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By Root 996 0

will shift. Right now, every situation you are in is a mixture of past, present, and future. Imagine yourself applying for a job. As you offer yourself to the scrutiny of a stranger, trying to handle the stress and make a good impression, you aren’t actually in the now. “Will I get this job?” “How do I look?” “Were my recommendations good enough?” “What’s this guy thinking, anyway?” It seems as if you can’t help tumbling in the mix of past, present, and future. But the now can’t be a mixture of old and new. It must be clear and open; otherwise, there is no unfolding of yourself, which is the reason time exists.

The present moment is really an opening, so it has no duration—you are in the now when time ceases to exist. Perhaps the best way to gain such an experience is to realize that the word present is linked to the word presence. When the present moment becomes filled with a presence that is all-absorbing, completely at peace, and totally satisfying, you are in the now.

Presence isn’t an experience. Presence is felt whenever awareness is open enough. The situation at hand doesn’t have to bear any responsibility. Paradoxically, someone can be in intense pain, only to find that in the middle of his suffering, the mind—unable to tolerate the body’s torment—suddenly decides to abandon it. This is particularly true of psychological pain—soldiers caught in the terror of battle report a moment of liberation when intense stress is replaced by a rush of ecstatic release.

Ecstasy changes everything. The body is no longer heavy and slow; the mind stops experiencing its background music of sadness and fear. There is a dropping away of personality, replaced by the sweetness of nectar. This sweetness can linger a long time in the heart—some people say it can be tasted like honey in the mouth—but when it leaves, you know beyond doubt that you have lost the now. In the mind’s scrapbook, you can insert a picture of perfect bliss, and that becomes like the first taste of ice cream, an unattainable goal you keep running after, only to find that ecstasy remains out of reach.

The secret of ecstasy is that you have to throw it away once you’ve found it. Only by walking away can you experience the present moment again, the place where presence lives. Awareness is in the now when it knows itself. If we take away the vocabulary of sweetness and bliss and nectar, the quality that is missing in most people’s lives, the biggest thing that keeps them from being present, is sobriety. You have to be sober before you can be ecstatic. This isn’t a paradox. What you’re hunting for—call it presence, the now, or ecstasy—is totally out of reach. You cannot hunt it down, chase after it, command it, or persuade it to come to you. Your personal charms are useless here, and so are your thoughts and insights.

Sobriety begins by realizing, in all seriousness, that you have to throw away almost every strategy that you’ve been using to get what you want. If that’s at all intriguing, then carry out your sober intent to release those futile strategies as follows:

SPIRITUAL SOBRIETY

Getting Serious About Being in the Present

Catch yourself not paying attention.

Listen to what you’re actually saying.

Watch how you react.

Remove yourself from the details.

Follow the rise and fall of energy.

Question your ego.

Immerse yourself in a spiritual milieu.

These instructions could come directly from a ghost hunter’s handbook, or the hunter of unicorns. The present moment is more elusive than either, but if you want to get there passionately enough, sobriety is the program you need to set up.

Not paying attention: The first step is neither mystical nor extraordinary. When you observe that you’re not paying attention, don’t indulge your wandering. Come back to where you are. Almost instantly you’ll discover why you wandered away. You were either bored, anxious, insecure, worrying about something else, or anticipating a future event. Don’t evade any of those feelings. They are ingrained habits of awareness, habits you have trained yourself to follow automatically.