Arrive in this moment Root yourself completely in this ordinary moment If you see your mind swaying If you see your thoughts swaying into the past,
Into the future into doing this or doing that Let those branches sway while you root yourself in this now And what I mean by rooting yourself is to be completely satisfied with this moment So much so that you don't need to escape it As we are obsessed with thinking we have in an unconscious,
Unknowing,
Unmindful way appropriated a powerful faculty of thinking and made it into an escape route Instead of going somewhere following your thoughts into memories and imagination allow the thoughts to come to you allow my words to come to you allow your feelings and other sensory perceptions to come to you and resist the urge to push anything away or to run away from this moment Sneakily into your own virtual reality of your mind Don't grab,
Don't push Just root yourself in this now and allow things to come to you and allow things to go through you Notice how all your thoughts are coming and going through you My words are coming and passing through you effortlessly Notice that if you did not indulge in the tempting thoughts the thoughts do their thing and go away without causing any discomfort or pain to you Often times we misunderstand that the thoughts are bothering me Most of us suffer our minds and our thoughts tremendously but if we paid attention,
Zoomed in with a calm mind a rested body and an openness to truth we might notice that thoughts are like an assembly line they do their thing,
They go away Imagine yourself standing on a train station and I am telling you that don't indulge in any train stay at the station You will notice dozens of trains pass by ugly,
Beautiful,
Long,
Short empty,
Completely filled There might be chaos when a full train is passing by As long as you are not interested in indulging none of those thoughts,
None of those trains bother you Botheration happens when we jump in when we lean in,
When we try to grab and get into that train Yes,
You can't live your life on the train station I completely understand,
You have to think you have to indulge with your thoughts But this exercise of pausing,
This indulgence is an exercise of revelation of our freedom Freedom to indulge or not It's an exercise in the revelation of truth of what thoughts are and how botheration happens with our thoughts so that wisdom and freedom grows in you about your own peace and happiness about your own experience about your own mind And suffering,
Our psychological suffering thrives on lack of wisdom,
Lack of freedom lack of clarity in deep seeing When we deeply see,
We understand things become clear,
We recognize our freedom we are open for wisdom to happen So when we slow down in a session like this blossoming can happen The autopilot mode of zipping through life through our experience is broken And for that we need to be present we need to be rooted in this now This deep seeing that I am talking about is impossible to think through You can't think your way into peace and happiness into wisdom and freedom You have to see it And when you see it,
You can't unsee it Your eyes change forever The penny can drop The mind creates this compelling virtual reality that sucks us in keeps us engaged all along The only time we pay attention is when we are suffering And if we are used to suffering,
The intensity when it crosses a threshold,
Then we start paying attention In this moment,
See clearly the reality that is happening right now including the unfolding of my words and the virtual reality that is happening as an echo of what I am saying or what is happening in this reality It's only an echo It's not the real sound Just like there is some sort of an allure in the digital virtual reality with the screen,
With the interactions,
With the avatars Humankind has been plagued with this mental virtual reality for thousands of years As a matter of fact,
I feel that this digital virtual reality is a mimicking of the mental virtual reality The only reality is here and now This ordinary moment is the only access we have to reality Everything else is only mental and conceptual And in this access to reality experience happens Experience through the sensory perceptions through your sensations in your body Even the experience of thoughts and images is happening in this reality But there is a special quality of the thoughts that we engage with They may,
Based on our tendencies they may compel us into believing that what they are pointing to in the content of those thoughts is real That's why the smartest of us lose our way into our minds If we are able to pause our thoughts and we engage with the sensory perceptions of sights sounds,
Tastes,
Textures and smells and bodily sensations we will be deeply rooted in our experience That's how most animals live But this power,
This faculty of thinking that makes us quote-unquote superior is also dooming us into suffering Not because of its power,
But because of our naivety You know there are some fans of movie stars,
Of TV stars that believe that the character that the actor is playing is real They are not able to grasp that it is a TV show or it is a movie and they are just an actor They think that's real and our predicament is something similar We think the movie that is happening in our mind the light and sound show of thoughts and images of words and images is real And there is almost always a tragedy,
A horror movie or an anxious movie going on So thinking as such is not a problem But losing ourselves in thinking as if it's real,
That's the problem Suffering or not suffering then becomes a choice Not a surface level choice Nobody will willingly choose to suffer But if we choose the underlying habit or if we ignore the truth then suffering is inevitable That's what I'm trying to bring you face to face with Truth Not facts But truth of your own experience of your own freedom,
Of your own mind and of your own suffering Every time you arrive in the now even for a split moment all virtual reality falls away There is only this reality Ordinary reality Yes,
In this reality most of the times there is no action happening there is no drama The boredom that the mind experiences is the peace that we are after But we chase drama we chase excitement and we travel through our mind in alternate virtual realities which just fall off when you arrive in this moment Their untruth disappears There is only the truth of this reality And when we are in this now when we have arrived,
When we are rooted everything starts aligning and calming down Your body calms down your breath calms down and your mind calms down Rush,
Haste,
Panic,
Stress is when we are cut off from this reality and lost in a virtual reality That's why in the Indian tradition this being lost in the virtual reality is called a dream And just like a dream the characters,
The events in this virtual reality are not real And the instruction of the wise sages over the millennia has been to wake up To wake up from this dream Wake up to the virtual and find ourselves in the actual And it is a habit First time it is not knowing the ignorance of the difference between the actual and the virtual And once we have seen it then it is only a matter of the momentum of habits And just like any habit if we want to break it,
Change it we need to do the opposite more until the habit wears off So keep arriving Every time you take off,
Arrive Because every time you take off there is suffering And the more you arrive,
The more sensitive you become to peace to actual And your sensitivity to suffering increases That which required an intense suffering for you to come back will happen for faint ones too So keep coming back,
Set an alarm Listen to more of these sessions Decide to be present more often Find your way to erode this habit And keep arriving Thank you
