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Live Quality

What is the Present Moment?

The present moment, at best, is a means to an end, a stepping stone to the future, because the future promises fulfillment, the future promises salvation in one form or another. The only problem is the future never comes. Life is always now. Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do—it’s always now. It’s all there is. And if you continuously miss the now—resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments—the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be “yourself.” And so you are disconnected from the fullness of life that is the “suchness” of this moment. When you are out of alignment with what is, you are out of alignment with life. You are struggling to reach a point in the future where there is greater security, aliveness, abundance, love, joy … unaware that those things make up the essence of who you are already.

How do you allow it to emerge?

Simply by allowing this moment to be as it is. This means to relinquish inner resistance to what is—the suchness of now. This allows life to unfold beautifully. There is no greater spiritual practice than this.

Live in the moment for the sheer joy of living it. Then each moment has the quality of an orgasm. Yes, it is orgasmic. This is how my people have to live, with no ‘should,’ with no ‘ought,’ with no ‘must,’ with no commandment. You are not here to become martyrs; you are here to enjoy life in its fullness. And the only way to live, love, enjoy, is to forget the future. It exists not.

The very thought of tomorrow is a continuous process of our today. It appears even closer to us than our present, our very now. But, is it really possible to live in the tomorrow? Not at all. We cannot go into the past, nor can we live ahead in time. The present is the only space one has, the here and now, this very moment is the reality. The moment our mind asks how to live in the present (here and now) – we have lost that moment inquiring about the present and thinking of the future. When there is no thought, no bubble in our mind about planning for tomorrow, no inquiry about the present – that moment is blissful, here and now. This is the fine art of living moment to moment, and of living in a deep state of meditativeness.

Chanakya says, one should not be anguished about the past, and must avoid any thought of the future. Those blessed with the vision, live in the present, here and now. This doesn’t mean that we don’t plan a future visit or a trip. But we should not go on living in that future trip planning. Osho says existence knows only one tense – the present. It neither knows the past, because it is no more, nor does it know the future, because it is not yet. But the mind is always concerned either with the past or the future, never with the present.

“Existence is only in the present. The mind is never in the present. In fact, the moment you are in the present, there is no mind; instead, there is only a great silence. The whole sky of your inner being is without thoughts, without clouds,” says Osho. In fact, the present is not a time at all. It is for our convenience that we have created divisions – past, present, and future. But, if we look at this realistically, it appears that past and future can be in time, but the present is eternal.