Allow yourself to arrive in this moment.
Allow yourself to see that thinking is not getting you anywhere.
Yes,
It gives an illusion that you are getting somewhere.
But in reality,
You are not getting anywhere.
So instead of trying to get somewhere,
Pretending to get somewhere,
We can just be here.
We can arrive here.
In this ordinary moment,
In this endeavor to get somewhere,
What the mind sneakily is convincing us to do is to avoid being here.
The endeavor is to escape this ordinary moment.
The promise of the extraordinariness of the next moment,
The next future,
Is so hypnotizing,
Is so convincing that we naively escape this now.
And we don't even recognize that it is happening.
Recognize this simple truth about our own experience,
That if we took care of what is here in this ordinary moment,
Moment to moment,
The future takes care of itself.
The reason the mind is strategizing,
Thinking,
Overthinking,
Is because it doesn't know how to handle what might come,
What will come.
But if you recognize that no matter what comes,
It will come only in this moment,
And if I took care of what is in the moment by being present in the moment,
Everything that the mind is afraid of is automatically taken care of.
Trust this truth of your own experience.
Constant thinking and overthinking are just a gimmick to find certainty,
To know before it happens,
To kid ourselves into knowing before it happens.
But you and I both know the beauty of life is that what will happen,
Will happen only in this moment.
Just like when you start reading a book,
You have to read it page by page in order to get the book,
And within the page by page,
Word by word,
Paragraph by paragraph.
That's the joy of reading a book,
And the joy of living is that every moment unfolds moment to moment.
As much as your mind wants to know what happens in the next chapter of the book,
You have to read where you are at.
You have to endure that cliffhanger,
Recognizing that when it's time,
I will know.
This trust brings immense calmness in our mind,
In our body,
Rather than consciously,
Constantly being anxious,
Hyper-thinking.
Recognize that whatever needs to be known,
Will be known at the right time,
In the right moment.
Not a moment faster or slower.
And what will get revealed will be unpredictable.
Every moment,
What gets revealed could not have been predicted.
I have no idea what my next words are.
We have no idea what's going to unfold in this next moment,
Inside,
Outside,
Anywhere.
The only place where we will know what happens is in this moment.
This is our portal to magic.
Everything else,
Whatever is in the past and whatever is in the future,
Only meets us in this moment and then becomes the past.
The future becomes the past by traveling through this magical portal of this moment.
There's nothing to escape then.
As a matter of fact,
The only thing to be done in this moment is to be present in it,
To engage fully with it.
Thinking our way out of this present moment then sounds foolish and wasteful because life is happening only in this moment.
The thinking,
Overthinking is fueled by fear,
Fear of being prepared for what is to come.
And yes,
For practical reasons we have to plan,
Prepare.
But we also have to understand we can only prepare.
What happens is no one's guess.
It's just like studying for an exam.
You prepare what you have to prepare and then you show up to the exam.
What comes in the exam is unknown.
But all preparation also happens in this moment,
Out of love,
Not out of fear.
Fear takes us away from this moment.
Love and trust keeps us in this moment.
There is hubris in the mind,
To be honest,
Of feeling that it can predict what's going to happen,
How it is going to happen.
That's what fuels this fire,
Is that belief that as a tiny little pretend fragment,
A.
K.
A.
The mind,
I can control the future.
The future doesn't belong to any mind.
The moment that is unfolding is unfolding for all of us simultaneously.
There's nothing private about this moment,
As if it's only happening for you and not for me.
Yes,
The experience of how it unfolds is intimate to me and intimate to you.
But it's all unfolding in a totality simultaneously.
That's how it has always unfolded.
And no matter what your mind thinks,
Your life has just turned out fine.
In the quest of predicting what's going to happen,
We are not present to what is happening.
The point is not to predict what's going to happen rightly.
The point is to live what is happening fully.
There is this sneaky tendency of the mind wanting to know.
You might notice this even while reading a book or an email or a text.
There's a tendency to skim through,
Just to know,
Not to feel,
Not to live,
Not to stand in what is being said.
That's the difference between knowing and living fully.
Because the focus of the mind is in the future.
And this present is so ordinary,
So uneventful that I don't need to be present.
And if something bad is happening in this present moment,
Of course I want to dream about what a better future will be like,
Or what a better past was like.
So in every scenario,
The mind has decided as if it can decide.
It cannot decide anything without our permission,
Without your permission,
You,
The awareness,
The presence.
There's a voluntary surrender to the mind's whims that escape of this present moment is the only option.
I'm not saying thinking is the problem.
I'm saying escaping the present into thinking is the problem.
And again,
It's not a problem because I say it's a problem,
Because at the end of the day we are doing it out of our own freedom.
Nobody can make us stay in this present moment or escape it into thinking.
And once things are done out of freedom,
They are no longer a problem.
So thinking is not the villain here.
It's our misunderstanding of where life is that results in this escape.
And that's why we are cut off from this moment where all the fulfillment,
The love,
The beauty,
The intelligence lies.
And then we desire it so deeply and the future always fails to deliver.
At this point,
We have practiced this escape so diligently,
Moment after moment for years and decades,
That this revelation might feel like being hit by a bus.
And as my teacher likes to say that this has been crystallized by repetition and the opposite.
No repetition is the way out of this addiction,
So to speak.
Addiction of escape.
So the way out is this understanding of what I am pointing at,
To allow it to grow in us,
So that it can remind you,
Just like a fully primed pump works by itself.
Once you see the truth of my words in your own experience and it finds roots in your heart,
The erosion of habit will happen at its own speed,
Proportionate to your interest and your love for this moment,
For life,
For peace and happiness.
The mind is merely an instrument left on its own devices.
It will go rogue and it has gone rogue.
You,
The presence,
The awareness,
That which you call I,
Is the power that the mind works on.
You are the master.
Once this understanding deepens in you,
The same mind that went rogue will facilitate the process of colonization of this understanding in every facet of our life.
Although it might sound like I am demonizing the mind,
The mind is merely an instrument programmed for survival.
Survival of itself and the body.
Once you add fulfillment,
Peace,
Happiness,
Love in the picture,
We can't let the mind run the show,
Because it has done a good job of keeping you alive,
Not a good job of fulfilling you.
Fulfillment is in this moment.
It's always in this moment.
This is the portal where experience happens.
Conceptual thinking is not real experience.
Let me rephrase that.
The experience that the conceptual thinking is weaving in our mind through images and sounds is not the real experience that happens in this moment,
Through our senses,
Through our mind,
Through our body.
At best,
It's a stick-figure representation in a 6K,
8K world of experience.
Every time you arrive in this moment,
You are one with life.
You are actually living.
From this arrival in the moment,
Whatever conscious thinking happens is still rooted in this moment.
The unconscious thinking of escaping will become redundant once you understand its fear-induced shenanigans.
Every time you arrive in this moment,
You will feel connected with yourself.
You will feel connected with others,
With your work,
With your kids.
The idea of connection and the experience of connection,
The idea of anything and the experience of anything are very different.
Ideas happen in the mind.
The experience happens in the moment.
Keep arriving.
And what you are escaping to is a mere figment of imagination.
Life is here.
Real is here.
Don't settle for imaginary.
Don't settle for figments.
Don't escape.
Thank you.
