LIVING AWAKE IS LIVING NOW
Step out of your thoughts.
Your timeless presence,
freedom, and being
exist only Now.
WE CAN ONLY BE AWAKE NOW
Contrary to the mind’s projection, we can only be awake Now. We cannot hold on to yesterday’s awakening, as powerful as it might have been, or think that tomorrow we might finally “wake up.” What is aware in us this very moment is timeless, and it unfolds its beingness only now. The mind is always looking for another moment. It lives in time, in duality. Duality is not a mistake, for the Infinite needs duality to experience itself. The constructs of time and space allow the Infinite to experience itself as duration and form. However, what is awake sees from beyond time and is awake only in the timeless Now. When we imagine that we can be awake in some other time than now, in some other place than here, we delude ourselves. Even our memories and projections occur in the Now.
The seeker imagines he is traveling in time toward a goal called “enlightenment” and wants to find the best path. There’s a wonderful story that illustrates the seeker’s dilemma. It includes an exchange in which a student asks his teacher whether the path to enlightenment is difficult or easy. He is told it is neither. When the student questions why, the teacher responds that there is no path to enlightenment; one does not travel to a goal. It is a journey that has no distance. When we stop traveling, we arrive.1
TIME AND THE TIMELESS COLLAPSE IN THE NOW
Time is actually the timeless manifesting as Being. When the timelessness of Being is seen through the mind, it is called “time.” We perceive time when we perceive change. For the mind, time can seem to move fast or slow, but in fact, our life is simply now. When we are totally present now, beyond ideas, we are living awake, no longer identified with past memories or future expectations. The eternal Now is timeless, yet it appears as this moment—fresh, mysterious, alive, and free. Now is our timelessly awake Self being.
This very moment, this very breath, this very experience, this very sensation, all are objects in the Heart of Awareness that is here now. What is awake in us lives in the Now and cannot be separated from what is occurring. Whatever our fantasy may be about a spiritual journey that will take us from “here” to “there,” we eventually see that it has only been a journey back to here and now. To be here consciously, and fully present now, is to experience our awake Presence. For a moment, consider being here without a past or projected future. Whom or what would you be?
WHERE AM I?
Along with the question Who am I? we might also ask Where am I? No matter where the body travels or what experiences arise, aren’t you always here? Here, in the car moving the body to the grocery store. Here, in the phone conversation. Here, in the cooking of dinner. Here, in the argument with your partner. Here, in the perusing of the internet. Here, as your body sleeps. YOU are always here. Awareness is that which is here/now—not a body, not a mind, not an object that comes and goes, but that which is ever present.
A great liberation comes from living now as our Self, but it costs us our desire to live “then” or “when.” This moment is a doorway into the timeless, awake dimension of our Being. Just this! What happens when we allow everything to be as it is now? The mind cannot understand how there could be peace if the moment is not peaceful, but peace is what is underlying all moments, all experiences—timelessly here now.
TIME DOES NOT TAKE US TO THE TIMELESS
Awakened living is all about returning again and again to Now, which is the timeless dimension right in front of us, not a thought in the back of the mind’s memory. We can only breathe now, live now, and love now.
Can you love tomorrow? Tomorrow is imagination, fantasy. The love you will give or receive tomorrow, “when . . .,” is a fantasy that disappears with the illusion of time. It does not take more time to experience the timelessness of Being—the radiance in a flower, the life energy in a bird winging its way across the sky, the mystery of who you are. Why wait? Tomorrow never comes, for when it does, it’s always today! Being awake is now; it does not operate in past or future tenses, and it actually steps out of the present tense as well in its timeless Presence. Even if we have had powerful and authentic awakenings or openings in the past, we must return to now if we are to live awake.
RETURNING TO ZERO
Minds want to know: Does a sage think, feel, walk, talk, have a spouse, a job, ever become ill? Does he ever feel frustration, sadness, anger, fear? To live awake, will it be necessary to drop out of my normal life and live in a cave? Does everyone who has had an awakening experience become a spiritual teacher?
The mind is always comparing itself with what it considers to be the ideal of a person living the awakened life. “The ideal looks like this; no, it looks like that.” But however it looks, the mind is quite convinced it does not look like the one he or she is. Ramana would frequently be asked questions along this vein. He usually responded by asking, “Why do you want to know about someone else when you do not yet know who you yourself are? Find out who you are first, then see if the question remains.”2
Life moves, mind moves, feelings move, but not a single moment is taken to be personal or separate from the wholeness of Being. And the wholeness of Being cannot be separated from the Source of Being, which is infinite, indescribable, nonconceptual, and incapable of being objectified in any way. The Source is where all concepts, forms, and differentiation dissolve. This is what I call “zero.” It does not have a name. But whatever appears in/as Being arises from such a Mystery and returns to it, including the mind that creates an experience of self, world, and other. When this movement of mind “returning” to its home ground happens spontaneously in consciousness, we might call it “returning to zero.” But the infinite zero does not move and thus has no need of returning anywhere; it is attention that returns to the silence and stillness of the Heart of Awareness.
