To better understand everything that is to follow, make sure you have already covered my previous post Consciousness, Ego, and the Self so you can follow along. If you wish to start from the original article, check out my post The Roadmap to Overman.

In this article you will learn the following:

• • what is presence
  • how to achieve it
  • what is time
  • what is fear
  • what is love
  • what is purpose and how to find it

Much of the following text will be paraphrased from the book “The Power of Now” and I do not wish to take away any credit from the author. For a better understanding of everything to come, check out my summary of the book “The Power of Now“.

 What follows is an explanation of how you can feel consciousness in its purest form.

Relation between consciousness and presence

Once you are fully present and in the moment, the true feeling of consciousness will be felt. Nothing that you ever did could possibly add anything to what you have at any given moment. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the now, being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

This is because the mind cannot conceptualize something beyond itself. The problem of the mind cannot be understood on the level of the mind. You cannot feel someone else’s being except through your own. Once you truly understand this, the concept of oneness will become much more clear. The idea that we are all one, that we are love and nothing other than love, but more on this in future articles.

At the deepest level of being, you are one with all that is, and awareness is the path towards this enlightenment. The ability to access pure consciousness, unobstructed by thought is enlightenment.

Remember one thing: nothing is intrinsically boring, indeed, boredom is simply a lack of paying attention. This is the true power of being fully present.

How to achieve awareness in the present moment?

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream – a gap of “no-mind”.  So the goal is to achieve this feeling of “no-mind” and it can be done in two ways. You can either do it by “watching the thinker”, or you can create the gap by directing the focus of your attention into the now.

Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment and you will realize what I am talking about. This is the essence of meditation. Meditating is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.  

It may seem hard to measure your success in the practice of meditation, but there is one certain criterion that always works: the degree of peace that you feel within. And importantly, when meditating, don’t get frustrated once you find yourself lost in thought. To know that you are not present is a great success, that knowing is presence.

Relation between the ego, mind, and presence

Now let’s dive deeper into the relationship between the ego and the present moment.

The ego/self consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it – who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: it misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past.

But the present moment holds the key to liberation and you cannot find the present moment as long as you are identifying with your mind. Your mind is just an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task and when the task is completed, you lay it down and return to the present moment.

Do not give all your attention away to the mind and the external world. By all means focus on what you are doing but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible. Stay rooted within.

Illusion of time

Now we will take a look at the problems the concept of time causes us and how breaking the illusions will help us become happier.

End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable and by removing time from the mind, the idea of there being anything other than the present moment disappears. The feeling of being identified with your mind is to be trapped in time.

Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there”.

Life is now, there was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Once you realize this, you will find out that you cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the now. Focus your attention on the now and tell me what problem you have at this moment. Without time, no suffering, no negativity, can survive and how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and the quality of our lives.

Fear, pain, and death

All fear is the ego’s fear of death. All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance.  Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intrinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. But the present moment already contains everything you could ever need.

Death is just stripping away of all that is not you and the secret of life is to “die before you die”, and find that there is no death, there is only pure consciousness that comes after.

The all-prevailing love, joy, and peace

As I like to call them, the holy trio; love, joy, and peace are deep states of being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with being. As such, they have no opposite, but they cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. This is because they arise from beyond the mind, they are always present, you are just unable to notice them because of all the distractions made by your thoughts. Being conscious, and fully aware of the moment, you will realize that these “emotions” are always present.

Compassion is the awareness of a deep bond between yourself and all creatures, the oneness that we keep talking about. Love and compassion never grow more intense or change. Its radiance just stops being obscured and you get to experience its true nature, the way it always is.

Purpose, life, and the present moment

And now the most important part of the post. What is purpose and how do you find it? These are the topics that we are about to uncover.

You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary, your deepest inner being. It is already whole, complete, and perfect. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for being.

Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do. But if your destination, takes up so much of your attention that it becomes more important than the steps you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose.

Your outer journey may contain a million steps, but your inner journey only has one. And as you become more deeply aware of this one step, you realize that it already contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination.

Understanding purpose

To fully understand what purpose is and how to find it, you should watch the following video as it goes into great detail on purpose and how you can find yours.