Recently, in the past month or so, I had started to grow sick of the constant pull away from the present moment.
Here and now was NEVER good enough for me.
This grew worse and worse over the course of the last half a year.
It became my own personal hell.
No matter where I went or what I did, it wasn’t right.
I gave into this feeling constantly—always moving from one place to the next, from one activity to another.
I would numb out this discomfort with dopamine stimulation far too often.
If you cringe at reading this, think again.
You’re almost certainly doing this as well.
Make it a point to notice all the times you go on your phone in a day, then contemplate how intentional that action really was.
What did you expect to get out of it? What did you truly get out of it?
This genuinely became my life. An eternal cycle, it seemed.
What an utterly ridiculous way to live life, isn’t it?
I started to notice more this disatisfaction with the present and grow frustrated with it.
I looked outward, at my goals, to see if perhaps they were to blame.
I investigated my biochemical profile, suspecting that a damaged neurological reward system might be to blame.
Then I thought more about meditation, spirituality.
I was growing crazy with myself. I didn’t want to live all of life like that.
There’s only ever the present moment, and if I didn’t actively change how I was experiencing the present, it’s as if I’m never truly living the life that’s right in front of me.
The truth is by noticing the present moment, everything negative can be dissolved instantly.
That’s a profound concept that’s been best articulated to me from the Power of Now.
It’s simple, but not easy in the slightest.
Thoughts and feelings are insidious. Tension arises and eclipses our entire consciousness without us even noticing.
Thoughts flood in that feel like us, so we lose ourselves in them.
We have to “work” to stay awake.
But when we do achieve presence, we achieve the purest, realest form of being.
In fact, the only form of being there ever actually is.
Normally we color the world around us—both our physical world and psychic world—with stories.
Stories are not real, though elements of them may have been real at one point in time.
Now, and always, the only thing that is real is being.
It’s weird, it’s a little uncomfortable to think about at first, but it’s true.
It might at first seem like life loses it’s depth in the face of this.
But in reality, it gains depth in orders of magnitude.
Once you start really opening your eyes to what is here and now, consciousness and the external world reveal their beautiful sophistication.
At the same time, our stories stop causing us pain.
This is a much better baseline state of consciousness than the usual: completely immersed in the ego and it’s problems (in other words, suffering caused by the stories it tells about the world).
Instead, try to view life as a beautiful, sophisticated, immersive and cinematic game playing out right before your eyes.
I used to say a cinematic film, but that eludes to a kind of inability to interact with it, which is not quite the case.
It really is a game, and the most complex one you could possibly conceive.
There are laws that govern it, universal energies and structures.
Everything is always moving, always changing, at different time scales.
Other points of consciousness manifest all around you, each with their own stored, subjective data of the world around them.
But ultimately, you can be whole in your being alone.
The external world is a bonus. You don’t need anything there outside of the most basic survival resources.
Once you start seeing life in this way, it can become incredibly immersive and fun.
You move from one present moment to the next, leveraging your mind as a creative tool to navigate through various challenges you take on.
You take in the profundity of the world around you. You see it for the strange and complex miracle it is and are grateful to take part in it.
You can recognize whats good, useful, and beautiful, and what’s bad, detrimental and tainted, and choose to take on challenges that contribute to the former.
This is basically being fully awake. Being whole in your presence, and engaging this world/ dimension as a game, leveraging the mind you’ve been given to navigate it’s crazy laws.
The pain-body, the ego, doesn’t want to die to this reality. It wants to control, it wants to create a dream of both pleasure and immense suffering.
The dark of the mind and unconscious are at war with the conscious point of light in you.
Their ammunition essentially is thoughts and feelings.
In a way, I think thoughts and feelings are the same energy on a spectrum.
Feelings are more primal and abstract.
Thoughts are refined, specific, and articulated—they’re feelings conceptualized and developed by the intellect.
They’re often the ingredients, the particles that make up feelings.
Both are external energies that flood the psyche.
Seeing, noticing, is the real answer to all this.
Doing so, for real, dissolves the illusion.
You have to step back from thoughts and feelings.
Investigate where they’re coming from.
Take inventory of the present: what’s going on around you?
Take inventory of your physical body: pain, stress, tension, hunger. These things can overshadow your state of presence and color your thoughts and feelings.
If you feel like you aren’t dissolving the illusion, you have to repeat the above process until you do.
Don’t accept not attaining presence.
See all your thoughts flow through you. Even thoughts of failure at the task. Let it all come and go.