MZD - Ep 82 Cultivating Presence

“The whole essence of Zen consists of walking along the razor’s edge of Now.”

~ Eckhart Tolle

 

So how are you doing today? Are you in a good place? In spite of circumstances or any situation you may find yourself in.

Even when things are going well, do you sometimes find yourself experiencing an underlying unease or restlessness? Sometimes we find ourselves feeling a certain level of unexplainable anxiety, boredom or nervousness, a background static that is always there. This is our minds in a habitual resistance to the present moment. It is like the hum of an air conditioner or machinery that, when the sound ceases gives enormous relief.

The reason our mind doesn’t want to live in the present has to do with our ego, which lives only in the past or the future. The ego, or false, illusory sense of self, as we call it, is often intimately connected with problems as a form of identity. And these problems can only be in the past or in the future, never in the present moment.

How crazy is that? Wanting to identify with problems versus just Being in the moment certainly sounds like a mental disorder.

So in our daily living, and in particular, our meditation, we choose to live in the present moment, because there is no ego attached to the present…to the Now.

Tell me, what problems do you have right Now, in this present moment? Sure, you may have what we call a situation that needs to be dealt with, but that is not a problem. It is either something you deal with, and it’s taken care of, or…you learn to accept it, and forego the suffering that comes from identifying with the “Problem”. Suffering and problems need time, they cannot live in the Now.

I love the way Eckhart Tolle puts it in his classic book The Power of Now. He states that the reason the mind habitually resists and denies the Now is

 

“Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.”

 

By the way, this is why we practice meditation, to distance ourselves from time and our minds to better realize the fact that we are not our minds…only observers of them.

 

Tolle goes on to say,

“Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in a meaningful way? The question ‘What time is it?’ or ‘What’s the date today?’ – If anybody were there to ask it – would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. ‘What time?’ they would ask. ‘Well of course it’s now. The time is now. What else is there?’”

 

At first, this concept of living only in the Now can boggle the mind because for eons we have learned to only live in what we call “Clock Time”. But once we grasp this concept of letting go, and learn to be present, we begin to become free of “Psychological Time”.

Of course we need to be able to function in “clock time”, being peripherally aware of it, as we meet our daily responsibilities and interact with the world, but we don’t have to be trapped in “psychological time”.

That is why we begin cultivating our Garden of Well-being with Presence and Awareness. It provides the space and rich, fertile soil for all of the other states of well-being that we are going to cultivate as we learn to grow and manifest positive change in our lives.

 

So let’s begin…