The Power of Now

Chapter 1: You are not your mind

The word enlightenment is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.

• Buddha's definition of enlightenment ""the end of suffering"". It only tells you what is enlightenment is not.
• When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.
• The incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.
• Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgements and definitions that blocks all true relationships.
• The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the thinker.
• Become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence. The progress of practice is measured by the degree of peace you feel within.
• The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you can't find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
• No mind is consciousness without thought.
• Emotion is the body's reaction to the Mind
• Love, joy and peace are deep states of Being. Pleasure is derived from something outside of you.
• All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfilment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.
• Don't seek to become free of desire or ""achieve"" enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.

Chapter 2: Consciousness: The way out of pain.

• The pain you create now is always is some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconsicous resistance to what is.
• Time and mind are in fact inseparable.
• Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have
• Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. always work with it, not against it.
• Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it.
• As long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life.
• Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right will no longer be there.
• You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it.
• As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for belief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled.
• The secret of life is to ""die before you die' - and find that there is no death.

Chapter 3: Moving deeply into the now

• The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of mind. Once you have understood the basic dysfunction, there isn't really much else that you need to learn or understand.
• End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from mind and it stops - unless you choose to use it.
• Past gives you an identity and future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfilment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
• Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
• Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.
• The mind cannot know the tree. It can only know the facts or information about the tree. My mind cannot know you, only labels, judgements, facts, and opinions about you. Being alone knows directly.
• If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.
• The moment you realise you are not present, you are present.
• Any lesson from the past becomes relevant and is applied now. Any planning as well as working towards achieving a particular goal is done now.
• Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete ? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life ?
• All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms are fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.
• Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.
• You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the now.
• Use your senses fully. Be where you are, Look around. Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything thing to be. Listen to the sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something - anything - and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhytem of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the ""isness"" of all things. Move deeply into the Now.
• It's about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations - to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the ""isness"" of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with.
• As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.
• Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing ? If there isn't, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.
• When the compulsive striving away from the Now ceases, the joy of Being flows into everything you do.

Chapter 4: Mind Strategies for avoiding the Now

• Make it conscious. Observe the many ways in which unease, discontent, and tension arise within you through unnecessary judgement, resistance to what is, and denial of the now.
• Am I at ease at this moment ? is a good question to ask yourself frequently. Or you can ask: "What's going on inside me at this moment ?"
• Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it , or accept it totally.
• Stress is caused by being ""here"" but wanting to be ""there"" or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.
• Ask yourself what ""problem"" you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment ?"
• Waiting is the a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present.
• Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time. Access the power of Now. That is the key.
• The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

Chapter 5: The State of the Presence.

• The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in. The mental noises returns; the stillness is lost.
• Since being, consciousness and life are synonymous, we could say that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness.

Chapter 6: The Inner Body

• The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes.
• If you keep your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now.
• There is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.
• Full attention also implies acceptance.
• Non forgiveness is often towards another person or yourself, but it may just as well be toward any situation or condition - past, present or future - that your mind refuses to accept.

Chapter 7: Portals Into the Unmanifested

• Whenever you are present, you become ""transparent"" to some extent to the light, the pure consciousness that emanates from this source.
• Let your spiritual practice be this: As you go about your life, don't give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within.
• Another portal into the Unmanifested is created through the cessation of thinking.
• Surrender - the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is - also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested.
• Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what is; these are all portals you can use - but you only need to use one.
• Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.
• We identify exclusively with our own physical and psychological form, As every form is highly unstable, we live in fear.
• Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God - A Course in Miracles.
• When space and time are realized within as the Unmanifested - no-mind and presence - external space and time continue to exist for you, but they become much less important.
• Every portal is a portal of death, the death of the false self.
• Chapter 8: Enlightened Relationships
• True salvation is fulfilment, peace, life in all its fullness.
• If you stop investing it with ""selfness,"" the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama and new pain.
• The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of mind.
• When you know you are not at peace, your knowing creates a still space that surrounds your nonpeace in alowing and tender embrace and then transmutes your nonpeace into peace,

Chapter 9: Beyond Happiness and Unhappiness there is Peace.

• Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
• Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher.
• All that arises passes away.
• Whenever you are unhappy, there is the unconscious belief that the unhappiness ""buys"" you what you want.
• Don't look for peace, Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now.
• A few years from now - two years or seventy years, it doesn't make much difference - both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all.

Chapter 10: The meaning of Surrender

• Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life
• Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.
• Negativity, unhappiness, or suffering in whatever form means that there is resistance, and resistance is always unconscious."
• Full attension is full acceptance, is surrender."
• Time and pain are inseparable.
• Choice implies consciousness. Choice beins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns.
• You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past.