Consciousness: The Way Out of Pain (1of5)

Time for some more Now. There are some good sections I want to get to, so I need to get this one out of the way. This previous week has been a pretty good one, a lot better than most weeks that I've had. My progress has been going well and I recently made another mini-breakthrough. It relates to something I've talked about before, how I am usually harsh on myself, give myself high expectations, and my acceptance for my own actions. I had an idea of what I needed to do, but I realized I was wrong. I felt like there were people out there I needed to make peace with, but really what I really needed to do was make peace with myself.

Create No More Pain in the Present

Not accepting what is can be a source of a lot of suffering.

The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind.

Accepting the now is a very difficult thing to do, especially for me, since my mind likes to dwell in the past and dream of the future. I used to spend little time in the now. As I learn to accept things for what they are, I can feel myself become free of that pain I was once prisoner too.

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.

It's weird to think of the now as timeless, at least it was weird for me. The concept of time is in itself a interesting topic to talk about. Our lives are so ingrained with this idea of time. Time is always moving, we are always getting older, etc. This in a way can hinder us, since when we look at time we really only see the past or the future, since the now is technically just an infinitely small piece of time existing at this very moment. My calculus knowledge makes me want to define the now as dt, just a joke. Here we learn that the mind needs time. Without time, the mind has nothing, no past of future, to identify with. If it only has the now, and the now is always changing, what does the mind identify with?

Yes, we need the mind as well as time to function in this world, but there comes a point where they take over our lives, and this is where dysfunction, pain, and sorrow set in.

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future, and so, as the vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, become covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. An increasingly heavy burden of time has been accumulating in the human mind. All individuals are suffering under this burden, but they also keep adding to it every moment whenever they ignore or deny that precious moment or reduce it to a means of getting to some future moment, which only exists in the mind, never in actuality. The accumulation of time in the collective and individual human mind also holds a vast amount of residual pain from the past.

The minds obsession with the past and the future covers up the now. It leads us to believing that you are who you are based on your past. The accumulations of things I have done in the past is me, thats what I identify with. Looking at my life in the past, this is what I must do in the future. Your mind is always stuck in the past so it has an identity, and its always projecting itself into the future so that it can stay alive, obscuring the now. Sometimes the now may be something unpleasant, so you would want your mind to cover it up. This really does nothing to get rid of the pain. You are just adding to it.

It is as it is. Observe how the mind labels it and how this labeling process, this continuous sitting in judgment, creates pain and unhappiness. By watching the mechanics of the mind, you step out of its resistance patterns, and you can then allow the present moment to be. This will give you a taste of the state of inner freedom from external conditions, the state of true inner peace. Then see what happens, and take action if necessary or possible.

Accepting the present moment is the best thing that you can do. Accept what is, then act. That sounds like the best way to act on something. My feeling that I needed to make peace out there was still my mind living in the past. I needed to look deep down inside and accept what has happened. Only after that can I take proper action. I was going about it the wrong way. I was trying to take an action first before I did any accepting. I already know from experience that this is true. I already did take some actions, and I did not get the results I had expected. My pain and suffering did not go away like I thought they would. Now I am focusing on my inner self and looking to accept what has happened, and then take the best action necessary.