THE WILLINGNESS TO BE TRANSFORMED
Egoic thought cannot know itself as “pure awareness”; rather, it is awareness that sees egoic thought. The infinite Ocean of Awareness awakens itself within its own expression of Being. And it is that same awake beingness that will transform our way of being in the world. If we are looking for a “permanent” state of embodiment or a knowing of pure awareness that is “remembered” every single moment, we are still operating from the mind of separation.
When there has been a true awakening, it is the Mystery and not the “me” that then begins to transform our thoughts, our heart, and our actions. At this point many seekers move away from what they have realized and return to the mind to try to figure out how to live from this truth. However, as soon as we go back to the mind’s thoughts about “how,” we have departed from the mystery of Being, which is the agent of living more deeply, directly, and simply from what we are. So this often becomes a source of confusion, and many either return to egoic transformation techniques, which are now directed by a spiritualized ego, or they become passive rather than grounded in Being, which is simultaneously alive, present, intimate with the moment, and functioning with wisdom and compassion. In either case, realization may not truly flower because of one’s attempts to either control or avoid acting from that deeper dimension.
OUR LOCUS OF OPERATION SHIFTS
What happens is that our locus of operation shifts from conditioned thought to the openness of not-knowing mind. Conditioned thought may remain when it is useful, but we are now available for what Consciousness wants to say or do, knowing that it is always relating to itself from within itself. Responses simply happen spontaneously without the kind of deliberation our ego might once have engaged in. We experience “being lived.” We trust the discriminating wisdom of the Heart of Awareness to move us.
When the inner knowing is informing our speech and actions without the filter of ego trying to stay safe or trying to be seen in a certain way, we may not, initially, always feel comfortable following “instructions.” Yet here is where Emptiness begins dancing effortlessly, at times in surprising ways.
Of course, there are no guarantees that we will always be perfect in our responses. When we begin to realize the truth of what we are, we may feel that we are free, but our minds, emotions, and bodies may be acting and reacting from old identifications. It is our deep and sincere devotion to Truth and to living from Truth that opens the heart and mind and creates willingness for all false views to be deconstructed. Realization does not create a new identity; it keeps shedding old ones.
LIVING WITHOUT A MAP
To the egoic mind, living awake is imagined to be living in an ultimate state of knowing—always knowing what to say, where to go, what to do, how to respond, what the next thing should be. Actually, living awake is living without a map. We are not given a ten-year plan, not even a ten-minute plan or even a ten-second plan, which does not mean that we never make plans. It’s just that we understand today’s plan may not be tomorrow’s reality. Our mind learns to live in not knowing, which, of course, was always the state of affairs, if we are being honest; but we imagined we were in control and had a mental map for living. We may have spent years trying to find the “right” map to tell us how to move in life and in relationships.
Now, there is nothing wrong with having a moral compass, or values based on kind and compassionate ways of behaving in life, or helpful ways of thinking about oneself or interacting with others. But living awake is not about knowing ahead of time what may be called for in any given moment or what compassion will look like. We actually are living without a map or a goal.
To the Western mind, living without a goal, without a map, having nowhere to go and nothing to do sounds like sheer madness—boring at best, lazy, irresponsible, and an invitation to chaos at worst. But nothing could be further from the truth. It might mean, in living awake, that we are finally available for Truth to move spontaneously within us in the Now, allowing action to come from the dimension of our being that is clear and at peace. Doing is coming from Being. It does not mean living stupidly or passively or being unable to make plans. It means not being attached to those plans. It means being open to what is here now rather than judging it, being curious rather than fearful about this moment’s expression. It means being authentic, real, engaged, and intimate with experience.
By all means, if you want to drive to an unknown destination in your car, use a map. But if you want Truth, be guided from the deep, silent Source within that gives the mind no security but, rather, continually invites it to the unknown and to the lifelong adventure of living openly now.
WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED FOR IN ANY GIVEN MOMENT
In any given moment or situation what might be called for could simply be a warm smile, a hug, compassionate listening, giving bread to someone who is hungry, or offering love to someone starving from its lack. What might be needed is changing our baby’s diapers, washing dishes, watering plants, visiting a shut-in, giving our partner a kiss. Or what could be called for is a confrontation to an ego. In times of emergency, when there is no time to reflect, action may happen to save lives or avert accidents. When we experience being in the flow, we are not thinking about it; life is simply flowing effortlessly. We might be playing an instrument, singing in the shower, making a piece of art, running without thinking about running, enjoying cooking a new dish.
We will also be faced with challenges, difficult decisions, people who seem to thrive on creating conflict, drama, or argument. Are we willing/able to stay connected to what is most deeply true, even as we have to be clear, set boundaries on our time, or refrain from engaging in dramas that are no longer interesting to us? Each time we relate, we may be tempted to return to old conditioned ways of being, but here is where it may take courage to live from what we have realized—and love from an open heart. We do not become doormats. When we take a seat in our true Self, we have great respect for our own expression of Being and what is true for us, at the same time honoring that others are deserving of the same respect and freedom to be who they are.
