To the mind, all this is not significant, because it has “more important” things to think about. It is also not memorable, and that’s why you may have overlooked that it is already happening.
The truth is that it is the most significant thing that can happen to you. It is the beginning of a shift from thinking to aware presence.
Become at ease with the state of “not knowing.”This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing. So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.
Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling — mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place. A power and intelligence greater than you and yet one with you in essence takes over. There is no decision-making process anymore; spontaneous right action happens, and “you” are not doing it. Mastery of life is the opposite of control. You become aligned with the greater consciousness. It acts, speaks, does the works.
A moment of danger can bring about a temporary cessation of the stream of thinking and thus give you a taste of what it means to be present, alert, aware.
The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth. At best, it can point to it. For example, it can say: “All things are intrinsically one.” That is a pointer, not an explanation. Understanding these words means feeling deep within you the truth to which they point.
CHAPTER 3
THE EGOIC SELF
The mind is incessantly looking not only for food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self. This is how the ego comes into existence and continuously re-creates itself.
When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, “I,” what you usually refer to is “me and my story.” This is the “I” of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the “I” that is never satisfied for long. It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to find its fulfillment in the future.
Can you see that this “I” is fleeting, a temporary formation, like a wave pattern on the surface of the water?
Who is it that sees this? Who is it that is aware of the fleetingness of your physical and psychological form? I Am. This is the deeper “I” that has nothing to do with past and future.
What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash — one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.
To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought. To you, it is liberating.
When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made “me.” That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it.
Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom.
The egoic self is always engaged in seeking. It is seeking more of this or that to add to itself, to make itself feel more complete. This explains the ego’s compulsive preoccupation with future.
Whenever you become aware of yourself “living for the next moment,” you have already stepped out of that egoic mind pattern, and the possibility of choosing to give your full attention to this moment arises simultaneously.
By giving your full attention to this moment, an intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life.
When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end.
You live for the future, and when you achieve your goals, they don’t satisfy you, at least not for long.
When you give more attention to the doing than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the old egoic conditioning.
Your doing then becomes not only a great deal more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful.
Almost every ego contains at least an element of what we might call “victim identity.” Some people have such a strong victim image of themselves that it becomes the central core of their ego.
Resentment and grievances form an essential part of their sense of self.
Even if your grievances are completely “justified,”you have constructed an identity for yourself that is much like a prison whose bars are made of thought forms. See what you are doing to yourself, or rather what your mind is doing to you. Feel the emotional attachment you have to your victim story and become aware of the compulsion to think or talk about it. Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don’t have to do anything. With awareness comes transformation and freedom.
Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself. For many people, a large part of their mental-emotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that. By doing this, you make others or a situation “wrong” and yourself “right.” Through being “right,” you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.
Can you observe those patterns within yourself and recognize the complaining voice in your head for what it is?
The egoic sense of self needs conflict because its sense of a separate identity gets strengthened in fighting against this or that, and in demonstrating that this is “me” and that is not “me.”
Not infrequently, tribes, nations, and religions derive a strengthened sense of collective identity from having enemies. Who would the “believer”be without the “unbeliever”?
In your dealings with people, can you detect subtle feelings of either superiority or inferiority toward them? You are looking at the ego, which lives through comparison.
Envy is a by-product of the ego, which feels diminished if something good happens to someone else, or someone has more, knows more, or can do more than you. The ego’s identity depends on comparison and feeds on more. It will grasp at anything. If all else fails, you can strengthen your fictitious sense of self through seeing yourself as more unfairly treated by life or more ill than someone else.
What are the stories, the fictions from which you derive your sense of self ?
Built into the very structure of the egoic self is a need to oppose, resist, and exclude to maintain the sense of separateness on which its continued survival depends. So there is “me” against the “other,” “us” against “them.”
The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone. That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long. You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness.
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
Do you carry feelings of guilt about something you did — or failed to do — in the past? This much is certain: you acted according to your level of consciousness or rather unconsciousness at that time. If you had been more aware, more conscious, you would have acted differently.
Guilt is another attempt by the ego to create an identity, a sense of self. To the ego, it doesn’t matter whether that self is positive or negative. What you did or failed to do was a manifestation of unconsciousness — human unconsciousness. The ego, however, personalizes it and says, “I did that,” and so you carry a mental image of yourself as “bad.”
