Only nowness is what’s going on. And in the nowness ‘I’ am the only subject. Without this ‘I’ witnessing all objects and events, nothing is. So ‘I’ am necessary for my world to exist. My world is the only world that can ever be known to me, and therefore for the world to exist, I must be. The world is in this Now, my world is Now, I am the World and Now.
The other day I was watching this moving documentary called ‘The Power of the Heart‘ during which Maya uttered the words above. The story’s about what heart-centeredness offers us a society and an individual. And her point was that to leverage the power of the heart we must become calm. And if we don’t know how to do that then she suggests that we ‘do nothing’.
A wonderful day it is. A wonderful time to be alive. Do we view each moment with wonder and in wonder? If not, what’s keeping us from it? Really, what is it that keeps us from fully arriving at right now? It’s our distracted mind, which is ever abuzz with the thought of the moment. We stay in our heads and much to our detriment. Is there a way out? One way is to consciously operate more from our ‘heart’ region instead of always residing in our brain. Try it, just drop down to the heart and see what happens…
Is it really true? Does it pay to always be here and now? Our human minds don’t buy this logic. The truth is that the treasure to be found here and now can only be realized when we genuinely learn how to be fully present. Being fully present means that we’re just being, and experiencing what’s going on. It means that we’re not creating thoughts about what’s going on.
And when we do this and get good at it then nothing but a blissful peace is the initial result. More eventually unfolds which includes amazing creativity and an all-encompassing sense of oneness…
We’re like the sky. We are the capacity for all that we experience. That includes the objects and events ‘out there’, it also includes our body, feelings and even our mind (we’re not our minds). Within this spacious capacity that we’re calling ‘the sky’ we focus on the clouds and birds, the ‘arisings’ that make up our lives.
And we love to hold onto certain kinds of clouds, the ones we can’t let go, those are our ‘fixations’. And these clouds, our thoughts, our fixations, is what we make ourselves to be. But we’re really the sky itself, that spacious quality of beingness, that allows all clouds and birds to appear just as they are.
What can we know without a shadow of a doubt? We can’t trust the past to our memory or history books. We can only imagine the future. We can’t really know an object such as a pencil or a tree. That’s because we perceive objects with our senses. That same object such as a tree is a totally different experience to an ant or a bacterium. So what is a tree then? We see it as a separate object but the ant probably ‘sees’ it as an extension of the soil…
Emerson, in this quote, talks about a posture of ‘not-knowing’ and equates it to ‘knowledge’. Such a posture is very powerful because only from such a perspective, the one of ‘not-knowing‘, can we truly know the only thing that is knowable.
God is present. He lives as all that is. That includes our life and our aliveness. To be with him all we have to do is acknowledge his presence, assume it to be present and move through the day in that trust. Life speaks to us constantly, are we listening? We are Life, let’s be aliveness itself…