Chapter Five: Awakening To The Moment

Chapter Five - Awakening To The Moment: If we spend more time in our minds being distracted from the moment we are in, how much of life are you actually experiencing? It is absolutely essential that we live in the moment that we are in. This is the only way that we have the opportunity to experience life the way it was meant to unfold.

Transcript

Chapter Five

Awakening to the Moment

Positive affirmation: Awakening to the Moment. Address This Moment with a sense of wonderment and innocence, for it is the doorway into your deepest joy. 

Life is happening in a series of moments. You move from one moment to the next, and the idea is to be aware and capture all the moments of your life. I have missed many moments in my life by being stuck in my mind. I was stuck, but life kept rolling on without me. What happened in those moments that I can’t remember? 

What is this moment and how does one stay present with it? This chapter addresses these very questions and then takes you deeper into concepts beyond your mind.

By missing moments of your life, you miss what life has in store for you and what you can offer the world in return. The Japanese term ichi-go ichi-e means “never again” or “one chance in a lifetime.” It reminds us to cherish the moment, for it will never happen again in the same way. 

This moment, right now, contains more than you may realize. There is a vast amount of depth and meaning hidden within this moment. If you are not paying attention, it will pass you by. On the surface, this moment may seem mundane or just like any other. Conversely, when you fully enter this moment, you can access peace, Divine presence, wisdom, and intuition. Your mind cannot conceive the extent to which you will be given love and direction. Inside, you have a road map the leads to your greatest joy and fulfilment. Being in the moment can show you what you have been oblivious to or what you have been turning a blind eye to as well. You need to be in the moment to spot all the gifts landing at your feet and to avoid foreseeable potential hazards. 

Life isn’t just about being positive or finding positivity. Being in the moment can help you remain calm if life starts to fall apart. A positive person is not always a realistic person. Being truly in this moment is about being honest and real with what is happening from one moment to the next.

This moment is full of all the things you require to reach your purpose. This very moment is the accumulation of all your moments put together. Also, this moment is inter-connected to a vast number of potentials and forces of nature. Whatever is happening in this moment is no accident. You have called together all the forces which have created what you are experiencing now. A victim to the world will cry out that terrible things happen to them all the time, while an empowered person will embrace this moment with acceptance and acknowledgement that this particular moment is happening for them, not to them. By being consciously aware of the moment you are in, you have a greater ability to see and experience all that is in front of you. It helps you to be more engaged with life. 

Identifying How You Exit the Moment

Life is an adventure best understood by living it one moment at a time.

When you are not in the moment, you fall out of context with what is happening around you. This also happens when you get stuck in your head, lost in your thoughts. You can lose touch with the truth.

This was something that happened to me frequently. My mind would make up a story and, before I found out if it was true or not, I would begin reacting. Jealousy is a great example of this. In my past, I would let my jealous thoughts invade my mind to the point where I would become angry at my partner. Even though I had no proof, I couldn’t seem to find a way out of my delusions. In those moments, I would completely lose touch with the truth.

As you build experiences, your mind begins to catalogue, searching for similarities from your past to your current moments. Immediately upon finding a match, your mind will try to predict what is going to happen next. The problem is that you don’t always see what is truly happening in the moment when you are distracted by your assumptions. Sometimes you just see what you want to see. You extract slivers of the present and twist the moment to relate to one of your past moments. In doing so, you completely miss what is unfolding in front of you and become out of context with what’s at hand. 

Another exit from the moment occurs when you are triggered. A trigger is something you feel, see, hear, smell, or touch in the present moment that brings up a memory of the past. Triggers can be positive, negative, or neutral. These triggers can draw you away from the moment, as you are thrown back into an experience from your past. Triggers can cause you to shut down and become locked into your mind. When this happens, you immediately withdraw from the moment. 

The important message here is to remember that the next time you get triggered, you can choose to come back to the moment you’re in and reinsert yourself into what’s really going on in front of you. By reinserting yourself in the moment, you fall back into context with what is happening around you. 

Everyone loses touch with the moment. There will be periods in your life when you find it more difficult to remain present. During times of conflict, trauma, or loss, the allure of your mind will be very tempting. Knowing what takes you out of the moment and into your mind is valuable information. As you practice staying in the moment, you develop more awareness of it. In doing so, you reduce the distractions and allow yourself to catch more of life.

