An eternal present...

We are in the presence of Intellect undefiled.

Fix it firmly, but not with the eyes of the body.

You are looking upon the hearth of Reality, within it a sleepless light:

you see how it holds to itself, and how it puts apart things that were together, how it lives a life that endures and keeps a thought acting not upon any future but upon that which already is,

upon an eternal present—a thought self-centered, bearing on nothing outside of itself.



-- Enneads, VI. 2. 8.
Plotinus