Living in the now

So yesterday I mentioned Ekhart Tolle and his idea of the Power of Now.

It is a dense subject and probably more than I could even sum up in a blog. I will try and help by linking you to the wiki entry for it and telling you about how I found it to help me.

Here is the wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now

I will be pulling quotes from it throughout the blog.

The essence of the Power of Now is staying and living in the moment in the right now.

I struggle with this so much. I mean when your moment of right now is sitting in front of a computer in a chair that has perfectly melded to your growing ass. Why in the world would I want to be as Ekhart puts it "Be Present." My mind wants to meander to all the great things I am going to do. Relive great moments of success or more than likely relive some moment or incident that caused me great pain so I am making sure not to do it again. It is more likely my mind is trying to justify a fear of moving forward and the ramifications of taking a risk in the present by drudging up the past.

I realize now that these moments do not serve me well at all. So pat on the back to me for making this realization but I am not very good at practicing it.

So what does it mean to be "Present"? I will paraphrase from the wiki entry

First you need to understand Tolles version of the ego.

The ego is a sense of self derived from the content and activity of the mind. It is "a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning."He notes that virtually everyone hears a "voice" in their head all the time, the involuntary and often repetitive thought-processes of our minds. As we live "the voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on." It may be reliving the past or rehearsing imagined future situations.The ego is the sense of self which regards these incessant thoughts as 'my thoughts', and the mind which thinks them as 'me'.

So as I see it, the ego is that voice that is constantly obssessed with ME and what ME and my thoughts about ME are doing right now. Really it is something I find myself overly preoccupied with during the day.

Tolle suggests that our egos are conditioned to think in terms of past, present and future. This means that we are constantly preoccupied with looking both backwards and forwards - in fact anything rather than focus on the present, the here and now. So we focus on the past because this is what gives us our sense of identity, and what has led us to the life circumstances that we currently face. And we focus on the future because this is where all our dreams, hopes and fears will play out.

Now I love this because this is so true of me. I am overly preoccupied with my perception of myself and how I am projecting it towards others.. This is me focusing on my past and making sure that I am playing the role of Jude Beers accurately. Furthermore, if you know me you know I am overly preoccupied with the future and my dreams of it. My sense of now is usually based on me working to get to a future I am living in my mind.

Tolle claims there is a deeper sense of self than the ego, a conscious Presence which may be known in various ways. One method he recommends is simply to listen to the voice in the head without judging it in any way or getting caught up in its contents. Just by 'watching the thinker' in the head, he says, "You'll soon realise: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it." That I am realisation is "a sense of your own presence ... (arising) from beyond the mind." And as one becomes aware of this deeper self as a conscious presence, so the involuntary thinking begins to subside, giving way to stillness, peace and what he calls "the joy of Being."

This takes so much work for me that it is exhausting and sometimes painful. Strange right? I think I must be doing it wrong :) Stillness? Peace? ok. *Grits teeth tries to hold still and clear my mind, trying to push the voice out of my head by farting out my ears.*

I find the focus needed to push out thoughts of the future and past out of my head to be tiring. So naturally I feel like I am doing it wrong. But its hard to change old habits.

Try to stay present today. Live in your now. It is the only thing you are capable of.

From the great movie Kung Fu Panda the wise turtle points out, "Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present."

See ya tomorrow