Imagine you are watching a movie. You watch for one minute and then fast forward twenty minutes. If you keep doing this, by the end of the movie you would have only watched a very small fraction of it. If you only watched six to nine minutes of a ninety-minute movie, would you know what that movie was about? You most definitely wouldn’t be able to extract much meaning or value from it. 

This happens often in life. You catch a minute of your life and then get stuck in your mind. By doing so, you are on pause while life keeps rolling along around you. This can cause you to feel out of place and like you don’t fit in. It can also make you feel as if life is moving too fast and you cannot keep up. 

The mind has a strong propensity to predict and judge everything that is happening now and what needs to happen in the future. By releasing the mind of this duty, you allow yourself to become innocent, to allow what is really happening to be as it is, without your projections and expectations placed upon it. Being in the moment doesn’t mean that you don’t prepare for the future or make plans. It means that you don’t revisit your plans more often than necessary. If you get stuck in your mind worrying about possible outcomes, you only see your past. The grace and perfection this moment offers you is best understood by living completely and deeply in the presence of this moment. 

Return to Innocence

Innocence occurs naturally when you rest deeply in the moment and mute the inner voices. The quieter the mind, the more swiftly you fall into a state of innocence. The absolute joy of innocence is self-evident when you return to it. One of the commentaries in your mind that removes you from being innocent is the voice that says “I know” to everything. By stopping yourself from thinking you know everything, you will see the world around you in a different light. Meet the world with fresh and new eyes. You may find that things and people are not as you thought they were. 

 Daily I look at my partner as if I don’t know her. In this practice, I see her beauty as I did the first day we met. This simple practice leaves me in a state of awe of her. Each time I look at my wife with my fresh, new eyes, I find more to learn and love about her. Since everything is in a state of change, I know she will never be the same twice. I get to learn and discover her anew every day. 

Your perspective changes from one moment to the next. The appearance that things are suspended in time is temporary; even the landscape around you changes daily. Your mind likes to feel it knows everything, so change can be difficult in the mind. It needs everything in your life to remain as it is so that it can claim its worth—that it knows something. But change is a blessing, even though it may not feel like it when you are clinging to the past or a desired outcome. There is no peace in clinging to the past or future. 

Take an entire day and try meeting the world with new eyes. Look at every person or place you encounter in your day like you are experiencing it for the first time. Be like a child and stop yourself from getting lost in your mind’s commentary. Be free and willing to engage the world from one moment to the next. See what happens.

Processing Your Environment 

You process information in several ways. One is through cognition and the other is your emotional state of mind. External stimuli are processed as they enter the mind and then go through your filters. 

Your filters are made up of two things: your mind and your emotions. 

1.     The Mind

Many different things comprise the mind’s filters:

Memories                         Experiences

Education                          Empirical Knowledge

Pre-disposition                  Values/Ideals

Beliefs                              Attitudes

Mental Illness                   Cognitive Processing Style

Chemical stability             Chemical Imbalances 

2.     Your Emotions

Your emotions create different moods and states of mind:

Relaxed/Tense                  Calm/Excited

Alert/Fatigued                  Interested

Happy/Sad                        Angry

Panic                                 Stressed

            Your mind and emotional state can have an effect on how you perceive your environment. It can distort what is present, causing you to have a perverted sense of reality. Your interpretation of what is happening around you varies with your ability to be mentally present, your level of intelligence, your cognitive abilities, and your emotional intelligence. Your ability to interpret and interact with others is enhanced by good critical thinking skills, and this is where your mind can be very useful. 

With all the variables, the chance of you distorting what you see is probable. Even if one of the variables from the lists above is off, what you see is changed and altered by your perception.

Link to picture
https://umatter.ca/2021/02/01/chapter-five-awakening-to-the-moment/

Processing Your Environment through Direct Consciousness 

Another mode of processing your environment is through your heart/soul. This method allows you to experience the moment as a silent witness. While witnessing, you hold a portion of your attention on the stillness found within you. This silent, still centre is where you access your true self.  In this type of processing, you bypass the cognitive mind and your emotional states and take a direct path to your heart. Conventional linear processing is suspended, since now interpretation is no longer subject to the duality of the cognitive processes. Simply put, you get out of the way, and your heart experiences the moment.

