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| Article 65 - Presence and Present |
All spiritual seekers would find it very rewarding to read the works of the American teacher EJ Gold. One of his very profound statements is "Invoke the presence of your Presence in the present".
The present is a part of time and Presence is a part of eternity. We experience the world through the five senses. Each moment, the senses take a photograph of life which we register as a single frame in the mind. It is this photograph of the senses which we experience as the present moment. It is just a point. The mind joins several such points to make a series of pictures. In doing so it experiences a feeling of movement, the joining of dots to form a line. It is this moving feeling we call time. For his convenience, man has divided time into minutes and seconds, but this does not convey what is happening at the sensual and mental level.
Our minds are always in the past or future i.e. we are constantly brooding or daydreaming. Thus except when we are in a state of fascination, we are never in this small point called the present moment. Now if we can make an effort to hold our minds in the present moment, we get a feeling of ourselves in the present. Till now we were never in the present but we now feel our own Presence in the present.
Thus we have two separate feelings. One is of the point called the present moment which is continuously changing with every event and moment in life, and another of ourselves being present or our Presence which never changes. The longer we hold on to these separate feelings, the deeper and more powerful they become. We will then experience life in two separate dimensions simultaneously. In one everything is a flux and constantly changing, and in the other we are eternally Present.
Everything that happens in our lives moves along one line of time from birth to death. This line is made up of innumerable dots or present moments. The past is past and cannot change. But Presence is always here. It is neither part of birth or death, nor past or future. It sees the whole line as one dot. This is eternity.