The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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“You have it already. You just can’t feel it because your mind is making too much noise.”
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Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
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Thinking has become a disease.
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So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
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about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.
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Why should we be addicted to thinking?
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Because you believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking.
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To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important.
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you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
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the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!
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Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.
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the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the “problem.”
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Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.
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Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain.
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The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it.
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the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering
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Why does the mind habitually deny or resist the Now? Because it cannot function and remain in control without time, which is past and future, so it perceives the timeless Now as threatening. Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
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The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future,
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Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.
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Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.
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Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true.
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you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment.
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So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die.
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Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
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The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear.
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The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.
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The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.
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The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.
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Remove time from the mind and it stops
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You haven’t yet grasped the essence of what I am saying because you are trying to understand it mentally. The mind cannot understand this. Only you can. Please just listen.
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Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
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Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
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“What, at this moment, is lacking?”
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If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
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The moment you realize you are not present, you are present.
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Any planning as well as working toward achieving a particular goal is done now.
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If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored.
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Your life’s journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to “make it.”
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Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are?
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The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present.
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Most people find it difficult to believe that a state of consciousness totally free of all negativity is possible.
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time is the cause of your suffering or your problems.
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You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.
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Forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life. What is the difference? Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real.
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find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?
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Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now. Focus your attention on the Now and tell me what problem you have at this moment.
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You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being.
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See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.
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So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action — just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord.
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To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of past for your identity and future for your fulfillment.
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