It’s right in front of you, but you avoid it all the time, often for lack of courage.
“This” is called the present, it’s what happens to you the moment it happens, whether it’s a strange wave of post-orgasmic bliss, or a phone argument with your landlord.
In either case, the intensity of these states makes them challenging to face, and we often try to sidestep them.
Yes, even the aftermath of an orgasm is difficult to experience fully, didn’t you notice how your mind tries to distract you from the raw experience of pleasure by always commenting it? It’s even truer when it comes to pain.
If you started meditating, you’re probably aware of how you build a protection layer of mental blabbering to absorb the shock of reality.
We constantly talk ourselves out of awareness by imagining our future, trampling in our past or simply denying what’s in front of us (“I can’t believe it!”).
Tampering with reality is completely normal, but normal doesn’t mean healthy, it merely means everybody does it. And once again, we do it for lack of temerity: we seek shelter from the crude light of immediate experience, until we decide we’d rather get hurt than living in the matrix.
Something radically changes when you decide to open up to your senses and embrace your present situation fully:
- Self-destructive talk shrinks to nothing
- Stressful situations often become a playground (as opposed to a horror show)
- Waiting times change into exploration times
- Smartphones completely lose their appeal
- Sleep gets deeper and more effective
- Memory increases significantly
There’s enough studies proving what awareness actually enables, and you probably don’t need more evidence.
Still, you might hesitate opening the valve to unknown states, here’s the motivational list that I use for myself to meditate more:
- Life’s running out, whether you attend it or not, the time spent rehearsing your life is taken on…your life.
- Our most lovely fantasies are not worth 0,5% of a the direct experience, a live kiss is worth a dozen online orgies.
- You could dissolve most of your fears in the acid bath of mindfulness, or continue to feed them in your head. There is no in-between.
- The world is dominated by those who decide on our dreams (marketers namely), practicing awareness puts you back in control.
- Every dying person wishes they had learn to enjoy little moments earlier in their lives, you could start before them.
If you take the first steps towards living consciously using meditation, you probably won’t need much convincing arguments, one step will lead to the next. Until that happens, the world will conspire to keep you stuck in mental constructs.
The choice is yours to pick the red pill instead of the blue one, but it’s far easier to digest once your mind is made up.