Beware: This May Wake You Up
Beware: you may want to go back to sleep!

Approach the present moment as if you have never approached this present moment before.

Of course, the present moment hasn’t been experienced before, but we still approach it as if life is one continuum, and so we overlay the present moment with the previous moment. The past. There will still be a residue of the past which is a graph of all our reactions – our patterning – but when we take a larger view of the graph, a certain tendency will be seen and that is our true tendency, indicating the path we are following.

When we approach the present moment in a fresh way, it is more tentative, more reflective. This connects to lateral thinking as opposed to vertical thinking. Vertical thinking is one continuous line of assumptions. Lateral thinking is going back to basics and asking the question, “What is this?”

At retreats, one notices some lamas approaching text and questions as if never heard before. That’s a good sign! I remember asking Ringu Rinpoche, “Is essence ordinary?” He paused for some time, pondering, and replied, “Yes it is.” I assumed he knew this already, but he took the time to review his view.

We will notice that we may not want to stay in the present moment. Astonishingly, we actually don’t remain in the present moment: we chose to go back to the familiar dream. We “sleep, perchance to dream.”

We always have a choice to walk out of enslavement, or stay there as it’s ok really… Demons know how simple it is for us to wake up, and how simply we can be put to sleep. The media is all about the past (even if it is the immediate past) and can never speak of the present moment. If it did, it would stop entertaining us.

All we have to ‘do’ is watch, and recognise. When we recognise, there is a knowingness present. The present moment is the presence of wakefulness…and cannot be found, as we would be coming out of the present moment of direct, immediate experience, to entertain ourselves. This is non-duality becoming duality.

Remembering this, you may never go back to sleep again 😉