Living in the NOW: 4. Unnecessary thoughts are the greatest obstacle on our way to the NOW.
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'Our intuitive mind is a present from the gods, and our rationality is a faithful servant. We live in a society that adores the servant and forgets the present',
Albert Einstein
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Let us be very clear about this: thinking and using your common sense are absolutely necessary if you use them for the functions for which they are needed. It seems clear that a race-car engineer that designs a car has to think carefully about the design, the construction, the materials, etc.  However, when his thinking process is disturbed because during his work he is not fully concentrated, then he does not function well, his creative impulses are hampered and at the end of the day he will feel a lot less satisfied and probably more tired than he usually feels. Unnecessary thoughts and bad concentration divert us, exhaust us and make us fail to achieve our goals. On the other hand: working with full concentration is satisfactory and makes people less tired. Working with full concentration not only diminishes the chance of falling asleep on your couch after a hard day's work, but it also leads to better achievements. The fear of tigers or lions seems realistic enough but the fear of looking foolish does not make any sense. It is our firm opinion that nearly all thoughts that hinder us to reach our aims or our dreams and have nothing to do with the activities that we are undertaking are actually superfluous.
In Zelinski's book "Doing nothing an art of living" we find a table about wasted worries. The table indicates that 96% of our worries are wasted time.
Wasted Worries (E. Zelinski)
40% of our worries have to do with events that will never take place
30% of our worries have to do with events that have already taken place
22% of our worries have to do with unimportant events
4% of our worries have to do with events that we cannot change
4% of our worries have to do with events that we can do something about
The Ego
Most of our frustrations, fears, doubts, uncertainties only exist because of our ego. Ego literally means second I and it more or less makes up a mental image of our self. The ego really thinks it knows everything about yourself and everybody else and does all it can to maintain itself. Essential words that have to do with the conditioning of our ego are: No, shortage, resistance, unrest, separated, dependence, incomplete and time. As all our impressions are subjective, and are consequently experienced and interpreted by every person in his own way, we can say of our thoughts that we should not take them too literally. Two persons with an identical DNA structure can have totally different personalities and ideas. Perhaps one of them may suffer from an inferiority complex as a result of experiences in his youth and perhaps the other one has no insecurities at all. Yet both of them are made up of the same building blocks. But one of the two is constantly hampered in his life and in his happiness by an uninterrupted flow of negative trains of thought that may be completely irrelevant for the other one and for almost everybody else. As M. Caplan puts it so nicely: our ego is the author, the director, all the actors and the reviewer all in one. The ego determines the scenario until the real self takes over and we are in a position of BEING. With BEING we mean an open concept that covers the transcendental reality of living in the NOW. Consequently our ego is the big monster and the result is that every now and then in the spiritual world the ego is under attack. Personally we wonder if this is the right method. Do not we need the ego in the first place to motivate us on our way to enlightenment? We do not have to imprison our ego, but it should be our servant and not our master.
Buddha defines enlightenment as the end of all suffering and our intellect is the greatest obstacle in reaching this aim. Enlightenment is associated with a condition of uninterrupted love, happiness and peace. If we can really achieve enlightenment may be a big question and a question that everybody should answer for himself. However this may be: it is certainly possible to get close to this ideal and to spend more and more time in the NOW. What we should remember is that the ego is responsible for our thoughts of frustrations, fears, doubts and uncertainties. And consequently for all thoughts that have nothing to do with the NOW. When we succeed in taking our ego and our thoughts less seriously, accepting our present circumstances, and we can resist our inclination to view every situation as a starting point for setting up a search to see if we can make a problem out of it, we may be able to make progress in our efforts to spend more time in the NOW.
Meditating to be able to live in the NOW.
This is a completely different approach as compared to lifting up your life to a higher level via some new games, a course of skydiving, sex or drugs or rock&roll. No matter how much fun some of these activities can give us the joy they give is only temporary. Besides: people soon get used to these things and have to look for ever more drastic activities to get some satisfaction. Nevertheless: we cannot but admit that some of the activities mentioned can be quite fantastic and sometimes even useful. To put it even stronger: the makers of this site cannot live without them and are fond of them. The great thing is that by means of certain techniques and by means of our philosophy we have learned to enjoy these activities even better. To give an example: when people are snowboarding any form of fear is usually at once followed by a fall or a contorted technique. By means of a studied getting rid of this hampering fear and these unpleasant anxieties we have discovered that despite our limited technical skills we can now easily master slopes that made us tremble in the past. Gradually we see that these forms of spiritual thinking are applied more and more frequently in all fields of sports and in the business world.
 Gerry Lopez, from Hawaii, a legendary figure in the world of wave surfing gives the following answer when a reporter asks him whether he applies yoga, Meditation and spiritual principles when surfing:
'You must purposefully empty yourself of all thoughts, images and consequently also fears. You are only busy with the moment. Thoughts create a separation between you and what you see. Then your view is not clear enough. You have to become one with your senses and that only happens when you are not thinking. When you are scared your tendency is to withdraw into yourself, you become nervous and you start to make mistakes. That is something that you can do without when you are riding a high wave. I think that if people succeed in focussing on other things in this way, for instance their work or their relationships, they will be much more successful.'
We think that with these words Gerry Lopez hits the nail on the head. Would not it be wonderful to be able to apply techniques that help us to get back into the NOW whenever we feel the need to? Meditating teaches us to get into the NOW, to be there, to stay there. Techniques developed for Meditating can be helpful when people want to be able to feel relaxed at any moment they like or to escape from unwanted thoughts that cause you not to be in the NOW.
Read the sequel about Living in the Now in the fifth article: Meditating, a key to living in the NOW.
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