Status check (December 9th)
December 09 – Status Check: Today, every hour (set an hourly chime-alarm if you wish), stop what you are doing and ask yourself either “What Time is it?” (Answer: “Now”) & “Where Am I?” (Answer: “Here”). Alternate the asking of these questions and keep it up for one full day … Be sure to pause after both the asking and the answering to look around and Appreciate exactly where & when you ARE.
Initially for me, this task was about simply remembering that I was alive in any particular moment. “Be Here Now” sounds so simple, and indeed it can be. I mean, the first time I engaged it this morning, I remembered that I was “Here” – sitting in a chair in a friend’s cottage, on the coast of a region of land known as Rhode Island,
in the northeastern portion of a region of land known as the United states of America,
on a planet called Earth,
circling a star called The Sun,
in a galaxy known as “The Milky Way”,
which is hurtling through an incomprehensibly vast space known as “The Universe”.
OK, that last part was little disconcerting, and yet everything up to “The Milky Way” was cool.
And then I remembered that I was “Now” – independent of all the remembered moments of my past, and independent of all my moments that might come thereafter.
Then my awareness started to ponder the implications of these Truths. There were the somewhat conventional questions: “But where in this Universe am I?” … “Is there an end to this Universe?” … “Is our Universe an entity like the Solar System, also hurtling through an even larger space?” These questions don’t have answers (yet), so it felt pointless to invest too much energy in considering them, though I did experience a measure of Peace when I simply let them go and remembered that, regardless of where my “Here” actually is in space, I am always still “Here”. It brought me a brief-yet-profound experience of inner stillness – “Here” …
And finally my ego began yammering something about stillness being as myth – that every entity on Earth is zooming and spinning and bouncing through the Universe in every second. And on its face, my ego was correct. The Earth and everything on it is rotating at roughly 1046 mph. The Earth and everything on it is orbiting the Sun at approximately 67,000 mph. The Sun and all its planets are zooming through the Milky Way galaxy at around 558,000 mph. And our galaxy itself seems to be hurtling towards a very dense sector of the Universe (known as “The Great Attractor”) at about 2,700,000 mph (this last figure is a bit tenuous, but the galaxy is going somewhere in a hurry for sure). Feeling dizzy yet? No need, friends, because the relative inability of our brains to perceive all this movement means that we can still pause and be still – “Now” …
And as if that wasn’t more than enough, as I began to observe every new Here&Now during each subsequent purposeful pause, I became aware of something amazing: that our lives not only appear to be beautiful, every moment of our lives feels Beauty-full. I initially experienced this Truth when I somehow shifted my perceptions from what I was seeing or hearing to what I was feeling, and then even to how it felt to see and to hear. And when I did so, the following thoughts became clear:
Sunlight is beautiful, and yet feels Beauty-full …
Green tea tastes delicious, and yet it feels Beauty-full …
Blue glass is beautiful, and it feels Beauty-full …
The image of Buddha (or Christ) laughing is beautiful, and yet it feels Beauty-full …
And this inner Beauty, so perfectly reflected in everything around me in every moment of my life, is what “Here&Now” means to me – here and now.
See You when I see you …
…. and until then, be Now!
Scaughdt
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