Roger Harty: Musings About The Now

.

ANYBODY who knows me will know that I am a huge fan of a book called ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle.

I can safely say that having become familiar with the book and all the ins and outs about understanding the Now it has changed my life.

It has never failed me and has given me, if nothing else, a refuge for peace of mind and a clear direction in life.

The first thing I can say about the Now is the universal fact that all we ever have is Now. You can’t live in the past and the future has not yet arrived so honestly the only gig in town is the Now.

If you want to be on the dance-floor of life you have to learn to live in the Now! Another fact about the Now is that it opens up all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions.

For instance in my opening sentence above I wrote about understanding the Now which by itself is a total contradiction. You cannot understand the Now you can only be in the Now.

If you are trying to comprehend the Now, that de facto means that you are thinking about it. Thinking brings us somehow by its very nature into the past or the future which are the very two places in the mind where the Now cannot exist.

So to summarise the above.

1  The Now is the only gig in town.

2  You cannot understand the Now you can only Be in the Now.

So ultimately the secret to the Now is a very simple one, but the problem is that our minds will never agree with that statement, purely because they are being sidestepped and do not like being ignored. (Who or what likes to be ignored?)

However we have to live with the truth and the truth is that the only connection that we have with the future or the past is our thinking mind. Another truth is that the two places that the Now cannot exist in is the future or the past.

That in a nutshell is why, whether we like it or not, our thinking mind has to be sidestepped (ignored!).

So to live in the Now and to truly appreciate the Now, we can only experience it and not think about it.

To put that in another way, if we cannot think about it the only thing that is left is to experience it. Now you’re on the dance-floor!!

If I was to ask a question at this stage it would be this. Having mentioned the above, is it any wonder that the true place of refuge where we can find God is in the Now??

Another Paradox!!  We can never find the Now we can only Be in the Now. We can only experience the Now.

Wouldn’t it then be also true to say that we ultimately can never find God (search for God) in our lives we can only experience God in our lives.

How can we search for God if he is always present? Is this not what Jesus meant when He said “Be still and know that I Am God”.

P.S. There may be some people reading this who are uncomfortable with the term ‘God’ and I totally understand this and at no stage am I trying to offend. I would suggest that they can replace the term ‘God’ with the word ‘Peace’ or ‘Love’ and they should find that  will also work for them.