Practicing the Power of Now

Practicing the Power of Now

From the best seller, The Power of Now, rises the next book,  Practicing the Power of Now.

 In The Power of Now, there are specific practices and clear keys that show us how to discover for ourselves the “grace, ease, and lightness” that come when we simply quiet our thoughts and see the world before us in the present moment.

Practicing the Power of Now is a series of excerpts from The Power of Now that directly gives us those exercises and keys

( It is here, now, in this moment: the sacred presence of your Being. It is here, now, not in some distant future: a place within us that always is and ever will be beyond the turmoil of life, a world of calm beyond words, of joy that has no opposite)

Excerpts

One Life

Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived or spoken of – yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it to give you something to believe in but to show you how you can know it yourself.

There is an eternal, ever-present One Life beyond myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death. Many people use the word God to describe to describe it.

The world enlightenment is simply your natural state of felt oneness with being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible , something that, almost, paradoxically is essentially you and yet much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name or form.

The inability to feel this connectedness gives rises to the illusion of separation, from yourself and the world around you. You then perceive yourself, consciously or unconsciously , as an isolated fragment. Fear arises, and conflicts within and without become the norm.

Intelligence beyond the Mind

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, becomes very destructive.   To put accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is a disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken over. 

It is almost as  if you were possessed without knowing, and you take the possessing entity to be your self.

You realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond your thought, that is only aspect  of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity , joy, inner peace – arise from beyond that mind.

( Relax for a while ……

OSHO About Laughter

Religion has been missing one very fundamental quality: the sense of humor. It’s unfortunate, because it has made religion sick.

A sense of humor is an essential part of the wholeness of man. It keeps him healthy, young, and fresh. And for centuries the sad people have dominated religion. They have expelled laughter -- from churches, mosques, and from temples. The day laughter enters back into the holy places they will be really holy, because they will be whole.

Laughter is the only quality that distinguishes man from other animals. Only man can see the ridiculous, the absurd. Only he has the capacity and the consciousness to be aware of the cosmic joke that existence is. It is a cosmic joke; it is not a serious affair.

Seriousness is a disease, but seriousness has been praised, respected, honored. It was absolutely essential to be serious to be a saint; hence only, people who were incapable of laughter became interested in religion. And people who are incapable of laughter are not human yet -- what to say about their being divine? That is impossible -- they have not yet become human. Hence I have tremendous respect for the sense of humor, for laughter.

Laughter is far more sacred than prayer, because prayer can be done by any one; it does not require much intelligence. Laughter requires intelligence, it requires presence of mind, a quickness of seeing into things. A joke cannot be explained: either you understand it or you miss it. If it is explained it loses the whole point; hence no joke can be explained. Either you get it immediately or you can try to find out the meaning of it; you will find out the meaning, but the joke will not be there. It was in the immediacy.

Humor needs presence, utter presence. It is not a question of analysis, it is a question of insight.

To be able to laugh, you need to be like a child -- egoless. And when you laugh, suddenly laughter is there, you are not. You come back when the laughter is gone. When the laughter is disappearing, when it is subsiding, you come back, the ego comes back. But in the very moment of laughter you have a glimpse of egolessness.

There are only two activities in which you can feel egolessness easily. One is laughter, another is dancing. Dancing is a physiological method, a bodily method to feel egolessness. When the dancer is lost in his dance he is no more -- there is only dance. Laughter is a little more subtle than dance, it is a little more inner, but it has also the same fragrance. When you laugh.... It has to be a belly laughter.

Laugh so that your whole body, your whole being becomes involved, and suddenly there will be a glimpse. For the moment the past disappears, the future, the ego, everything disappears -- there is only laughter. And in that moment of laughter you will be able to see the whole of existence laughing.

Lao Tzu had a sense of humour. Maybe because of that he could not become the founder of a great religion. He used to ride a buffalo. Now, couldn't he find a horse? Anybody could have afforded at least a donkey -- but a buffalo...? And that too, sitting backwards! The buffalo is going one way and Lao Tzu is looking the other way. He must have created laughter wherever he passed. Life is not a tragedy, it is a comedy.--The Dhammapada: (OSHO)] )

Continuing with Eckhart ….

Is there joy in your doing?

Ask yourself: is there joy, lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t , then the time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.

If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what”. See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept  what is, because you cannot give full attention to something and at the same time resist it.

Are you busy? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “ in the future. It’s a split that tears apart from inside.

Identification with the Mind

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.

On the one level of thought, resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level it is some form of negativity. The intensity of pin depends the degree of resistance to the present moment, this is, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. Mind always seeks  to deny the Now and escape from it.

Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind, which is to say as long as you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical disease. Resentment, hatred, self-pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealousy,  and so on, even the slightest irritation and all forms of pain. And every pleasure r emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time.

Love is a state of Being. Love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose , and can not leave you. It is not dependant on some other body; some external form.

