The Power of Now



(This title may well have been influenced by David Godman's The Power of the Presence)
“Now is the time” is something that I have valued less in practice. Why in practice is because I do know theoretically that time is utmost important and I am also among the crowd that goes cribbing "I don't get time to do blah blah blah". I'm also one of the laziest and biggest procrastinators that I've seen. Knowing that, one can clearly see how the short-of-time-fact comes to effect.

We always think of doing something, going "not now, maybe tomorrow onwards". That tomorrow never comes. If we were any bit smarter, we'd have known that whatever that is that makes us breathe can't afford to be one of us. If that also goes "I'll breathe tomorrow onwards", we'd not have the opportunity to procrastinate anything! But in its kindness it lets us breathe *now*. That is where the entire power lies, if we try to see. Things we see, or don't see for that matter, things that exist, exist in the now. They're here for us now. We are here to experience them now. Whenever it is, it is now. That is what time is. Its the moment of existence. All things get done in the now. Nothing is there in the past gone by us. We could spend our lifetime thinking of the past and gain nothing, possibly even lose everything. Even planning ahead of time takes a toll on the now. I remember having answered, to a question "Where are you?" in a yoga course, "I am where I think I am" meaning "I am where my mind is". (I was ridiculed, so to say, as a philosopher then!) So the mind takes you into the past reliving those moments, while at other times, going ahead and trying to live things that haven't happened (in this life)! In all that happening, only for an extremely small percentage of mind's existence, it lives in the now. If we can hold on to that moment called the now, every now and then, continuously, that is what makes up as meditation.

This now has the power to create and destroy universes; its verily the brahman that we all must reach. Even in the vyavhAric, living in the now gets a huge amount of things done in a short amount of time. The human life is wasted in the non-now, otherwise.

ॐ तत् सत्

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