presents

“Now-Here” All the Time?

Is it really possible to be in the “now-here” all the time?

Most of my time seems to go in planning for, or worrying about, the future.

Whether you

know it or not,

you cannot be anywhere else than here and now.

Wherever you are it will be here and now.

You are given

only one moment at a time

and you are wasting that moment

in planning or worrying about the future;

and the future never comes.

What comes is always here, now:

it is a series of “nows”

one now,

another now

but you are always living in the now.

There is no future

so how can you worry about the future?

It is because of this kind of worrying

and planning for the future

that a certain proverb

exists in all the languages of the world:

Man goes on desiring,

planning,

worrying about the future

and God goes on disappointing him.

There is no God to disappoint you.

In your very planning, you are sowing the seeds of disappointment.

In your very worrying about the future,

you are wasting the present;

and slowly, slowly it becomes your second nature .

to worry about the future.

So when the future comes,

it will come as the present;

and because of your habit of worrying about the future,

you will waste that moment also in worrying

You will go on worrying about the future for your whole life.

You will stop only when death comes

and takes away all

possibility of the future.

You missed your whole life:

you could have lived

but you only planned.

Live

intensely and totally now,

because the next moment will be born out of this moment;

and if you have lived it totally and joyously,

you can be absolutely certain that the next moment

will bring

more blessings,

more joy.

I have heard:

Three professors of philosophy

were having a discussion

at a railway station. The train was

standing at the platform. There were a few minutes before it was due to leave,

but they got so involved in their discussion that the train left

without them then they realized, and they ran….

In the last compartment, only two professors could enter; the third

remained on the platform. The train had gone

and he had tears in his eyes.

A porter was standing there. Seeing the scene, he said,

“Why are you crying?

At least two of your friends have got the train.”

He said, “That is the problem. They had come to see me off.”

They must also be crying, inside the train.

Existence also sometimes plays jokes on people.

Stop

this habit of planning.

Stop worrying about the future.

If tomorrow comes,

you will be there;

and if you know how to live,

if you know how to live joyously and dancingly,

your tomorrow will also be full of dance and joy.

It is the miserable man

who plans for the future,

because his present is so miserable

that he wants to avoid it, he does not want to see it.

He thinks about tomorrows:

good days are going to come.

He is utterly impotent to transform this moment into a good moment.

A long habit of transferring everything

to the future, .

postponing,

living for the future,

will take your whole life out of your hands.

There is no other way.

You are asking, “Is it really possible

to be in the here-now all the time?”

This is the only possibility.

You cannot be anywhere else.

You try:

try to be in the tomorrow.

Nobody has succeeded up to now

you cannot be in the

coming minute.

Do you think you can jump

and reach into the future,

jump out of today

and reach into tomorrow?

Even if you are planning for tomorrow, that too is being done here-now;

even if you are worrying about the future,

that too is being done here-now.

You cannot be anywhere else; whatever you do,

existence allows only

this space

of here and now.

I can say to you

that I am living here and now.

I also have tried

somehow to get

into the future

but there is no way.

You cannot go back

into the past,

you cannot go ahead of time into the future.

In your hands is always the present;

in fact, the present is the only time you have.

And now

is such

a meaningful word,

because that is your whole life

a “now” stretched

from your birth to your death.

But it is always now…

and here is the only space.

You cannot be

anywhere else than here;

wherever you are,

that place will become here.

Just be

clear about it,

otherwise life goes on slipping through your hands like water.

Soon you will have empty hands;

and meeting death with empty hands

is an utter failure.

Meet your death

full of joy

silence and serenity.

Meet death

with your hands

full of ecstasy.

In that ecstasy, death itself dies.

You never die…

your here-now continues

forever and forever.

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