The Eternal Now

The Eternal Now

by Mooji 

 http://www.mooji.org/index.html

This mind is always oscillating between past and future, and it doesn't know right here, right now. There cannot be a history of Now! You don't need a concept to support Now. ... Now beyond the concept of now.




The Now I'm speaking about is not monitoring any external situation. It's not an 'event'!




And perceiving that which is, being what is, is also not an event. The perceiving of one's true nature is not an event. That happens in the eternal Now. That Now never becomes 'then' in the pure mind.




It means: Be totally present just as presence and Now means just being. It is just another reference name for yourself, your nature. What are you right here, right now? What can you define as yourself? How would you describe yourself? What can you say that holds the total fact of yourself?


From here, activity, however subtle, is seen as merely a transient play in consciousness. The whole universe is breathing in this.

Blessings to you, Mooji

Seneca - What a Wise Man!

A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear, while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.
~Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

There is no unhappiness in the present moment. If you find yourself unhappy, check your thoughts, watch them float by as you are the observer......they are but memories of something that has already occurred or an anticipation of a fear or anxiety of the future.

NOW - is the kingdom of heaven, right here, right now!

Discover the "Kingdom of Heaven" right NOW!
from Rhonda Byrne
Creator of The Secret


"How do I stop my negative thoughts?" - is a question that I have been asked many times. If you have ever asked this question then you will feel such enormous relief in knowing the answer, because it is so simple. How do you stop negative thoughts? You plant good thoughts!

When you try to stop negative thoughts, you are focusing on what you don't want - negative thoughts - and you will attract an abundance of them. They can never disappear if you are focused on them. The "stop" part is irrelevant - the negative thoughts are your focus. It doesn't matter if you are trying to stop negative thoughts or control them or push them away, the result is the same. Your focus is on negative thoughts, and by the law of attraction you are inviting more of them to you.

The truth is always simple and it is always easy. To stop negative thoughts, just plant good thoughts! Deliberately plant good thoughts! You plant good thoughts by making it a daily practice to appreciate all the things in your day. Appreciate your health, your car, your home, your family, your job, your friends, your surroundings, your meals, your pets, and the magnificent beauty of the day. Compliment, praise, and give thanks to all things. Every time you say "Thank you" it is a good thought! As you plant more and more good thoughts, the negative thoughts will be wiped out. Why? Because your focus is on good thoughts, and what you focus on you attract.

So don't give any attention to negative thoughts. Don't worry about them. If any come, make light of them, shrug them off, and let them be your reminder to deliberately think more good thoughts now.

The more good thoughts you can plant in a day, the faster your life will be utterly transformed into all good. If you spend only one day speaking of good things and saying "Thank you" at every single opportunity, you will not believe your tomorrow. Deliberately thinking good thoughts is exactly like planting seeds. As you think good thoughts you are planting good seeds inside you, and the Universe will transform those seeds into a garden of paradise. How will the garden of paradise appear? As your life!



May the joy be with you,


Rhonda Byrne
The Secret... bringing joy to billions

Be Still.....Be Now.....Be Present

Now is all there is. There is no other time. The past and future are concepts that can be thought about now but they can never be experienced now.

We believe in the illusion of a separate self. Self is only a concept. Eckhart Tolle, (Stillness Speaks, 2003) explains, "The mind is incessantly looking not only for food for thought; it is looking for food for its identity, its sense of self. This is how the ego comes into existence and continuously re-creates itself."


Trees, water, sky, hills--why do we divide life up and name the parts we have created?

The ego, manufactured by the mind, tells you who you are. The ego tells you that you are a body and its thoughts. Since you are a body, you can die. Since you can die, you are always in danger. Now must be broken up into pleasurable things, that are to be moved toward, and painful things that are to be avoided. Life is divided in two-- living and dying. The ego tells you that pleasure and life are the same and that pain and death are the same. This perpetuates the ego's practice of constantly resisting now--telling you that your life has problems that must be avoided and solutions that must be found. Suffering is born out of the stories we tell ourselves about pain. "Inner alignment with now is the end of suffering." (Stillness Speaks, 2003)

There is a tension that constantly moves us away from now. It says, "Go do something." It says, "Accomplish this." When a goal is accomplished, it is quickly replaced by another goal, and the moving away from now continues. It constantly seeks some time other than now. Instead of experiencing now as it is without labels, judgments, and descriptions, this mind-made self causes your true self to become lost in thought. To keep denying the reality of now, just as it is, it perceives and then describes life to you. You begin to have a relationship with life.The fact that you are life becomes obscured.

The ego chatters incessantly. It tells you that there are things outside you and things inside you. Things that are inside you are admitted into consciousness. Things outside you are denied and become subconscious or are projected "out there" so that they can be judged and related to as if they are separate objects. The ego divides up the whole of reality into parts that it names and counts. "The landscape is made up of separate things. This is a tree, that is the ground, there is the sky." This abstracting denies the fact that there is no real dividing line between the tree, the ground, and the sky--or between anything and anything else. Everything is connected.

By moving away from now and into an imaginary future, or into a remembered past, the ego seeks to establish its existence and keep the mind from discovering the truth by accepting what is now. In the future, it tells you, you can add this or that or something else to yourself and become bigger. Tomorrow you will have accomplished more. Next year you will make more money. Further denying now, the ego ruminates about the past and all its horror. Still continuing its denial of now, the ego sometimes tells you about the "good ole days" of the past.

