An excerpt

A Buddhist monk, after completing ten thousand hours of mediation, can control his attention on demand. He can locate and focus his attention, and his being, on Self-awareness in the present. How adept he is at maintaining controlled attention and his depth of immersion in the present, is subject to many factors within him and external to him.

 

For the average individual who must face the demanding and distracting world of day labour, controlled attention on Self-awareness in the present is not easy. Not that it is easy for a monk, but the monk does have the advantage of being in an environment that encourages Self-awareness.

 

After almost fifty years of international travel, analytical research and practice, and repeated verification, I have come to an essential understanding — life can only be lived in the present. We can remember and imagine life in the past and the future, but we can only live life in the present.

  

The common man is at a disadvantage, having to bear both the burden of maintaining society, and his own Self-awareness within society. To help keep his higher Self alive, he prays, takes counsel from a master, attends religious festivals, and meets daily with fellow believers of whichever religion he favours. He buys, wears, and displays religious objects and images. He does all he can to remember a higher level of being than what he finds in congested traffic, the clutter of his desk at the office, the daily taunt of monetary rituals, and the drudgery of his habitual inclination to attach a personal identity to every feeling, thought and sensation he experiences.

  

How then can the common man, the average individual, be made into a monk while bound to the canon of conventional edicts?

  

The monk uses internal and environmental prompts to remind him that his attention must be divided between being aware of what he is doing, and of himself doing it. He uses his breathing, he uses what his eyes see, what his skin senses, what his heart feels, what his mind thinks, what his ears hear. He uses the nourishment of his human presence and perception to awaken his afterlife Self. And the common man can do the same. Whenver he is engaged in any kind of daily ritual, task or chore, he can ask, “Am I aware of myself being where I am doing what I’m doing, or not?”

  

We are all born in the present, live and die in the present. All that remains is for us to be in the present, to be Self-aware always. From the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night, the question remains, “Am I here now?” And there is little to no external change made visible to other people by our being Self-aware in the present. We receive neither praise nor money from being more Self-aware. Beyond feeling less stressed or less incomplete, what we gain from enhanced Self-awareness is greater scale-of-vision perspectives, a glimpse of the world without us in it, a deeper insight into the presence in us of our afterlife which is also in the present.

  

Every moment in the present brings us a moment closer to enlightenment — an escape from the very small world of the human ego and all its possessive “i” attachments. And there is no lock on the present door. All who are willing can walk through it now in this moment as these words come to an end and a moment without words begins.