Today I invite you to be free from the known.
From everything that you have known and that you do know.
To the point where any opinion,
Any judgment,
Any commentary about whatever is happening now is rendered useless,
Irrelevant.
Because if the premise is that we are pausing,
Freeing ourselves from the known,
Any mental chatter about something that is unfolding fresh in this moment is irrelevant.
Although I am inviting you to be free from the known,
What is unfolding is still unknown.
That's where it can become a little sticky to understand.
Our mind can only chatter,
Think,
Categorize,
Discard.
Whatever it is that the mind can do can only happen once whatever is unfolding has happened.
For instance,
You cannot understand what I am about to say until I say it.
And once I have said it,
It's no longer unfolding.
It has unfolded.
It is the past.
I hope you recognize the instantaneity between me speaking and you hearing.
The past is happening very fast.
So it can be a little difficult to spot that everything that has happened is gone.
And whatever you do about it mentally is dealing with the past.
Sometimes we only think of the past in the context of a few years,
Few days.
But if we zoomed in to the actual experience,
We'll realize that the past is right around the corner.
And because it's so adjacent to this present moment,
It gives an impression that I'm with the present moment,
Whereas I'm actually with the past.
In other words,
What I'm really saying is you cannot think about the present.
You cannot think about the present.
So free yourself from the known,
From the past,
All the accumulation of knowledge,
Information,
Experiences that doesn't influence what is unfolding right now.
What you know has nothing to do with what is happening.
This might be a humbling experience since we have spent our life gathering,
Accumulating things,
Physical and subtle.
But in order to deeply experience,
Fully experience what is unfolding,
For you to be fully present to this unfolding of the sound of my voice requires you to be free from known.
And if you are free from notice all the thoughts hovering in your mind.
Every one of those thoughts is about the past.
The nature of the mind is such that it can only hover or it can only facilitate thoughts about the past.
And although we think we can quote unquote see the future,
Imagine the future,
It is a direct correlation of what we already know.
So the problem is not with the mind the problem is not with the thoughts that are hovering.
By definition thoughts are about the past or as a concession about the future.
And let them be.
Just like your heart is pumping,
Let your mind create thoughts.
The point is not what your heart does or what your mind does.
The point is what are you doing?
There is nothing exciting about your heart pumping.
It's the same motion,
More or less.
But there is juice in thinking,
In engaging engaging with thoughts.
Allegedly they are different.
But once we understand the nature of the mind,
The nature of the thoughts,
It's all about known.
Whatever fear of the unknown we have is often masquerading as the fear of the habit not continuing,
The habit of thinking,
The habit of engaging with the known.
It's like if I asked you to give up coffee or tea,
There will be that discomfort.
That's the same thing we experience.
And we go back.
We run back to the known,
To the familiar,
To the practiced.
But can you see that in this moment you are untouched?
If you paused engaging with your past,
If you in this moment and the moment passes by the time I say moment,
In every moment,
It's a fresh experience.
Isn't that something?
It could be the sound of my voice or the sound in your vicinity or the sensations of you sitting on a chair or anything else that comes through you,
Comes through to you.
And as long as we let it go,
As soon as it comes,
The freshness is preserved.
Every word that I am speaking right now is fresh,
Unprepared,
Unpracticed,
Unknown.
Every word that you are hearing right now is fresh.
The silence,
The pause in between the words,
In between the sentences,
Is also fresh.
And there's nothing scary in fresh.
There's nothing scary in quote-unquote unknown.
That's where life is.
Otherwise it's just stale.
It's like you're dealing with a virtual world all the time.
Virtual being mental.
Virtual being mental.
It gives you the illusion that it is real until only until you are not looking closely like a magic trick.
Then a magic trick,
A mere illusion.
It can only pass because you are not looking closely.
So look closely at your experience at the freshness of this unfolding.
Break through from the virtual and pierce this moment to experience the actual.
As long as we worship what is known or what has been accumulated it's very hard to let go of it from time to time.
I understand social protocols dictate that we have to show what we have accumulated in our life.
But what I'm describing to you is a very intimate process.
You don't have to show to yourself or be constantly surrounded by what is known what has been accumulated.
The more deeply you pierce this moment with your presence the more deeply you are present without the known without the baggage of the known interfering clouding this moment the more you'll find yourself as this fresh sun without memory rising every morning seems familiar yet fresh it might feel very unfamiliar at this point to be stripped off to be naked from all the known from all the accumulated but that's just teething pains the unfamiliarity of a new activity it's as if I'm asking you to stand out of your mind and to step into the moment and you can't decode this instruction with your mind this is for you and your heart to step out of the mind and to step into this moment anything I say about this moment is going to be false because as I said the moment passes away by the time I say anything and for something to be true it has to be true all the time to everyone at everywhere so in the world of wanting to grab everything and package them into words into videos into pictures into concepts and ideas we ignore the basic fundamental truth about our experience that what is happening cannot be encompassed by words it can be encompassed after it happens sure but not in the moment and we have this choice to penetrate this moment every moment to think or not to think because as I said the mind is not a problem thinking is not a problem the invitation is always open to step out of your mind and step into the moment to pause the virtual and engage with the actual to be free from memory and known and to be present to the new thank you
