The Now of Life

What is Now?

What time is it now on your watch? Is it 6PM? Would you call it as “Now”? But one hour later when it is 7PM it can still be called “Now”. Go forward 10 days and you can still call that as “Now”. Heck, by the time you say the word “Now”, the now might have moved a couple of seconds. I am writing this now, but you will read it later which is now for you. So when exactly is now? If you think about it, our past, present and future is nothing but an infinite string of “Now” – Now, Now, Now, Now …! It has always been now and only now has existed in real and nothing else.

What about the past and future? Where are they?

The past is not going to be found outside. You can find its imprints but that’s it, there is no secret place where they keep re-enacting our past. The past is in your memory. We remember things and that is how we relate to the past.

- We love the good things of the past and we want to repeat that experience and we also hate the bad things and we don’t want them to happen. This is when we intensely pray God! We pray to God that we don’t want old bad things to happen again to us. But they happen to us anyway and then we say “Why God Why!”.

- The opposites of life makes sure that if you get something good, you also get something equally bad. So if you want something better from the past, you will have to accept something worse too. It goes on in a vicious cycle and if you believe in re-incarnation we continue this ignorantly in our next life.

- The Past should be used only for learning and for guidance. You have to totally understand that what worked in the past may not work in the present moment, lest you want to end up in that vicious cycle.

So where is the future then? I have no idea! According to what I have read, there is an infinite cosmic mind and it contains possibilities of the future. Let it be so or Let it not be so, but our point has been that we always worry about our future. We have to earn enough money so that we can live a peaceful life in future. We have so many dreams built up, believing on a future that is yet to happen. We work with the financial adviser and chart out a really intelligent plan which is based on the “Stock Market” and add hope to the equation. When our hopes shatter, we blame it on the Society or Government or we get angry with our Gods. Well, Future is always going to be full of surprises.

The Surprises of Life
I will share with you a short Zen story I read.

A student goes to stay with a master to learn fencing. For the first week, the master asks the student to completely do only the household chores like cooking, washing, cleaning and serve the master. The master treated him like dirt. Apart from this, the master began to attack him with a stick every now and then randomly. The student would go to the kitchen and he would be attacked, he would go to the bedroom and he would be attacked. Every time the student kept track of which places he hides and he would become alert there. But the master kept using new hiding places and surprised him everyday. The student finally gave up, he left all the memory of the hiding places. He became completely alert wherever he went and was always ready for a surprise attack. The next morning when he went inside the kitchen, he immediately defended the surprise attack in the blink of an eye. The master said “Now you are ready to learn!”.

The experiences of the past makes us more alert and this is the learning we have to carry. Be aware at all the times, because life is full of surprises. It doesn’t mean you have to live in fear, it just means awareness or alertness. It was not the past solution of keeping track of the hiding places that helped him, but the new solution of acting out of alertness in the moment that helped him. Your alertness decreases when you worry about the past and dream about the future all the time. When you be in the moment, your alertness naturally follows. For learning more about Awareness, I found the book – Awareness By OSHO to be very informative.

Tuning into the moment
What does this mean? Shall we all stop doing what we are doing and just go live in the moment, partying all the time? That’s not only impractical, it is also stupid. So don’t get carried away when people want you to live in the moment. Think what it means.

It means that, continue doing whatever you are doing, but the only focus should be on what you are doing right now with complete awareness.

When the Zen Master eats, he just eats. But when we eat we do the following:

1. Talk.
2. Think about stuff.
3. Worry about stuff.
4. Criticize the food.
5. Count the calories.
6. Keep track of the time, so you eat fast.

Basically we do everything but eating. Passively eating and actively engaged in other stuff. If we do the reverse, Consciously eat  and let the other stuff just float by like clouds. When you consciously eat, you will automatically relax and eat slowly. You will be more in the moment. This is actually easier said than done. I have been trying this for the past few weeks (struggling, with stupid jokes flowing during serious contemplative moments!) and I am hoping that I will get a hang of it someday.

So What happens if you are in the now? You tune yourself with the Universe. You will begin to exist with the flow of nature, establish a deep harmony. When you are in the now, a lot of questions get answered automatically. It is like answers flow as thoughts from the silence of your mind automatically with no effort. The entire Universe is in Meditation and when we tune ourselves into it, we are naturally in the meditative state.

I also learned that any technique of meditation only helps you to be in the meditative state. It is just the beginning and it has to be like that all the while during the day even when we don’t practice the technique. The more things I get to know, the more ignorant I feel.

So Let’s Just be.

The Opposites of Life

What is it?
Good and Bad exist in the external world like Day and Night. Positives and Negatives coexist in the Universe and are the driving forces behind its creation and further evolution. Electricity itself is the flow of electrons in one direction and protons in the opposite direction. But this is very generic and one would wonder what it all means and what could be taken out of it. These are the kind of generic basic lessons I was getting from that cartoon show back in 2007 and It actually took one year to dawn on me that I should probably read a few resources to understand this in detail.One of it was a book “What is Zen?” by Alan Watts, a Classic.

One way of looking at it was, without the bad you cannot appreciate the beauty of Good. Without night, you will not appreciate the light from the day. So, does this mean bad is essential? Should things go bad? Should there be “badness” in this world? Don’t we all think that how peaceful the world would be if everything is just good? May be we can all export the badness (not bad people) to some other planet and just keep the juice of goodness on Earth? Will that give us happiness? My mind was taking crazy spin around these thoughts when I was trying to relate what the Zen wisdom of law of opposites meant in real life.

