Now is the Only Reality That Exists
Almost every person on this planet spends most of their life living in a fantasy land of their own making. There are very few people that have even the vaguest idea of what the true reality of their existence is really like. This has been the sad story of an unconscious humanity for the entire span of our tenure on this planet.
We engage with the world every day of course. We have conversations with others that are based in the real world of the here-and-now. We go to work each day and come home each evening and we are largely conscious of this as we do it. We are always involved in some activity in the real world, whether it is sleeping, eating, going to work, visiting friends or relatives, cooking the dinner, going shopping…all of these things are based in the real world of our senses and we are aware of them as we engage in them. So how can it be that we live in a fantasy when our memories and moment-to-moment experience of the world, gives us all the information that we need to prove unequivocally that the world we that we live in is real and solid and indubitably, not a fantasy of any kind?
The reality is that yes, we may well be physically engaging with the world and consciously aware of what we are doing, but we are mostly, not on the whole present or mindful at the moment that we are engaged with that reality. Our engagement tends to be marginal and reliant on an initial and momentary repeat mental-visit as we physically go about whatever activity we are involved in. It is a partial and perfunctory involvement with life.
Whatever we are involved in; we are mostly unconscious of it most of the time. Our minds are on the whole busy with other things and ignorant of the activity that it has propelled the physical body into motion to deal with. Think about what is going through your mind at any moment of the day, regardless of the task you are performing. Possibly you are reminiscing about the lovely romantic meal you had last night whilst you are doing the washing up, or you are thinking about what you are going to do that evening as you get ready for work. Maybe you are thinking about the shopping trip you have to do later as you rush to get the kids ready for school or you are wondering if you made the right decision over that new pair of shoes you bought yesterday as you decide what outfit to wear for the day. Perhaps you are thinking about what you would like for lunch later whilst you complete some task at work or maybe you worry about whether you will get that job you have an interview for tomorrow as you get ready to go to bed. All of these types of thoughts are familiar to all of us and we have them whilst we engage physically with the world in tasks that although they might be triggers for the thought process, are in all other ways, entirely unconnected with the thoughts themselves.
Whatever the subject matter of our thoughts, they are almost always set in the context of the past or the future. We spend most of our lives in this state – looking back to the past at things that were and now are no more, or projecting into the future and looking at things that have yet to exist or may never exist, in the way that we envisage them.
Stop yourself from time to time and watch your thought process and you will see the truth of this. We all do it. We spend our lives in an unconscious state, only peripherally aware of the reality of the world and of the nature of the existence that is going on around us at that moment in time. We are unconscious to the nature of reality for almost the whole of our lives. Only rarely do we stop and fully engage with the moment as it happens, that is, being fully present, not peripherally present. Fully present means engaging the mind and the senses totally in the moment. Being aware of everything in that moment, not partially involved in some past or future experience.
Staying totally present in the moment – being fully and utterly aware of the nature of reality at the moment that it is happening, is no easy feat. The reason for this is that the majority of the time the present reality is pretty mundane or boring. How interesting is it to chop vegetables or to vacuum the carpet? To wash your hair or to iron a shirt? Not much really. Our lives are dominated by mundane things that it is hard to stay consciously focused on at all times. Our minds get used to the mundane nature of the here-and-now and decide to have as little to do with it as possible and go off searching for more interesting things to ponder. There are plenty of other things in the past or the future that are much more worthy of note to our minds way of thinking. In allowing this, we not only abdicate responsibility for our own thought process, we create a situation where it becomes incredibly difficult to stay totally aware of reality as it happens to us. Our minds get up in the morning and do their daily thing of finding something else to think about. To stay present in reality, we need to retrain our minds and bring them back under our control.
Most of us are not taught to reign in the mind and to train it to do our bidding. So how do we start to live in the present moment as it is happening to us? It is not really that difficult; though it can be incredibly dull.
The best way to begin to take back control of your own mind and thus to encourage it to stay present in the moment – in now, is to bring it to bear on whatever activity you are engaged in at the moment. It doesn’t matter what it is, simply bring your full weight of consciousness to have an awareness of the activity. If you are digging the garden, notice how the soil feels under the pressure of the spade, smell the earth as it is turned, feel the pressure that you place on the spade. The tensions in your body as you exert the effort to turn the soil. Fell the texture of the spade’s handle. Notice the sound of the spade going into the earth and any other sounds that might be around you at the moment: the passing of an aircraft, birds singing, a neighbour in their garden nearby, the sounds of passing cars…try to be totally present and aware of everything that is going on at that precise moment in time. Whatever the activity, we can all make the effort to try to be totally aware of the moment as it happens in this way.
The more that we engage with this type of activity, the more we are able to take back control of our mind and live in the present moment. We can actually start to live the life that is going on around us at the time that it is happening. We start to be fully aware of our lives and can take pleasure in it in a way that we were not previously able too – it becomes richer and fuller and more meaningful and we start to develop a truer understanding of life that had previously eluded us. The advantages of living life as it happens are numerous and profound. Life takes on a quality that we did not know was possible.
If we are engaged in thoughts of the past too much, we live in a world that is not only gone and dead, but conditioned by our own particular perspective on it and so it is not real. If we spend too much time living in the future, we spend our time living in a world that has yet to come – if it comes at all, that will again, be conditioned by our own particular perspective on it and our own conditioned view of the world.
Training the mind to be conscious of the world in the moment can be a long and arduous task, but the rewards are great. But does engaging with this practice give us a true and accurate perspective of the world? Do we start to fully see the world for what it really is? In part yes, but not fully.
Living in the moment allows us to experience the world as it truly is at that precise moment in time, from the perspective of our conditioned understanding and response to the world. It is real and there is no alternative to it – but it is a reality based on our perception of it and how we relate to it and ‘read it’. What we are not aware of is a reality that is devoid of conditioned understanding. So even though we may be present in the moment, what we perceive of the world is based on all that we have previously learnt about it. When we pick up a knife to chop vegetables for instance, we bring to that moment, all of our learning and experiences of other knives. We relate to the object through this lens of our own making and so we do not actually have a true experience beyond the conditioning that we gain from our own experiences and from the information given to us by others. So even when we are present in the moment, our perception of reality is distorted by the past.
How for instance, do we see a tree for the first time every time we look at one? When we look at a tree, we bring to that moment, our knowledge, understanding and experiences of all other trees we have ever come across. We believe we have an understanding of that particular tree because of what we bring to it, but in reality we have no idea about that particular tree. To begin a relationship with the world as it truly is, and to see it afresh for the first time every time – to strip away our knowledge and experiences, we need to maintain as often as possible the practice of living in the moment – of not dwelling on the past or the future. In this way, we maintain a real and living relationship with the world and not one that is part fantasy and part peripheral engagement. We can begin to develop the ability to see beyond our conditioning and to see the world as it truly is.
Of course the object of this exercise is not to delete from our minds all of our conditioned responses to the world – these serve us in a multitude of ways and are what we need to help us to function in the world effectively. We do not want to reach a point where we have no concept of what a road or a fast approaching car means as we step off the pavement because we have stripped away our memories of the past and thus the tools we need to survive. The purpose of memory is to help us to survive and live fully in the world – it is not to provide a fantasy release from the drudgery of the moment.
What we do with our mind is key to our happiness. Our minds control our reality. How we relate to every aspect of our reality creates the world around as we perceive it. If we truly want to experience reality, the first step is to begin to train the mind to live in the moment. This is after all, the only place that reality exists.
Shared from Steve Gooch


MySpace Playlist at MixPod.com


















