Back to Now
The phrase “Here and Now” is known to all. It is strange to even mentions it, like saying, “Breathe!” Isn’t it clear that we breathe? Well, just as breathing is sometimes strenuous so the experience of Now can be hard work. It happens to us when our attention is bombarded by troublesome thoughts that are not from here and now. Valuable psychic energy is wasted and the result is nervousness and exhaustion. It’s like pressing the accelerator in low gear.
How and when did we lose our connection to ‘Here and Now’?
When we were young and vulnerable, we operated on an automatic and reactive mindset aimed at survival. This mindset is security centered. The mind will struggle for security by constantly trying to make sense of life. That means trying to predict the future based on past experience. The mind gradually develops a ’story’ about oneself. The story consists of explanations of what happened in the past, interpretations of the present and predictions about the future.
Within the story, a child perceives him or herself as the main cause of his or her pains. This often develops into the delusion of “I am not lovable as I am.” The heavy price is a loss of authenticity, of connection to the flow of life, to NOW.
What does it mean to ‘live in the Now’?
Living in the Now means our attention is entirely focused at the present moment, as if we ‘forgot ourselves’ in favor of what is happening right now. Self forgetfulness is to forget the story your mind has created through your life. The story is like a prison whose bars are past memories. Returning to Now is liberation from this prison.
When your attention is fully Now, you don’t sense the effort but the lightness of a playful state of mind. You allow yourself to be who you really are. Does it mean that one should not learn from the past and plan for the future? On the contrary! Being with the flow of life is to experience learning because life is a movement forward through learning and growing.
The Now attention is not engaged in blame, guilt or catastrophising the future but simply in what one can learn for a better future. In Now the attention is free from the ’stories.’ Creating a healthy distance from your stories is what you want to achieve through a process of self-awareness. As you learn to disidentify with the relentless thoughts you free your attention to respond more effectively to the Now.
How can we return to Now?
Returning to Now is, to my view, the most transformative experience a person can have in his or her life. This is a transition in the center of gravity of one’s identity. From controlling-analytical mind — EGO — to the spirit, this loving-abundant capacity within each of us.
While our Ego-attention is operating on the survival pain/pleasure principle, our spirit operates on the abundance principle of unlimited possibilities for flourishing. The one who learns how to shift attention from survival mode to flourishing mode has freed him or herself from the conditioned ego. This will result in a more authentic life, a life that reflects one’s true potential, one’s true nature.
The spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, wrote in The Power of Now that a connection to life occurs when we disidentify with this mindset that psychologically lives the past and future. The liberation is not by taking control of it but by connecting with and observing it. The brain involuntarily generates electro-chemical events that we experience as thoughts and emotions. This is the nature of the mind. Resistance will only feed the same mindset.
We must understand that thoughts are neither right nor wrong. It is our relationship with them that give them the power. It’s like watching a movie: the impact on us is as strong as the belief that what we see is true. Our challenge is to see mental events — thoughts, images, memories etc., as what they really are — a content from the past running on the screen of our mind.
The method we use in order to train the mind to do so is known as mindfulness. Put simply, you learn to notice whatever is happening in the Now. As you develop the skill to just notice, you develop gradually the observer within you. In a state of self-awareness you are not carried away by your thoughts and feelings. The idea is simple, but not the implementation. One has to properly study and practice this ability.
According to Tolle, one of the main gateways to Now is our body. A short exercise of noticing your body experiences will anchor your attention instantly in the Now. Your body is always here, always alive and always changing. By noticing the subtle sensations you increasingly center your core identity as the spiritual self. Observing means unconditional acceptance, without analyzing or judging.
This is an emphatic observation, without ego’s contaminated filter. Such an observation is a skill we left in childhood. While playing in puddles we marveled at the jumping green thing before it became a ‘frog’. Such observation often leads to moments of wonder and awe. Once you experience it, you realize that coming back to Now is like coming back to life.
~ by Hagai Avisar (Hagai will be giving an extended workshop at Gurukula in November. For more details, >>>Click Here)
