Living in the NOW: 3. In the NOW, everything is beautiful and perfect!
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'Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present', Eleanor Roosevelt
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We people love to be relaxed and negative emotions cannot affect us in any way as long as we are in this pleasant state of mind. We are fond of peak experiences and "flow" moments. During such moments we live in the NOW because our thoughts are in the t=0 (the moment). They are not concerned with the past or the future. The ego is switched off and so is our tendency to judge and we are only busy with pure thinking and pure observing. If you focus your attention completely on the NOW and you get into touch with your true nature, what remains of your excuses, your fears and your problems? In the NOW there is simply no room for such matters. We get closer to the essence of our existence and in spite of our problems, positive and negative moods and negative experiences in our life, we will discover that living as a human being is something good and really beautiful. For when you forget all your worries and you look with full concentration and completely relaxed at a rainbow or a ray of sunlight you can no longer disapprove and judge.
We observe things more sharply in the NOW because we do not have to judge, to understand or to argue. This very sharp and unprejudiced observing shows, according to Trungpa, the fundamental goodness of the moment. In other words: because we observe much more sharply we will much better realise the beauty and the perfection of many things. When you think a lot or when you have an active mind, your senses are not sharp and it becomes more difficult to see the beauty of things. In the NOW every moment is a peak experience or flow experience because our enlarged consciousness and power of concentration fully enable us to enjoy everything that mother nature has in store for us. Could this be the reason why fundamentally all of us love peak experiences?
During a peak experience we drop our shield for a moment and we get a glimpse of the truth and the beauty that lie underneath everything and everybody. This situation of living completely in the moment and enjoying this, a condition in which all our worries, frustrations, fears and impediments are gone, looks a little like the situation that we are supposed to find in paradise. How can you enjoy life and be really happy when your attention and concentration are disturbed by a constant distraction of negative trains of thought? In other words: in our opinion heaven must be a place where we live completely in the NOW because otherwise heaven cannot be heaven. It may be possible to live quite comfortably in a world without war where you can play with a lion in Tarzan's paradise-like jungle, you cannot reach nirvana as long as your mind is not fully at rest. Let us make this a little clearer. Has it ever struck you that when you are worrying, everything else passes you by and it even tires you out? This idea makes it possible that only after many years you find out that somewhere along the road that you pass every day on your bike or in your car there is an extremely beautiful tree or building that you never noticed before.
The world is perfect and unbelievably beautiful. We must only discover this and see it. Your true soul is not afraid of anybody, immune to criticism, does not feel superior to anybody and realises that in essence we are all one and the same. The only thing that we still have to do is try and find the right methods and techniques to alter our perspective and live more in the NOW. In other words: we must see to it that our consciousness grows, that the effect of our mind on what we do and what we are becomes less and that in this process we get into touch with our emotions and our inner potential. As we can read at other places on this site Meditation is the best technique to train our mind to live more in the NOW.
Read the sequel about Living in the NOW in the fourth article Unnecessary thoughts are the greatest obstacle on our way to the NOW.
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