forfeit both the present (directly) and the future (indirectly). And the deepest frame — Kālī devouring and remaking the universe each instant — reveals why "transcending time while in time" is even possible: if reality is being freshly created hundreds of times a second, then the "flow of time" is an appearance, and beneath it is a timeless creative pulse you can rest in (nityodita) rather than being swept along by the apparent sequence.
Kāla is one of the five kañcukas (tattva 10) and the time-aspect of contracted Consciousness. Its "be present" practice is the temporal face of ānanda through Presence (bliss is available only now) and feeding the senses (full present contact). The Kālī-devours-each-instant frame connects to the Krama's Kālī and the moment-by-moment creation/dissolution. "Transcending time while in time" is the temporal version of transcendence then pervasion.
The most counterintuitive move in the teaching is its indictment of nostalgia and fantasy, and it's worth steelmanning the objection it overcomes. Surely, one wants to say, nostalgia and fantasy are different from guilt and worry — they're pleasant, they can be creative, fantasy fuels art and planning, nostalgia connects us to who we've been. Why lump the sweet escapes with the bitter ones?12
Wallis's answer is that the content's pleasantness is irrelevant to the structural harm. The harm of all four escapes is identical: removal from the present. He's careful not to over-claim — the issue isn't that you may never think about past or future (that would make us animals, and the goal is to be aware of past-behind and future-ahead while centered in the now). The issue is losing yourself in them — the fantasy that takes over, the nostalgia you dissolve into. When that happens, "fantasizing is equally effective in removing us from full awareness of the present" as worrying is. The case study's real lesson is about a disguised form of avoidance: guilt and anxiety announce themselves as suffering, so we know to work on them; nostalgia and fantasy masquerade as pleasure, so they escape scrutiny — which makes them, in a way, more insidious, because you'll never think to question a mental habit that feels good. The pleasant escapes are the ones that quietly steal the most present moments precisely because no alarm goes off. And the deeper cut: the future you fantasize about is built only by attending to the present you're fleeing to fantasize — so the sweetest escape (imagining the good future) is the very thing preventing it.
The practice is recognizing and returning from each escape. Learn the four exits by name. Guilt/regret and anxiety (the painful pair); nostalgia and fantasy (the pleasant pair). Naming them makes them catchable. Watch especially for the pleasant ones. Since nostalgia and fantasy don't trigger an alarm, deliberately notice when you've dissolved into a sweet memory or an absorbing daydream — these steal present moments undetected. Don't suppress past/future awareness — re-center. The goal isn't a blank animal-present; it's being centered now, aware of past behind and future ahead without being lost in either. Return attention to the present without amputating temporal awareness. Attend reverently to the now. Bring "close and reverent attention" to present-moment reality — which both reveals its divinity and is the only way to actually build the future you'd otherwise fantasize. Use the Kālī frame for radical presence. Contemplate that the universe is devoured and remade each instant — there is only this freshly-created moment — which loosens the grip of the apparent time-stream and opens nityodita, the timeless flowing present. Notice the future-fantasy paradox. When you catch yourself fantasizing about a desired future, redirect to the present details that would actually create it — converting escape into the attention that builds.
Living in the painful escapes. You spend the now consumed by guilt/regret about the past or anxiety about the future, treating the present as a mere corridor between what went wrong and what might. The tell: rumination and worry as default mental states, the present chronically skipped — obviously stressful, and at least recognized as a problem.
Living in the pleasant escapes (the hidden failure). You dissolve into nostalgia or fantasy, mistaking these for harmless or nourishing because they feel good — and so never question the habit that quietly steals most of your present. The tell: a rich inner world of remembered golden days or imagined futures, paired with a felt thinness of actual present life — and, especially, fantasizing about a future while neglecting the present attention that alone could build it.
Standard kañcuka doctrine plus the distinctive Kālī-devours-each-instant cosmology.13 The genuine tension is the indictment of fantasy and nostalgia against their evident uses: fantasy is the engine of imagination, planning, art, and hope; nostalgia builds identity and connection. Wallis hedges (the problem is losing yourself, not all past/future thought), but the line between healthy imaginative projection and present-fleeing fantasy is genuinely blurry — when does planning tomorrow become fleeing today? The open question is whether "be centered in the now, aware of past and future without being lost in them" is a stable practicable state or an ideal that, taken too strictly, would pathologize the very temporal imagination that makes humans creative and forward-building — and whether the tradition's strong present-emphasis risks devaluing the genuinely generative uses of mentally visiting other times.
The teaching converges with the broad contemplative consensus on presence (be here now) but diverges interestingly on how time itself works, via the Kālī cosmology. Many present-moment traditions treat time as a real flow you should stop resisting and inhabit fully. Tantra's Kālī frame goes further and stranger: time's flow is itself an appearance — what actually happens is discrete re-creation, the universe devoured and remade hundreds of times a second, so there is no continuous stream at all, only a rapid succession of fresh creations. Pull on that and you find two different reasons to be present, sitting inside the same teaching. The "soft" reason (shared with most presence-traditions): the now is where life and the divine are available, so stop fleeing it. The "hard" reason (distinctively Tantric): there literally is only the now, because the past is devoured and the future not yet created — continuity is a construction laid over discrete instants. What the convergence-and-divergence reveals is that "be present" can rest on a psychological claim (presence is healthier and more real) or a metaphysical one (presence is all there is, because time doesn't flow), and Tantra offers both — the gentle version for the beginner and the radical Kālī version for one ready to see that the time-stream they've been swept along by was never a stream, just frames flickering fast enough to look like motion.
The plain link: this is a precise taxonomy of mental time-travel and its costs — squarely the territory of the psychology of rumination, mind-wandering, and presence.
The Sharpest Implication If nostalgia and fantasy damage you as much as guilt and anxiety — because all four equally remove you from the only moment that's real — then the pleasant mental escapes you've never thought to question are quietly stealing more of your life than the painful ones you actively try to fix. The destabilizing part: the sweetness is a disguise. Guilt and worry at least announce themselves as problems, so you work on them; but the golden daydream and the warm memory feel like gifts, so you sink into them undefended, and they cost you exactly what the worry costs — your presence, which is to say your access to reality, to bliss, to the divine, all of which exist only now. And the cruelest twist lands on the most innocent-seeming escape of all: fantasizing about the good future you want is the very thing preventing it, because that future can only be built by the present attention you're spending on the fantasy. The implication that should stop you is that your richest inner life — the remembered past, the imagined future — may be the most sophisticated way you avoid the one place anything actually happens, and that the person lost in a beautiful daydream and the person lost in dread are, structurally, doing the identical thing: not being here, where their life is.
Generative Questions