Once you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate mechanism, the ego is very vulnerable  and insecure and sees itself as constantly in threat . This, by the way, is the cause, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body’s reaction  to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continues message? Fear of course.

Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer will be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from mind

[Eckhart Tolle in Rishikesh

Next February, from the 16th to the 24th, Eckhart Tolle is giving a retreat in Rishikesh in North India.

 For those not familiar with Eckhart Tolle, his book The Power of Now (1997) is a luminously clear statement of "the sacrament of the present moment." As a book it has proved attractive to many more than the usual suspects. Personally I'd say Eckhart's the only person on the satsang circuit who could possibly have the makings of a world-class teacher. Recently at Sannyas News we heard tapes from a retreat Eckhart gave in Canada last autumn which had the same power to alter your basic sense of perception as Osho's last guided No-Mind meditations.]

Cycles of Success

There are cycles of success, when things come you and thrive, and cycles of failures , when they whither or disintegrate, and you have to let go of in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen.

If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are resisting to go with the flow of life, and you suffer. Dissolution is needed for the growth to happen. One cycle cannot exist without the other.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or  pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure.

Failures lies concealed in every success and success in every failure

Good or Bad

As long as a condition is judged as “good”or by your mind, whether it be a relationship, as a possession, a social role, a place or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are.

But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: the same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly gradually turned to bad.

All things, pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency  gone there is no fear of loss any more. Life flows with ease.

The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of being, the vibrant peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance. Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from the dependency on form. If every thing were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel would a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.

You don’t resist change by mentally clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend on it. You abide in being – unchanging, timeless, deathless – your abide and you are no longer dependent on fulfillment or happiness on the outer world of constantly changing fluctuating or forms. You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.

As long you are unaware of being, the reality of other humans will elude you, because you have not found your own. Your mind will like or dislike there form, which is not just their body but includes their mind as well. True relationship becomes possible only when there is an awareness of  being.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and the people come to previewed as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perception and interpretation are governed by fear.

[Is the key to a fulfilled life and to enlightenment simply this: not to run away from the present moment, but to be deeply rooted in it? The answer is yes, reiterated Eckhart Tolle, a modern master, at a retreat in Rishikesh (India) recently 

Rishikesh

Being a seasoned spiritual master, Eckhart Tolle began the Rishikesh retreat by narrating an anecdote from the life of the Dalai Lama when he fled from Tibet and came to India. In the first audience that the Dalai Lama gave to westerners in India, a curious gentleman among the audience sought help to overcome his lack of self-esteem.

"From what do you suffer?" the Dalai Lama had asked. The gentleman tried to explain, but the Dalai Lama couldn't understand and was more bewildered. Finally he went around to each person in the gathering and asked whether they had heard of what this feeling was. To the Dalai Lama's surprise, almost everyone nodded in affirmation. To drive home the point, Tolle then remarked with a smile: "Even the ugliest cat has no problems with self-esteem. Why then we human beings? And especially we the so-called modern human beings who live almost entirely in our mind?"

The reason for this sorry state of affairs is that we live almost entirely in our mind. We don't identify with our being, which would be natural, but with thinking and feeling

…

Tolle mentions the ancient Indian analogy of the wave and the ocean. "Right now, we probably experience ourselves as a wave and because of so many other waves around us, we don't see the ocean at all. We struggle to survive and we are afraid, because the danger that the wave disappears is real. Every moment trillions of waves appear and disappear. They are forms on the surface of the ocean and basically nothing else but the one ocean. As soon as a wave dives deeply into itself, it realises that it is indestructible, one with the immeasurable ocean."

Even when the wave felt alone and weak, when it was afraid of dying and didn't see the ocean, it was one with it. So the connection can be made directly, not sometime in the future, because the wave is the ocean. We are Being-now. Tolle doesn't say anything new. Why then so many people all over the world throng to his talks-so many that almost always the venue cannot hold them?)

("Pop," said Mulla Nasrudin's youngest son, "can you remember the first girl you ever

kissed?"

The old Mulla gave a hollow laugh. "Son," he remarked drily, "I can't even remember the last one."

 

The landlord sent a stiff letter to his tenant, Mulla Nasrudin: "My rent is considerably

overdue and I must ask you to send on some money."

Mulla Nasrudin's reply was swift: "I don't see why I should pay your rent -- I can't pay

my own." -  Mulla Nasrudin

 

 

The gentleman was on his way home when he passed Mulla Nasrudin's house and saw

through the window Mulla Nasrudin hitting his small boy over the head with a loaf of

bread.

Next day he passed, and the next, and the next, and each time the Mulla was hitting the

boy on the head with a loaf of bread.

Finally one Tuesday when he passed, he saw the Mulla hitting the boy on the head with a cake.

"Hellow," he said putting his head in through the window," run out of bread today?”

 

"Of course not," replied Mulla Nasrudin, "It's his birthday." -  Mulla Nasrudin)