The Present Moment

By Staff

Thursday, September 3, 2009, 15:59

When the mind drops its perceptions of sense objects and stops identification with its thought dances, at that stage in meditation, the mind is no-mind. When thoughts rush out in their mad fury to hug objects of pleasure, they are called extrovert thoughts, and to quiet these is the sacred function of the path of meditation. When these outgoing thoughts are eliminated, the resulting condition of the mind is known as the no thought state of highest meditation.

Thoughts gush in to flood the mind with angry bursts of self ruinous compulsions mainly from two sources; the past and the future.

Some thoughts stem from the past, dragging along with them the memories of the good and bad done in the days gone by. These confuse the individual with the regrets and sorrows, joys and pleasures raised by his memory from the stinking tombs of the past, forcing him to relive the dead past in the fragrant moments of the present. The future is the other source of our thoughts. We are often flown upon the wings of our mind's fancy and imagination to a world of dreams - where we are made to shudder at the future possibilities of failure, tremble in hopes of successes, and swoon in the expectation of total losses or large profits.

The past is made up of dead moments, and to unearth the buried moments is to live with the dead. We do so when we waste our energies in unproductive and wasteful regrets over things we have already committed. The more we remember them, those very vasanas are getting more deeply fixed into our personality structure. When we are not engaging ourselves with the negative preoccupation of entertaining the regrets of the past, we are wandering in the fairy-castles of our fancied future, peopled with ugly fears, horrid dreams, unnerving hopes, and perhaps, a thousand impossible expectations.

In short, when our minds are not rattled by the perception of objects, let us not thereby conclude that we have quieted our thoughts. Often, it is not so. The mind, when it is not engaged in the worldly objects that are right in front of it, can choose its own private fields of agitation by dragging up the buried corpses of a diseased past or by bringing up vivid pictures of a tragic hopelessness as the sure possibility of the immediate future! In either case the mind of the individual at meditation can get sadly disturbed. Therefore, the rishis advise us: Moment to moment engage the outgoing mind to live in the present.

Completely reject the past. Renounce the future totally. Then, in such a bosom, the agitated mind shall reach the state of mindlessness." This state of mind is called no-mind.

The content of the present moment, divorced from all relationships with the past and future, is the absolute fullness of the Infinite. Eternity is experienced at the sacred depth of the present moment. To live in the present, independent of the past and the future, is to experience samadhi, the revealing culmination of meditation. Seek it yourself. Nobody can give it to anyone else. Each will have to reach there all by himself, in himself, with no other vehicle than himself.

The sum total of the memories that we retain of our experiences in the past gives us a false notion of ourselves as an "individual entity." This the personality of our ego. It is this ego a mere bundle of memories of dead moments - that is meeting the present and interpreting it constantly in terms of its diseased past. Never can the ego see the present truly as it is.

Again, when the past, the ego, meets the present, it always strives to weave out of the present, a future pattern, a web spun by the ego out of its own imaginations. Hence life is a confusing jumble of meaningless sorrows, purposeless tensions, unproductive strains, depth-less joys- altogether a mad roar of an inconsistent destiny, dashing against the unyielding actualities of life. In the face of this frothy confusion the individual feels helpless, a mere raft dancing to the whim of the surge around him.

To Be Continued

About the author

Swami Chinmayananda

Swami Chinmayananda the great master's lectures were an outpour of wisdom. He introduced the Geetha Gnana Yagna. He wrote a lot of books on spirituality, commentaries to Vedantic texts, children books etc. He then started spreading His teachings globally.....