By breaking up life and moving away from now, the ego is addicted to dualistic knowledge. This is good. That is bad. It never allows reality to be experienced and known directly as a whole just as it is. The ego can only continue its existence by thinking about life. The ego cannot exist in the only time there ever is: Now.

How do you stay in the now? You feel life as it is. You experience instead of describing experience. You observe thought instead of believing it and becoming lost in it. You accept what is instead of resisting it. Even if something is happening that you would rather not be happening, you can feel and accept that you don't like what is happening now. Consistent with the Serenity Prayer, learn to change what should be changed and accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. Just be and accept that there is nothing you need to do and nowhere you need to go. Things are the only way they can be. Stop resisting now.

That doesn't mean to stop living your life and having accomplishments. It means to be present while you are living life and having accomplishments. Feel your life. Accept and be with the feeling without labeling it or describing it or resisting it. Every success in recognizing the ego and its motivations can be built upon. Along the way, learn to observe the ego's criticizing of your progress in staying present. Eventually, it will lose its motivation to continue its chatter. When it collapses, along with its mindless emotional thinking, you will know yourself and find "the peace that surpasseth all understanding." All that is left is the timeless now.

SOURCES:

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (Novato: New World Library, 2003 and Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 2003), p. 27, p. 118.
Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Bantam Books, 1980).
Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, 20th Anniversary Edition (The Theosophical Publishing House, 1993).
A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1985).
Tony Parsons, As It Is (Inner Directions Publishing, 2002).

The Joyful Now

You've probably heard people say things like the following statements, and maybe you've said them or thought them in your mind, also:

"I don't know who I am anymore."

"I need to get a life."

"I don't have a life."

"My life is awful."

or

"I LOVE my job, therefore, I love my life!"

or

"I am just me, a person, no one special."

These statements, when you think about it, don't make any sense. You can't have a life or get a life when you are Life itself. Also, how can an I be me?

We like to argue and say, "I can tell you who I am. I am a woman (or man) who is ____ years old. I have a job and I do _______ ." Or, "I have a degree and my profession is____." Someone else may say, "I am a nobody. I have no job. I'm poor and no one cares about me." Others like to say, "I'm a good person. After all. I tithe, do volunteer work, love my family, and am compassionate towards others." Many people need to build up their sense of self, or diminish it in order to feel and believe they are a separate self.

Thoughts first form in the mind and are translated as being true and real. Soon a story is created by the mind and an identity is born. You tell yourself this is who you are. Young children, even babies, are taught to learn their names, their age, their sex, the color of their eyes, hair, etc. The baby or young child had once just enjoyed being a part of Oneness. Then the external world began telling him he must believe in what his five senses are experiencing. His parents, teachers, older siblings want him to "see" the world as they believe they see it. The pressure is on for the child to see himself as separate....separate from everything. The message from the world tells him that in order to survive and fit in, he has to believe this illusion is real (although most humans don't realize it's an illusion).

The egoic self can build itself up to become a huge, puffed up ego, or the ego can go to the other extreme, believing the self is unimportant, or mistreated by society. This is just another clever way the ego makes an identity for itself, a "less than" identity. This becomes his victim role that his mind believes is who he really is, and he must continue playing it. As strange as it sounds, a person who has made this thought into his reality will usually not let anyone talk him out of his victim role. He clings to it because he senses his ficticuous self will die.........and then where would he be without it? Or rather, who would he be? Nothing? Such a terrifying thought!

We've all done this----created an idea of who we think we really are in our minds. Surely, it's real, we think. But,these thoughts change constantly, just like the world you believe you see around you, including the body form you're in. Animals and humans are born, grow old, then die. Trees, plants, clouds in the sky, mountains, oceans.........everything we perceive as real, even mind thoughts, come and go, constantly changing. How can we ever know who we really are, the actual core reality, when even our thoughts change so frequently? How can we ever stop the insanity of chasing after our own selves?

Try this:
Watch your mind for a moment. Be still, take a breath, relax, and now focus on your mind. Do you know what your next thought will be? Do you have any control of what the next thought will be? Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher and author of many books, suggests to try pretending you are a cat, silently gazing upon a mouse hole, waiting for a mouse (a thought) to appear. This is an excellent way to calm the mind and just be the awareness of any thoughts.

By doing this little practice, you've just experienced the Now, or the Consciousness, where there is deep stillness. You will soon come to know that the thoughts swirling like a whirlpool in your mind are not who you really are. You are so very much more than that.

There has always been one thing that is ultimately real, one thing that always is, always has been. The present moment. Even though it is perceived to be a moment in time, as if this moment will be followed by many more moments, the now, or the present is all there is.


When you begin to understand this by experiencing the now for yourself, there is an even deeper knowing of who you are in this moment of Now, all that there is. Observe that you are the awareness of awareness. That is you experiencing, or knowing, the Now. Awareness is also called Consciousness, or the Now, or the Divine within. Another way of putting it is awareness is the space where the witnessing occurs. Awareness witnesses the objects and forms that move and change in the moment of now. Even mind movements are simply foms,coming and going, not who you are.

Why wouldn't everyone want this peace, this joy that is found in the now? Many egos say they want peace, but they can't tolerate it for very long. Remember the ego wants to stay alive at any price, any cost. It will create conflict, sometimes physical, or emotional conflict in order to survive. When thoughts (or simply call it brain chatter, or obsessive thinking) keep replaying the awful past or imagining a fearful, anxiety ridden future, we miss the peaceful beauty of the Now. Yet, when we are aligned with Oneness, we can experience the peace and beauty of being one with all that is. When you understand and can say, "I Am That", you are awakened.

----diane