The Present Moment

 

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The Present Moment

Swamiji always tell us to stay in the present moment, but we keep vacillating between the past and the present. Swamiji’s entire stress is on the present moment, because reality lies in the moment. – that is the only reality. If we ponder – for even the past to exist as a memory, now is needed. It doesn’t exist as the past; it exists as a thought in the present. Similarly true of the future – the future does not exist as the future; it exists as our imagination in the present moment. All that exists, exists in the now. Now is the only time there is and to become more and more alert about now is to become aware of the presence of God.

Our present is crushed between our thoughts of the past and our fertile imagination about the future. We never learn to live in the present – always vacillating like a pendulum from the past to the future. Our present becomes negligible or non-existent as the past and future occupy our mind space.

If we think of the past, it is long - our past, then the society’s past, then humanity’s past, then the past of life on earth and then the earth’s past, and then the sun and the moon and the stars; it is infinite. And so is the future infinite - it will go on and on. Compared to the past and future, the present seems almost nothing – it is just a small point, atomic – and between these two it is almost lost track of. And that is the only reality; everything else is unreal compared to it.

If we see a rose flower, we see it in the now. If we smell it, we smell it in the now. If we feel and touch it, we touch it in the now. We cannot touch the rose flower in the future and we cannot smell the rose flower in the past. But if we start thinking of past and future, then the rose flower is there and yet is not there; it disappears.

In meditation think about a rose beautiful rose flower – we will feel its presence and get its fragrance in our nostrils too. Now think of some ugly event from the past, immediately our mind gets clouded, the fragrance disappears. The flower is there, but our mind has gone away – a screen of memory has come between us and the flower.

The whole work of meditation is nothing but this: how to become utterly present in the present, how to collect oneself in the now. Then everything is beautiful. Then walking is meditation, sitting is meditation, talking is meditation, listening is meditation, because whether we walk or sit, it is always now; whether we are silent or talking it is always now. There is only one time. Now is eternity.

And the day we start living in the present 24 x 7 – that will be the day of enlightenment. It does not mean that our mind will not go to the past or future, it will but it will go in full awareness of the present.