Keeping your mind and heart clean is an important key to your success, whatever be your ambition of life. Because there is an awakening that comes from a clear mind, ascertained by wandering thoughts and pre-occupations, and there is an awakening that comes from a clear heart, willing to engage with life as gift and as an ever-unfolding revelation of the purpose of creation. Such an awakened status can’t respond indifferently to life because it sees the outstretched hand of the creator at every turn and in every particle of experience. It cannot turn away from feeling, no matter what feelings may occur, because it perceives emotional depth as the great gift of individualized consciousness. This gift stirs the response of individualized life to the source of life as it displays itself in all living things.
To be awake and present is to take responsibility for noticing – for maintaining an intimate connection between the self and the rest of the world. It is to know that within the domain of this relationship lays a profound revelation of the source of all within every gesture, every interaction and every experience that takes place. It is to perceive the sacred in every moment. In today’s over scheduled world, being continuously busy is sometimes a necessity but often a choice based on the drive for outer success, wealth and the symbols of what is often taken to be a ‘life worth living’. Being busy, as opposed to having time ‘on one’s hands’, is perceived by many as a testimony to a life that has merit, purpose and meaning.
By contrast, idle hands – hands that remain to time, suggest that time is being wasted – that one could do more, achieve more, accomplish more. No matter if these hands are connected with one’s heart and with the heart of the world. For many, it is only the visible ‘doing’ of things that creates a sense of security and lets us know that time has meaning. The existence of a space of silence in which awareness can broaden is often not considered a gain. Nor is simply being here, responsive to the very air we breathe, considered a virtue. Is it any wonder, then, that we, as a collective humility, have forgotten have placed ‘noticing’ on the back burner of experiential values. And what would we notice if we took the time to do so?
In order to answer this question, it is helpful to sit in one place, breathing quietly, eyes somewhat unfocused, listening, seeing, sensing. Though one can do this profitably in a bare room, it is easier, at first, to sit in an environment where there is just a little movement present. Now, close the eyes and pay attention to the other senses. Feel the comforting fabric of surrounding life as if it were an envelope or cocoon, gently cradling one’s essential self. Notice every thing without discrimination and opinion. Try to feel the intimacy of connection with what is.
Spending time for a few minutes each day being awake and noticing is a good way to awake and noticing is a good way to begin the practice of being present. It is a good way to begin to expand one’s idea of what constitutes a meaningful life. And yet more than this is needed if one is to truly embrace what is, and to be ‘present in the present’. What is needed is the greater opening of the heart to the one self that exists within all.
This perception of unity and oneness has an opportunity to grow at any moment in which we interact with another soul. It is nourished by an absence of judgement and by a willingness to be open to the deeper levels of who that other might. Such openness comes from state of innocence and of childlike grace. It comes from knowing that the ‘other’ is part of the same ‘all that is’ as oneself, therefore of one heart, one breath, one life. The gift of being present as it applies to relationships is that it brings love to every interaction, no matter how small or insignificant. It brings the divine into every perception, no matter how ordinary. And it brings gratitude into each moment as it unfolds.
As a sense of being present deepens and one’s capacity to notice flowers, the deep richness of life and of love can be found everywhere and separation nowhere. In this state, one senses only the one who lives within all. One feels the essence within every other. Here, consciousness can affirm the greater life of which it is a part:
I am and you are. We are both of the stars and of the dust of the earth. We are both of the rocks and of the sandy shores. We are water and we are sky; we are earth, and we are air. We are the breath that lie breathes through itself, in a single and continuous song of creation.
We have to combine our feelings of being present in every task we are undertaking. Once we devote ourselves to the task being undertaken, we focus ourselves with all the energies at our disposal, we are sure that we may incessantly have every chance of success in accomplishing our jobs. Be happy – we may feel our presence.
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