Emerald Heart School Principal Tim Dyson, continues with the theme started in Ian Mills’s article ‘Being-ness’, published on 15th November 2017 and shares his insights regarding the more elusive layers associated with these issues. 

 


Nowhere Else to Go

The Blog article written a couple of months ago by Emerald Heart Elder Ian Mills, on the importance of being present really got me thinking. It was a lightly written, rather nice article and it got me reflecting on why we find it so hard to be fully present.  So rather than write a nice light article like Ian I’ve come up with a heavy one, Lol.

For sure there is a lot of conditioning on many levels that seeks to distract us from the present moment and much of it is societal but what is it about us that makes us so susceptible to that pull?  Why do we seem so willing to be distracted in this way. Even when we take time away from our busy lives the same thing seems to happen so what is it that causes us to reject the present moment? To me it feels like the energy of dissatisfaction. We reject the present moment as not being good enough preferring to think about a better future or a more pleasant past or perhaps to worry about the future or dwell negatively in the past, either way an aspect of our consciousness is rejecting the present. The trouble with this is that there is no future or past there is only the present moment and even this rejection takes place in the present despite our efforts to escape it.

Yes we have memories and plans for the future but there can only ever be NOW. When we plan for the future we are doing it right now. When we go into past memories, we are doing that in the here and now not actually in the past. We can’t escape the present moment, there is nowhere else to go so why do we try so hard to do so?

This dissatisfaction with the Now is, I believe, rooted in our story of self; the ego driven story of ourselves and our lives. We have our memories and from them we build a story of self that creates endless dissatisfaction and inner conflict.  We can’t possibly accept the present moment as being all there is as it doesn’t feel good enough. We need to try to create an alternative to just being here alive with all of our own and life’s imperfections and so we live in our heads endlessly following thoughts and the emotions that accompany them that take us away from just being a human being happy with the simple pleasure of being alive.

What I believe we are attempting to produce is a kind of barrier that creates a certain distance between ourselves and reality. All of our rejection of the present moment is an ego driven attempt to avoid reality at all costs because to dwell in the nature of reality, which is always present, would threaten ego at a fundamental level. Our real nature is always fully here, absolutely present and so of course ego has to try all its tricks to keep us from going anywhere near our real nature.

I believe many of us have some sense of this game that ego plays with us. We collude with it because our sense of unworthiness feeds the belief that we are not ready to fully show up, to be fully present in the here and now without some kind of filter in place. We delude ourselves into believing that there will be a better time in some unspecified future where we feel more whole and more ready to be fully alive.  It will be better to be fully present later when I’m less in pain, less scared, less angry, when I’m happier and more content. This is a delusion because there is no future there is only the now and it’s a delusion because we will never feel ready at an ego level of consciousness.  We start to become happier by becoming increasingly fully present not by putting it off to some future time that doesn’t exist.

So how do we start to overcome this dilemma and become fully present to reality and to our real nature? It will definitely require a certain kind of effort, not the effort of doing something but actually the effort of not doing something. Of not following the habitual patterning that always pulls us away from really experiencing reality as it is. This kind of effort, the effort of not following our habit can be the hardest kind of effort but the rewards will be far-reaching.

Perhaps the easiest and least effortful approach is simply to begin to appreciate the wonder in being alive. To marvel at this tremendous and awe-inspiring gift rather than to follow our minds endlessly seeing what is wrong about ourselves and our lives. It is, at the end of the day just a bad habit driven by ego to avoid the truth of reality. There is nowhere else to go and so we might as well fully show up. Who knows what can unfold in us and what we are capable of if we begin to let reality in.  

Love & Blessings,

Tim Dyson

Principle of the Emerald Heart School of Enlightenment

London, England