To open to the sense, to become really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain for a time in what T. S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world" — the present. The only true reality is the present.
In the stillness, empty spaces occur and new possibilities are searching their way to the surface of the mind. A connection is made, new relationships are formed and new patterns emerge. This process of being still and moving at the same time to something new is the way the experience of creative thinking comes about in our minds. T.S. Eliot alludes to this process in the middle of the "Four Quartets."
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.