Listening to the Present Moment
Escuchando el momento presente
This meditation invites you to slow down and listen to the quiet, present-moment knowing that lives beneath your familiar patterns of thought.
Listening to the Present Moment
Attuning to quiet signals
So be very attentive.
Listen very carefully to the soft, quiet signals or messages that you are just receiving in the present moment.
You're not receiving them from anywhere.
There's no entity or being of yours that's over there.
It's just this attunement, listening now into the moment.
For example, saying: yeah, don't need this, or don't finish that, or this noise is too much, move away.
And maybe you have an intuition that says this noise is really distressing me, but it's okay if I stay.
It's just an anxious activation and a fear, and actually the noise is not really a problem.
I'm not saying which one it is,
but that's the kind of intuition that you can start attuning to.
Only in the present moment, and when you're listening to it, can it in a sense speak.
There is no fixed answer
An annoying sound could be, in that moment, the answer could be: I need to move away.
Or it could be: it's bringing up a certain reactivity that I'm having a hard time sitting with, and maybe I can feel more deeply into this reactivity.
And the noise is kind of a helpful trigger.
But maybe it's not.
And there is no answer to that.
It's only in that moment.
So this is touching upon what I speak about:
what the universe wants as us.
Listening beyond the conditioned mind
Instead of what we're used to doing, which is listening to our mind,
the mind has a program, and it says: you want this, you want that, this is not good, you should go there.
That's the automatic. When we're listening to that, it's based on past.
When we are listening to what I call the desire of the universe,
the want that is universal, meaning not from your mind, from mystery,
(call it the mysterious wanting, you don't have to use "universe"),
it's coming from the present moment.
And so the advice in that sense is:
think of that as the deeper practice for you now, to really sense.
And it's going to require a sensing with that sensitivity into the present moment, constantly.
And it will disconnect you
from the known way of functioning.
Letting go of life support
It's like you've been on life support, and now you have to rely on your own system.
And that as a metaphor is: you've been relying on thought and conditioned mind. And this is all of us.
And now we need to rely on not something that we were taught,
not something that we learned from our parents, nor from past experience.
It's a knowing that's going to come from only this present moment.
And the more you start to listen to that,
it will become in a sense like an automatic flow.
Working with thought
At first, you need to listen and ignore the thought process.
Observe the thought process. The thought is going to say, whatever, go left.
And you can recognize that: oh, that's the reactive thinking that I now can see as the condition.
And it's a very difficult process because it's scary.
The thought process gives us the safe known, even if it's tight.
Even if it's the cause of suffering,
we trade that tightness for the sense of knowing, the sense of safety in the conditioned knowing.
And the knowing that's from the present moment is just,
you can never know if you're making the right movement.
That's when it's present.
It's a constant falling into a risk-taking.
Faith in presence
But at some point, the trust in that becomes so profound.
This is what I think was referred to as faith, true faith.
Not to an entity, a divine entity,
but faith in beingness and presence.
It's not about listening to a direction that's coming from the past.
It's about something that's really subtle. Really soft.
And when that trust starts to take over,
then it will be more of a flow, and an automatic.
Automatic in the sense that you'll notice that it takes over.
This is when they say: thy will is my will.
And "thy will" isn't to a religious entity.
Thy will is just this vast, mysterious, centerless movement.
And the recognition that "my will,"
the known,
the will that was coming from this conditioned mind,
isn't really there actually.
It's this recognition that it's actually, always, ultimately, has only ever been thy will.
Beginning and end
And just one more thing, as a balance to that:
we always are, right now, at the end.
There's nowhere to get to.
We're also at the beginning,
but it's the beginning and the end.
You are the alpha and the omega.