Advaita Vision

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Advaita for the 21st Century

Being in the Moment

Gina Lake

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Purchase Gina's book: 'What About Now' from US or UK.
Visit Gina's Website

On each page of What About Now?Reminders for Being in the Moment by Gina Lake (just released) is a quote from one of Gina Lake’s many books that will inspire you and help you remember to be in the moment. These quotes are intended to wake you up out of your ordinary consciousness and bring you in touch with your true nature and help you live from there. Here are some samples:

You think you need your thoughts and feelings to function. You think they are you. But you don’t need them, and they aren’t you. They are part of the conditioned, false self that you think of yourself as, but they aren’t what is alive in you and living this life and experiencing this moment. What is experiencing this moment, including what is aware of contraction over identification with thought, is who you are. It is very silent, though, unlike the egoic mind, which chatters away constantly. The real you is the Silent Experiencer who is alive and having the experience the false self is creating.

Your attention is important. It determines your experience of reality. You have a choice about what you give your attention to once you realize you have a choice. Life is transformed by this realization. It’s really very simple: Choosing to listen to the egoic mind takes you out of the moment and misleads and misguides you, while ignoring it brings you into the moment, where life is happening and wisdom and guidance are available.

Who you really are can only be experienced in this moment, not through thought. When we move our attention away from thought onto anything else, we land in the present moment, and the experience of being present is the experience of our true Self. This experience is one of love, compassion, acceptance, joy, and contentment. When you feel these, you know you are identified with your true Self rather than the ego. When you feel the opposite—discontentment and unhappiness—you know you are identified with the ego, with your thoughts.

Surrendering to life happens simply and naturally when we stop paying attention to our mind’s version of life and start paying attention to life itself as it is coming out of the now. There’s something else to do besides think! And that is to notice—to be aware of what is happening now. Look, feel, listen, sense, and you will drop into the now.

The more accustom we become to being present, the more we begin to live as Essence, which is a free and joyful experience. So, it turns out that the now isn’t just a place of sensory experience, although that is sufficiently rich, but it’s also where life comes out of, and if you aren’t paying attention to the now, you might miss what life is trying to bring about through you. You can follow the egoic mind’s plans and ideas for your life if you want, but something else right here and now has a plan, and that plan will be much more satisfying than anything the ego has to offer.

Experiencing what you are experiencing and experiencing your thoughts are very different realities—very different experiences. When you are experiencing what you are experiencing, you are at peace, relaxed, content, absorbed, with no thoughts about “me,” how “I” am doing, or any other stories, which are the ego’s version of reality. Instead of experiencing reality, the ego tells a story about it, and that becomes its reality.

Love is not an emotion but comes from jumping into experience fully and being willing to really have the experience you are having. Every moment is an opportunity to jump in with both feet, without holding back by evaluating the experience. The egoic mind inserts itself in every moment, or tries to, by evaluating it, worrying about it, or telling a story about it. This commentary doesn’t enhance life or keep us safe; it simply distracts us from the experience and prevents us from being fully involved with it. Most people have one foot in their minds, so to speak, and one foot in their experience. This doesn’t feel the same at all as having both feet in the experience.

Freedom is truly a state of mind—or, rather, a state of no mind, or ignoring the mind’s complaints about life. We are already free and always have been. We have been given this great gift of choice—the freedom to choose how we see life and respond to it. Happiness is under our control more than we may realize. We have more power than we may think—we have the power to not think (i.e., ignore our thoughts) and to experience the gift that this life is.

Because thinking is our default position as humans, we have to learn to notice what else is present besides thought. We have to learn to notice what is Real and true in this moment. We have to train ourselves to pay attention to the subtle joy, expansion, relaxation and yes of Essence as it enjoys life through us. This subtle experience becomes less subtle and easier to notice the more we put our attention on it rather than on thought, and then the mind becomes quieter, softer, and more in the background.

Gina Lake has a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology and over twenty years experience supporting people in their spiritual growth. She is also the author of Radical Happiness, Embracing the Now, Return to Essence, Choosing Love, Anatomy of Desire, Living in the Now, and Getting Free. Visit Gina's website at http://www.radicalhappiness.com for blog posts, free book excerpts and chapters, audio and video recordings, and a free newsletter.

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Page last updated: 10-Jul-2012