When life is simply happening spontaneously, with seemingly unexpected and sometimes miraculous outcomes, the ego wants to know how to stay in the flow. But the ego is not in charge of the flow. It is life without the continual story of “me”; it is simply the flow of life itself. We ARE life, not the separate “one” experiencing ourselves as its victim or its victor. The river of life keeps flowing.
THE MINDSTREAM
Each of us has a stream running through our life that has been called a “mindstream.” It is the flow of Being itself, carrying with it the moment-to-moment continuation of both mental and sense impressions that pass through consciousness. It includes the impersonal stream of karmic conditions and imprints, both positive and negative. From these impermanent moments that appear in the river of Being, we construct a seemingly permanent “self.” But like a flowing river, it never stays the same for a single moment. It is awareness itself that provides our sense of continuing. Impermanent moments or trace memories appearing in consciousness do not produce a separate entity.
While the mindstream carries impressions from prior lifetimes to this one, giving rise to the concept of reincarnation (past lives or karma for a separate “me” or separate “soul”), these ideas are dependent on identification with both time and our time-bound mind. Our deepest nature is timeless, whole, undivided, and compassionately awake in the Now. It is not personal, has no separate “self,” and yet here it is, awake and aware in each of us, each a unique, moment-to-moment expression of Totality. Some of us carry memories of what I would now call “past-life dreams,” for even this life is a dream, from one perspective. What we carry in the karmic stream are memories of past actions, experience, or feelings, both negative and positive, that arise in present experience to be liberated back into the wholeness of Being or to continue an evolutionary journey.
Imprints or impulses appear in our experience in the Now; a certain flavor seems particular to us, and yet it is simply the conditioned movement of life itself. These impressions, flowing in consciousness, appear in order to be seen and liberated from the illusion of separation. The melting of separation comes through the power of Presence and love in the Now. The past has no hold when we are intensely focused on experience now. If there is something “past” that needs to be seen or healed back into wholeness, it will arise in present experience. We do not have to dig up pebbles from the streambed.
Whether we call this continuation a mindstream of Consciousness, a river of Being, or what is passed along in the lineage of our forefathers and foremothers through our genetic heritage and life experience, the mindstream does not define us but plays a part in our functioning and in where we may feel resonance. The stream is always flowing, yet it is simply a current and not an identity.
While our time-bound mind imagines the stream will eventually merge with the Ocean in the future, it is actually occurring within the Ocean of Awareness right now. The timeless does not require time. Our awakening and freedom are present now. Through our devotion to Truth, we begin to see more and more deeply the ways the egoic mind holds on to a time-bound identity of separation.
Experientially, our lives are a continually changing happening in Consciousness itself. While we are conditioned to believe our body or mind contains a separate “self,” in fact, upon deeper examination, we find no such entity—only the flow of thoughts, feelings, experience, memory, sense impressions, all happening in the river of Being. Or we could envision our life and experience as being a bit like popcorn popping—now a thought, now a feeling, now a rosebud, now a sip of water, now being at work, now a moment of fatigue, now a moment of joy, now a moment of sorrow, on and on, each popping up in the dimensionless space of awareness, seemingly real and yet totally ephemeral. To live more and more consciously as this transparent awareness is living more and more in the peace of our true nature.
SURPRISE AND JOY
Sometimes, in the midst of a suffering world, we forget that joy exists. Many of us are too busy worrying about life to enjoy the precious moments of living it. Our minds attempt to wrap meaning around each and every occurrence, and in doing so, we cannot experience the fullness of the moment as it is, much less find any joy in it. Without awareness, there could be no thinking, but thinking is not the same as simply being aware. Each moment is fresh and new. No moment repeats itself—ever! Only ideas repeat themselves; interpretations repeat themselves; stories repeat themselves.
Surprise, astonishment, wonder, amazement are frequent experiences when we are open to the moment as it is instead of as we think it should be. That is why the whole world is fascinating to a small child who still lives moment to moment without many ideas. A dead bird, a cloud in the sky, a tiny flower, a green bean, all equally fascinate the unconditioned mind of a child. He finds joy in unimaginable places; so does the sage.
To live awake means to be truly aware, to be open to surprises, to taste the joy of simply Being, whether we are listening to music, looking at the stars, or tasting a strawberry. It means being present to one another, walking on this earth, experiencing our breathing, being wholeheartedly involved with life. Joy and suffering frequently trade places and are sometimes different interpretations about life rather than different actual experiences. The death of one moment brings a new one. Both mourning and welcoming are possibilities.
There is a sense of wonder, a sense of joy and spontaneity that often feels lost as we live so much of our lives in the virtual reality of our mind instead of the actual reality of the moment we are experiencing. Wake up! The grass underneath your feet is astonishing; the pattern of light on the carpet is fascinating; the fact that your body knows how to heal itself is amazing; the billions of galaxies are unfathomable. But none is as wondrous as the truth of YOU and the gift you give the world of loving your Self as all of it!