Self Is Our Connection To Consciousness
The present moment isn’t the same as the minutes ticking on the clock. The power of now cannot be found by looking at time, because the whole phenomenon is experiential. To live in the now is to have a completely different experience of mind, body, self, and world. Children offer a clue, if they are young enough, by not being so conditioned that they conform to society’s framework of life.
In that framework it is bad to be late and good to be on time. One fills the time efficiently at work and in a leisurely fashion on vacation or when given some free time. In other words, time is part of a way of life that we absorbed early on from the people around us, and the whole framework extends to core beliefs about birth and death, growing old, being dominated by memories, hopes, wishes, and fears, all of which are deeply rooted in social conformity.
As long as these concepts have the power to define your experiences, the experience of now is overshadowed by conditioning. At the same time, we must look at what the mind is doing right this minute. It is being active, filled with a continuous stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. Much of this activity is born of habit; if you think the same way today as you did yesterday, your mind is running on autopilot. Moreover, by identifying with all your opinions, beliefs, habits, prejudices, and automatic reflexes, you are relying on a mental construct that is substituting for realty.
This construct, which all of us have built since childhood, defines the ego-personality. “I” is shorthand for a self-made model of mind, body, and world that revolves around what the ego wants and fears, what it finds pleasurable and painful, and so on.
Normally we don’t notice our sense of self—we are simply too used to ignoring it. But the self is our connection to consciousness. All of life consists of the self consciously being present. Once you recognize this fact, you can reframe your life beyond the social model you have been conditioned to believe in.
The self doesn’t have to learn anything new or struggle to escape the old. Your sense of self has been spontaneously present all the time, only unnoticed because the ego has convinced you that it is the self. Once you go beyond the demands of “I,” experience is transformed. It starts to happen in an open state of awareness that has no agenda. On its own, your sense of self, if you notice it at all, has become entangled in your individual personality and the story of your life, a story you are constantly building day by day, year by year. The present moment is beyond stories. It exists outside time, which is why spiritual traditions all describe a place that is beyond the physical world.
This place isn’t a mystical Nirvana or the promise of Heaven. It is here and now, as a potential of the present moment. This place is pure awareness, which anyone can access. It is a field of all possibilities, which unfortunately we have shackled through the ego-personality into a small arena of limited possibilities. The present moment is nothing but a liberated state of the sense of self. Having seen this, we can discuss what such a liberated state feels like, what it can deliver every day, and most important of all, how to get there and make the present moment our true home.