Where is it?
It was a constant search. I never realized that I should look in the direction of the thoughts that come in your mind. You have so dwelt in our thoughts, so become one with our thoughts that we forget to watch our own thoughts and we just lead a reactive life to our thoughts. In other words, we just identify ourselves with our thoughts. If we get anger, we show it. If we get sad we react to that sad thought. All of this happens as we get stimulated from our external environment and we just remain like a dancing puppet in the hands of the external world controlling us all the while.

The next thing we do is the moment we see what we are thinking, we immediately judge ourselves with those thoughts. We judge that we are good when we are kind and we are bad when we are angry. Because, we have identified ourselves as this Body and Mind, anything good done by the body and mind makes us feel good and massages our ego but anything done bad or goes bad makes us feel bad about ourselves and we accumulate fear, guilt and what not! We then let that trigger more emotions within us. We are just a bundle of these chains of infinite emotions of opposite polarity arising from our thoughts. The modern civilized man has actually lost himself in his mind of opposite emotions.

This was the opposite that had to be looked at. The opposite of Good and Bad thought right within us. Knowing is Good, but if you are not conscious enough, it can cause the rise of your ego and whenever someone questions your knowledge and if you don’t seem to know it right, your ego will be hurt and you feel bad. Knowledge caused the Goodness in you, while the Hurt ego made you feel bad. This is the kind of existence of opposites within you.

Why is it?
The realization was that Good cannot exist all by itself. It attracts very quickly the equivalent bad very close to itself. So Good and Bad exist together as neighbors in your mind. How crazy is that? All the while, the moral world wants everyone to only be good, but the law of opposites says you can only be good if it can attract equal amount of bad. Go ahead, give it a thought, this is always true and there is no escape. If you are conscious you will quickly find that all the so called “badness” thoughts are actually getting buried by you within yourself because you are afraid the society might think you are mad. So long you would have thought you had controlled your anger and then one simple insult or a provoke you burst and you don’t even know it happened.

What to do?
At some point, some circumstances lead me to this book – “Emotional Wellness” by Osho. I mainly picked it up because I wondered if it could help me manage my fear and anger. I had no idea that I would be introduced into the world of consciousness and being aware of yourself and how one can deal with all your emotions completely. The essence of the book was to take the stance of a neutral observer and watch as you feel these emotions, without making any judgments. The emotions don’t stay within you if you just watch them. They stop their flow and stay with you as soon as you want to pass a judgment. Otherwise, They just flow out slowly and steadily. It becomes a living meditation where you watch your feelings all the time as a neutral entity/being. You will finally become that neutral being from where only the light of neutral energy flows. This is what is described in the book and if you read that in detail, a lot of it makes sense. Osho keeps it interesting and understandable with Zen stories and humour throughout the book. The only thing left for me is to experience this practically and I had been practicing that ever since I finished it (which was 2 weeks back I think!). At first, it seems difficult but I think as you go it would become more free and natural to observe.

The Fight of Good against Bad:
The society always tells of the stories of the fight between good and bad. The Good finally wins and the bad is destroyed. Sorry, but they are just stories where only people who couldn’t manage their “badness” were killed by the society. The truth is there is no point in killing bad people, not even killing yourself if you turn bad. Because it is the badness that you have to let it out. There is no point in letting the Good and Bad in you fight with each other. This is exactly why Gandhi and Buddha vouched non-violence as their motto. Ahimsa is the way that they said. If you have bad thoughts in you, you just watch it and let it flow out, leaving absolutely no stain in you. The moment you judge you leave the stain of guilt. Never Judge, just watch. Watch it fill your body and flow out of every single pore of your body.  This is also what it means when they say offer it to God. Osho simply said that in practical terms. If you let it out, it is automatically absorbed by God or Universe.

Do you remember the scene when Munna forgives himself and asks for forgiveness from Circuit in “Lage Raho Munnabhai!”. The emotions were let loose and they flowed out. What was left was the unconditional friendship love between them. Where was Munna’s anger/guilt and Circuit’s sadness after that one single act of letting it flow consciously? In fact this is exactly what Gandhi employed against the British. He will remain the watcher, will not react and will neither co-operate to all the laws laid out by the British. Only peaceful protests. Gandhi made the entire country just remain silent and watch as the British left us eventually. It is another story whether we really got the “Freedom” after that. But the essence that Gandhi applied externally is the same for your inside, with respect to the fight between Good and Evil.

Watch the evil in you without any judgement and also watch the good in you without any judgment. You will raise above the ordinary Good and Evil and you will become pure unconditional goodness. This is what is preached by Osho, Buddha and all enlightened souls.

And now we Begin:
If you want to understand the universe, you have to understand yourself first without any judgment or conclusion about yourself. You have to keep observing yourself until you reach the point where you simply become the observer with no relation to the thoughts that arise in you. You go on as being that neutral observer after that. This process never should stop, and the wasteful thinking slows down and would eventually stop. This is the state, the state of a neutral observer that has no opposites. You are then in control and aware of what you do. You can then choose to provide that neutral energy to whichever thought you wish to. Your thinking will now be clear and conscious. This is where I am trying to get to and I am wishing that every single human gets his/her opportunity to know this and get to this.

I am now reading another book of Osho – “Awareness” to know about this in detail. So far this book has been great and I will try to provide a summary and a review when I finish reading it.