MotherShip by Sam Wise ___ PLEASE REFRESH PAGE FOR WEB FONTS

Saturday 6 August 2016

Being Present

 
“Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being sand those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.
            Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation and that serves no purpose whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognising its futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation. In fact, in most cases it keeps you stuck in it, blocking real change. Anything that is done with negative energy will become contaminated by it and it time give rise to more pain, more unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious: unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others, unless they are immune – that is, highly conscious.
            Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space, nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without. If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution

- (The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Hodder & Stoughton, London, U.K., 1999, p.63-64).


Q. I don’t see how I can be free now. As it happens, I am extremely unhappy with my life at the moment. This is a fact, and I would be deluding myself if I tried to convince myself that all is well when it definitely isn’t. To me, the present moment is very unhappy; it is not liberating at all. What keeps me going is the hope or possibility of some improvement in the future.
A. You think that your attention is in the present moment when it’s actually taken up completely by time. You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now. What you refer to as your ‘life’ should more accurately be called your ‘life situation.’ It is psychological time: past and future. Certain things in the past didn’t go the way you wanted them to go. You are still resisting what happened in the past, and now you are resisting what is. Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.
Q. It is true that my present life situation is the result of things that happened in the past, but it is still my present situation, and being stuck in it is what makes me unhappy.
A. Forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life.
Q. What is the difference?
A. Your life situation exists in time.
            Your life is now.
            Your life situation is mind-stuff.
            Your life is real.
            Find the ‘narrow gate that leads to life.’ It is called the Now. Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now? When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.

- (The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Hodder & Stoughton, London, U.K., 1999, p.51-52).


“The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life’s challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns you into a nightmare. If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods or listening to someone, then you certainly won’t be able to stay conscious when something ‘goes wrong’ or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the way in which you deal with them will show you and others where you are at as far as your state of consciousness is concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or what visions you see. So it is essential to bring more consciousness into your life in ordinary situations when everything is going relatively smoothly. In this way, you grow in presence power. It generates an energy field in you and around you of a high vibrational frequency. No unconsciousness, no negativity, no discord or violence can enter that field and survive, just as darkness cannot survive in the presence of light.” - (The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Hodder & Stoughton, London, U.K., 1999, p.61-62).

Extraits du film NOSFERATU de Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (Allemagne 1922) accompagnés de la musique The Calling (Mk II) du groupe Death In June (Nada! - 1985).

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