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Experience the Unknown, the Very Essence of Life
The present contains the fullness of the world and the fullness of spirit at the same time. But the present is elusive. We all lead our lives by remembering the past and anticipating the future. Therefore, the real and unreal are inexorably blended. They are so entangled, in fact, that the present must be retrieved piecemeal; you cannot leap into it all at once.
The only way to retrieve the present is to clear out the past, which means whatever is routine, dull, knowing, calculated, anxious, and traumatic. You cannot manufacture innocence, for example, but by removing its opposite, knowingness, you leave space so that innocence can express itself once more.
Right now, the present moment is full for you, but in an unreal way. It is full of memories, expectations, projected beliefs, and past conditioning. The present moment could be full in a different, far more real way. You must challenge yourself to move from the unreal to the real.
When confronted with someone you think you know very well, whose behavior is predictable, don’t react at first. Leave a place for something new in your perception of this person. Ask a new kind of question, agree where you would normally disagree, without judgment, and see what happens. The same process can be applied to every other quality of the present moment. Distance yourself from past expectations, and in that way something unexpected can emerge.
Adapted from The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 1995).
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add your comment »There are nice dreams but past no matter good or bad it bilongs to the Lord, and if is something to be cleaned, we are not able to do this is no metter how we feel. Yesterday it was a nice day, bring it back and live it one more time, if it was not nice make it clean. I don't think to be so brave, I prefer to leave this to the only one who has the right to do this. - Because - if he gives me nothing I'll do nothing.
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Just what i needed to soothe my present state of mind. I seem to be surrounded by uncertainities and hostility of thought which constantly disturb my equinamity. Thanks Deepak, u r always my saviour. God Bless.
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Thank you Deepak. Yes cleaning out the past is really necessary. I have often experienced myself trying to move quickly to the future so as to get away from the past and while this all happens in the present moment it is nevertheless not truely lived because of the shadows of the past as you have discribed in another post. It is most likely the traumatic happenings of the past that keep haunting us. A way I have found good in dealing with difficult issues of the past was for example to turn down the sound of a particular event in the past ...it becomes peaceful. Or if there are very strong pictures of a particular event....let the colours fade a little. There may be unfortunate events in the past but they have brought us to where we are today here and now. Thank you again Deepak for this post.
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