Throughout history humans have infli
cted countless violent, cruel, and hurtful acts on each other, and continue to do so. Are they all to be condemned; are they all guilty? Or are those acts simply expressions of unconsciousness, an evolutionary stage that we are now growing out of ?
Jesus’ words, “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” also apply to yourself.
If you set egoic goals for the purpose of freeing yourself, enhancing yourself or your sense of importance, even if you achieve them, they will not satisfy you.
Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important. When anything arises out of presence, it means this moment is not a means to an end:the doing is fulfilling in itself every moment. You are no longer reducing the Now to a means to an end, which is the egoic consciousness.
“No self. No problem,” said the Buddhist Master when asked to explain the deeper meaning of Buddhism.
CHAPTER 4
THE NOW
On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not “this moment”?
This one moment — Now — is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now.
Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it?
When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.
The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?
The division of life into past, present, and future is mind-made and ultimately illusory. Past and future are thought forms, mental abstractions.The past can only be remembered Now. What you remember is an event that took place in the Now, and you remember it Now. The future, when it comes, is the Now. So the only thing that is real, the only thing there ever is is the Now.
To have your attention in the Now is not a denial of what is needed in your life. It is recognizing what is primary. Then you can deal with what is secondary with great ease. It is not saying, “I’m not dealing with things anymore because there is only the Now.” No. Find what is primary first, and make the Now into your friend, not your enemy. Acknowledge it, honor it. When the Now is the foundation and primary focus of your life, then your life unfolds with ease.
Putting away the dishes, drawing up a business strategy, planning a trip — what is more important: the doing or the result that you want to achieve through the doing? This moment or some future moment?
Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?
Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.
Feel the aliveness within your body. That anchors you in the Now.
Ultimately you are not taking responsibility for life until you take responsibility for this moment — Now. This is because Now is the only place where life can be found.
Taking responsibility for this moment means not to oppose internally the “suchness” of Now, not to argue with what is. It means to be in alignment with life.
The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.
When you say “yes” to what is, you become aligned with the power and intelligence of Life itself. Only then can you become an agent for positive change in the world.
A simple but radical spiritual practice is to accept whatever arises in the Now — within and without.
When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is.
The moment you enter the Now with your attention, you realize that life is sacred. There is a sacredness to everything you perceive when you are present. The more you live in the Now, the more you sense the simple yet profound joy of Being and the sacredness of all life.
Most people confuse the Now with what happens in the Now, but that’s not what it is. The Now is deeper than what happens in it. It is the space in which it happens.
So do not confuse the content of this moment with the Now. The Now is deeper than any content that arises in it.
When you step into the Now, you step out of the content of your mind. The incessant stream of thinking slows down. Thoughts don’t absorb all your attention anymore, don’t draw you in totally. Gaps arise in between thoughts — spaciousness, stillness. You begin to realize how much vaster and deeper you are than your thoughts.
Thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and whatever you experience make up the content of your life. “My life” is what you derive your sense of self from, and “my life” is content, or so you believe.
You continuously overlook the most obvious fact:your innermost sense of I Am has nothing to do with what happens in your life, nothing to do with content. That sense of I Am is one with the Now. It always remains the same. In childhood and old age, in health or sickness, in success or failure, the I Am — the space of Now — remains unchanged at its deepest level. It usually gets confused with content, and so you experience I Am or the Now only faintly and indirectly, through the content of your life. In other words: your sense of Being becomes obscured by circumstances, your stream of thinking, and the many things of this world. The Now becomes obscured by time.
And so you forget your rootedness in Being, your divine reality, and lose yourself in the world. Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are.
Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home:
I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now.I Am.
CHAPTER 5
WHO YOU TRULY ARE
The Now is inseparable from who you are at the deepest level.
Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.
It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matters whether you are rich or poor — it certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don’t matter absolutely.
There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.
You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
Reincarnation doesn’t help you if in your next incarnation you still don’t know who you are.
All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of “me” or “us.” That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end you always create misery. It’s as simple as that. When you don’t know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self.
Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.
Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don’t know who they are. You say: “
He lost his life” or “my life,” as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don’t have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or a blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.
Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That?
For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea. . . . Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters: self-realization, which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self — beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.
You cannot find yourself in the past or future.The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now.
Spiritual seekers look for self-realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don’t need time to be who you are.
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