Panic in the Park

One day while helping a friend sell drums at a festival in London, I heard a small child yelling for help. When I looked out from the booth, I could see the child begging people to help her mom, who was lying face down in the grass, crying and hyperventilating. But it was as if the little girl was invisible and no one could hear her cries. I quickly ran over to the girl, took her by the hand, and asked her to come and hold her mom with me. There we were, all three of us on the ground— the little girl on one side of her mom, and me on the other. I held her mom and told her she was safe and that she was going to be okay. After a few minutes, the mother’s panic attack subsided and her tears gave away to a deep sense of love and peace. We all sat there just looking at each other in love and appreciation for what was present. 

After what felt like an hour but was, in real time, likely fifteen to twenty minutes, we all got up, hugged, and parted ways. No words were exchanged. We did not need any. It was such an intense experience of love with two people I had never met and will most likely never meet again. 

That day I listened to my heart. My mind was not necessary. My heart knew what to say and do every step of the way. The next day while I was helping my friend in the park, the little girl, accompanied by her mom, came skipping into the booth. This time she was full of joy. She presented me with a beautiful painting that her mom had made just for me. Her mom looked at me with open arms. Her only words, through her tears of joy, were thank you.

 That experience transformed my heart and taught me about the power of listening to it. That day, my heart was wise beyond words and it delivered truth in action. You open the possibility for your heart/soul to speak when you silence the mind.

 The soul in you has a direct connection to God, for the soul is made in the image of God. Your mind/ego is not God, but the source and origin of your soul is. Your heart/soul has no problem with outside stimuli because it is everything, inside and outside. If your soul is God and God is everything, then what is being perceived is you or a reflection of yourself. Therefore, if you are at odds with the outside world, you are at odds with yourself. 

The heart’s wisdom, however, is sometimes difficult to understand, for the heart offers wisdom outside of what seems rational to your mind. Only by surrendering your mind are you able to bypass rationality so that you can directly perceive the world through your heart. 

But how do you get there? The wisdom the heart holds can be channeled by simply listening to it. Its knowledge is not limited to the past. It has access to all future outcomes in your probable field of trajectory and may give you knowledge that supports a later reality.  

link to picture 
https://umatter.ca/2021/02/01/chapter-five-awakening-to-the-moment/

By allowing what this moment is offering, you enter the sacredness of this moment and allow it to reveal itself. There are thousands of angels lining up the moments of your life. All you need to do is stay present and give yourself over to the moment. All that you require is on its way to you. That is why life is truly a gift. You are blessed and gifted in every moment of your existence. 

In between all your greatest moments, the miracles are still happening.

Miracles are in motion all around you. Waste no time … there isn’t a moment to spare. What if this was your last day on earth? Would you spend it sleeping, or would you seize the moment?

When you reflect on your greatest moments in life, the one thing you will notice is that you were completely surrendered to that moment. Returning and surrendering to the present starts by focusing on the here and now. You cannot be in this moment if your focus is on another one. You may find that nothing needs to change for you to be content. But no matter how perfect the moment, your mind will want more or something different. That is what the mind does but pay no attention to it. Return your focus to the present as you practice life “in the moment.” Just keep being willing to set down the past, future, and all the voices in your mind. The silence in you renders great power. You can only enter this silence by staying with the moment at hand. 

The Eternal Moment Now

When you step into This Moment now, you exit the temporal and enter all of eternity.

After many years of resting in the moment, I have had experiences that my mind cannot fully grasp. I have become aware of concepts, one of which you are about to read in the following paragraphs. There are a few areas in this book where logic runs out and you must employ a bit of faith—not to accept the material, but rather to just take it in for consideration.

This very moment expands backwards and forwards into all of eternity. All that has ever been and will ever be is here and happening right now, in this very moment. You are in this place right now because this is where your consciousness lies; everything here now is suspended by your or another person’s consciousness of it. It is not time or date that is holding you here. It appears to the mind that you have a start date and that you are moving along in a linear fashion, but this is not the case. Your soul is who and what you are, not the body that you are in. Your soul is eternal and timeless. 

