What's Your Relationship To the Present Moment?
Did you know that the present moment is all you'll ever have, and all you'll ever know?
You may think you know the past, or the future, but that knowing is happening in the present. In fact, your entire life only ever happens right now, in the current moment unfolding in front of you. It simply cannot be otherwise.
So that begs the question:
If I only ever know the present moment, then what's my relationship to it? How should I interact with the reality of life that keeps manifesting before me?
Do I fight it? Resist it? Use it as a stepping stone?
Or do I embrace it? Harmonize with it? Participate in it?
To answer these questions, we first need to know two things.
What is the nature of your being that has a relationship with the world around you?
You're the one in there looking out - the witness consciousness. You are not your mind, your body, your emotions, or your experiences. You are the indwelling being inside that's aware of all those things. You are the one that knows you have a body.
Think about it. The same you that looked at your 6-year-old body in the mirror, now looks at your body today in the mirror, however old you are. Your body has changed. Your experiences have changed. So have your beliefs, opinions, and relationships. But you in there, the conscious being looking out, are the same.
What is the nature of the reality of the world outside of you?
The moment unfolding in front of you is the result of 13.8 billion years landing on your doorstep. The world belongs to science, to God, to evolution, to cause and effect. You and I didn't make the world. We have nothing to do with it!
If you teleported to a village in China right now, you'd see that moment. But if you're not there, that moment is still going on. Just because you see it doesn't mean it's special. It's just what you see. The universe expresses itself everywhere, and you just happen to be there seeing one moment passing by.
A wise person realizes this is true of every moment. Moments don't belong to you, or me. They belong to themselves, to God, to science. But we have the gift of experiencing them.
So when you realize that you're the one looking out at a world that has nothing to do with you, you then ask: