'Nowhere near now': what you need to know to let go
Ordinary human experience is always split across two dimensions.
When you think about it, our day-to-day life is actually a weird fusion of (1) sense awareness that’s necessarily grounded in real-time and (2) an abstract mental awareness that isn't bound at all by the laws of time and space.
To put it another way - the body always has to stay put where and ‘when’ it is, but the conceptual mind can go anywhere and imagine anything it wants.
Normally we don’t pay attention to this split aspect of experience - but its implications for our happiness, health and prosperity are huge.
Why? Because ‘here’ is the only place we ever really inhabit, and ‘now’ is the only timeframe in which our life really occurs.
Here-and-now is the only real foothold we have - the only place in which to access real happiness and from which to enact real change.
So the problem for most of us is that we tend to live our lives nowhere near now.
And the result is the bizarre, utterly contradictory situation that our actual location in time and space remains hidden, unfamiliar and - crucially - unaccessed.
Where are you now?
So, if we’re nowhere near now, where are we then most of the time?
Well, practically speaking we’re in a weird gap - a gap between our real-time experiences and the commentaries that we impose upon them in the blink of an eye.
These narratives, storylines and projections take us out of the present and out of reality.
And the result is that what we are ‘feeling’ and ‘believing’ at any given time is likely to be a distorted conceptual projection of reality rather than reality itself.
Until the truth of this is seen - until we recognize how our default experience of the world is fundamentally mind-mediated - it is difficult to make any significant or lasting change in our life.
Seeing is believing / believing is seeing
To a significant degree, that projected narrative is composed of beliefs. So let's take a moment to reflect on what a belief actually is.
Beliefs enable us to take a definite position on something in a way that allows us to act. But they always remain superficial and incomplete forms of knowledge.
In contrast to a definite realization, a belief can always turn out to be wrong - and is only ever a best guess or working hypothesis about reality.
Beliefs in general can be either positive or negative - with those that are aligned with reality being life-enhancing, and those that are mal-aligned with reality being life-hindering.
The projected narrative that creates the ‘gap’ of daily life is generally composed of two different types of beliefs - beliefs about who we are on the one hand, and beliefs about where our experiences are coming from on the other.
The mistaken belief that our experiences come entirely from independent phenomena - without our mind or subjective experience being involved at all - gives rise to an underlying confusion about happiness.
And this in turn gives rise to attachment and aversion which are the main sources of most of our problems and conflict.
This confusion is the fundamental reason we exhaust ourselves chasing a dream situation on the one hand and fleeing a nightmare situation on the other.
Have you ever noticed how, when you actually do acquire that dream situation, you’re now presented with the brand new problem of trying to keep hold of it?
It doesn’t give us the fulfilment and satisfaction we felt sure it would - but we cling to it nonetheless, until we’re eventually dissatisfied and chasing some other dream version of perfect happiness.
The (Good) News Flash
Real lasting change can only happen when we see our distorted beliefs for what they really are.Because otherwise we run the risk of merely imposing ‘positive’ thoughts on top of that faulty belief structure.
When that happens we end up micro-managing our own thoughts and trying to manipulate the thinking of others - fearing the consequences of falling into ‘negative’ thinking.
With that approach our world contracts, we fail to see opportunities for growth and fulfillment, and ultimately we learn to play safe and stay small.
All of these tendencies are aspects of the predicament known as samsara - an endless, self-perpetuating cycle of stress and suffering.
And ultimately this understanding presents us with a choice.
We can either continue to get caught up in confusion, fail to realize where our default experiences are really coming from, and live like we’re chasing our own tail.
Or we can recognize and relinquish our distorted belief structure and fall in love with the beauty and abundance of the present moment - which has been our actual location all along.
In reality there are no dream or nightmare situations - just dream or nightmare beliefs.
And this is really good news, because beliefs are things that we can definitely learn to let go of.