We carry on with another powerful quote. We hope this will help orient you and remind you of the more important things as you begin to create your 2018 experience.
Enjoy!
“Happiness is only the capacity of a person to live truly in the present moment.”
Dario Salas Sommer
This phrase is quite popular nowadays. We hear it repeated in the context of popular psychology, yoga, and other practices.
But what does it actually mean to live in the present moment?
In the context of Hermetic Philosophy, being in the present moment has to do with how our mind is engaging time. Usually,
We are projecting ourselves through our thought into the past and reacting it thinking about what happened at a previous time, or projecting
ourselves into the future, wandering, worrying or worrying about what the tomorrow will bring. This is why:
Dario Salas Sommer calls us “Time travelers”.
Gurdjieff says we are “dreaming”,
And Yoda points a finger at us reprovingly and says:
“This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away�to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing.”
“And we are all included. This seems to be a peculiarity of mankind – albeit one that we can work to overcome.
Only, in order to work on it, we have to know it exists as an issue, give it the weight it deserves, and engage in some kind of strategy to resolve it.
To truly be in the present moment means to be alive, and aware the world around us, and not to be hypnotized by the constant “noise” in our heads which interprets the world around us without our consent.
And this brings us to the other part of the quote: Happiness.
And here we can bring in a quote from, the bard himself, William Shakespeare:
“nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Hamlet
Our thoughts define our reality, true enough. But where do our thoughts come from? Why can’t we stop them?
And what if we could?
Hermetic Philosophy holds that if we can change our thoughts, we can also change our reality.
We could transform misfortune to fortune, conflict to harmony, and sadness to happiness.
Maybe we can’t stop our cerebral activity over night in order to live in the present moment, but like any worthy journey, we can take a first step.
And a great first step is self observation: turning our attention to ourselves without commenting, to notice and feel what is happening in our body,
our thoughts. Take a moment to notice your breathing right now. Feel and enjoy the sensation of the breath for a minute, let yourself focus on the minute details.
Isn’t it funny how it was there all along, yet you just summoned it into conscious awareness?
The more often and the longer you do this during the day, the more you are connecting into the present moment.
Hypsoconsciousness, by John Baines is an excellent book that describes simple practices to be more in the present moment, grounded, and aware of yourself.
More on all this later in the series, in the meantime, a question:
How many times today can you catch yourself projecting your awareness to the past, or to the future?