Be Here
The root of all mental illness that is not caused by physical poisoning or traumatic physical injury, arises from learning to live in one’s mind, and not in life simply as it exists. This is living in the past and the future, which can only happen in one’s mind. All such holding on mentally to the past and the future is not living in the moment. This is the crux of Buddha’s psychology.
But how do you let go of your hurt and pain, especially when it has been so debilitating?
When reviewing what has happened before, one is projecting back into the past. All that projecting is the learned habit of imagining in the mind. Why imagining? It is imagining because it is not happening now. Living in the mind can also be projecting your doubts into an imagining of the future. When you project a fearful or negative future, you are attempting to repress or suppress the habit of doubt.
Realize that these imaginings in the mind are debilitating because they cling to what has been (or “will be”). We release this clinging not by forgiving what has happened, or not happened, but by living in the present moment. Living life IS forgiving, which can only happen in the present moment. To be in the moment – that is not in one’s mind – and to move away from emotional pain which is a bane in the modern world, one must live continually in the present moment. What moving away from imagined pain is, what forgiving really is, is living life for-giving. For giving, can only occur right now. When you are in the moment, you are not in stories (imaginings) in your mind. Free of imagined stories, nothing else is possible but living for giving attentively and with care to what is now.
Love hides from the mind that is not present because only in living in the moment, is love possible.
There are three ways to live life:
1. To attempt to live in one’s imaginings in the mind, whilst walking through the physical world. This leads to all forms of afflictive and emotional pain.
2. To live vacantly, indifferently to life. But this is an unfulfilling way to live life. This way inevitably leads to escaping mental pain and returning to live in imaginings in one’s mind.
Or
3. To live attentively in the body, not in the imaginings or in an emptiness of mind. To actively live attentively, means NOT living in the mind.
To be attentive requires cultivating the power of interest. Interest sustains presence in the moment. Living in the now is best embodied through the greatest power of interest, Love.
Living fully in the moment, is in fact, Love.
Life is for giving to what is, now.