In this moment you have the potential to change not only the future but the past as well. This moment, right now, adjusts the past and future according to what is present in your consciousness. Your mind will always assemble your life and the meaning of it, starting in the past and working its way to the present. 

Traditional Linear Cognitive Processing

How this book came into existence.

• I met a doctor who helped me with my mental health 
• I then spent time with monks
• I attended university

Because the above points start in the past and work their way into the present, all of them gave me the qualifications to write this book. This book is because of all the above. 

Non-Linear Intuition

How this book came into existence. 

• I was given the intuition to write this book
• I met a doctor who helped me with my mental health
• You have asked for this information

All the people who have and will ever read this book created it, but the reason for it is yet to be discovered.

The points above range from the past, present, and future in no order.You don’t always know why certain events in your life happen. Some of your life experiences are happening because of the future choices you will make. Your future choices adjust what is happening now in your life. This is an example of how this moment changes your past. If you have ever believed that “Everything happens for a reason,” this is your answer. Hence, it explains the importance of being in this moment and flowing with life, not against it. The reason is usually just around the corner.

I was introduced to this concept by Maharishi Krishnananda. A Maharishi is an enlightened person, a sage, master, or great seer. The Maharishi and I were sitting on his porch when he looked at me and said, “Time isn’t what you think it is.” Then he went on to explain that the past is changeable in this moment.

 I found this concept very confusing, and my teacher reassured me that it would make no sense to my mind. His only instruction was not to try to figure it out in my head. For years this concept would come to me, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. 

Several years later as a student of the University of Western Ontario, my professor stood before us and stated that, “Time is not what you think it is. What you do now can change the past.” 

Now he had my attention! He went on and told us about a study. Students were divided into four groups. Some were told to study only before the exam, others before and after the exam, and some only after the exam. The final group was instructed not to study at all. The students who studied before and after scored the highest and the students who studied after taking the exam scored better than the ones who didn’t study at all. The results were conclusive. The students changed the results of their exams from an event that happened after the exam. This is empirical proof that the past can be altered by what you do in the future. What you do now has a much broader reach than you may realize. This concept goes against mainstream thinking; however, in theory and in practice, it proves to check out. By removing the belief that life unfolds in a linear progression, this concept is much easier to grasp. 

Another way to look at this: this moment now is the past of the future. What is happening around you may only make better sense to you later. Some of the gifts that arrive in your life come because of the future choices that are yet to be made. This may be why life does not always make sense. However, there is a common belief that everything happens for a reason. The reason just might be that we have chosen what is happening around us.

There are only two things to do … Pay attention to the moment. Then let go.

Your mind does a poor job of holding the past and future in place within your mind. It doesn’t have the capacity to fully grasp what is happening right now. What you are holding is a very limited version of what is here and what has been. One thing that you can guarantee, the more awake and present you get with this moment, is that this life becomes more alive and expansive for you. Being present in this moment requires you to pay full attention to the here and now. When you do, you just might catch the sacredness of each moment before it passes you by. 

Once you discover who you are, the desire to leave this moment loses its spark. For it is only in the presence of this moment that you can deeply know yourself.

Tools to Deepen Your Experience of This Chapter

1. How dedicated can you be to the moment? Over the next few days, stay very aware of everything that is happening around you. Try to catch subtle aspects of your environment. Pay attention to where you are and what is around you. 

1. Observe how much your mind fills in what it thinks is going to happen next. When you notice yourself projecting a probable outcome, stop the commentary in your mind.

1. What are some of your triggers that take you out of the moment? 

1. Be aware when you place the moment on pause and get lost in your mind. Can you live for an entire day with your finger off the pause button?

1.  Engage your partner, family, and friends like you have never met them. Pretend you are meeting them for the first time. 

1. Practice observing your environment with your heart. Read and respond to your environment using only your heart. Listen to what your heart has to say. In this exercise, you don’t get to talk. Your job is to:

·       Rest your attention in your heart and listen.

·       Surrender your mind. 

·       Do not go into the feeling of your emotions.