Moving deeply into the NOW.

Don't seek yourself in the mind.

Many of us try to learn and understand the mind as a first step of attempting to attain consciousness.

The problems of the mind can not be solved on the level of the mind. Studying the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won't take you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity.

When you understand that the root of unconsciousness is identification of the mind, you become present, you become conscious.

• Identification with the mind gives it more energy, observation of the mind withdraws energy from it. The energy withdrawn from the mind turns into presence.
• Identification with the mind creates more time; observation of the mind opens up the dimension of timeless.

Learning to misidentify from the mind, therefore, is simple in it's core: End the delusion of time.

The mind needs time to exist. Our whole essence of self is shaped by the past, which then is projected in the future. We must realise that it is this identification with the mind, and thus time (past and future), that causes us suffering.

The books gives us two main perspectives of time. Clock time and psychological time.

If you set yourself a goal and work toward it, you are using clock time. You are aware of where you want to go, but you honour and give your fullest attention to the step you are taking at this moment. If you have become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfilment, the Now is no longer honoured. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping into the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into Psychological time.

In the absence of psychological time, your sense of self is derived from Being, not from your personal past. Therefore, the psychological need to become anything other than who you are already are is no longer there. In the world, on the level of your identified-with-mind-self, you may need to be wealthy, knowledgeable, successful, free of this or that, but in deeper dimension of Being you are complete and whole now.

When you think about it, all negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Usually, the future is a replica of the past. We dwell in what could have been, what has happened and why it happened so much so that our future is shaped accordingly. Our future becomes a salvation to what our ever needing mind craves. And the present moment, the Now, becomes obsolete.

What we need to understand is that the present is all we will ever have. There is never a time when our life is not "this moment." Once we realise this, it will be clear that the quality of our consciousness at this very moment is what shapes the future. And the quality of our consciousness is determined by our degree of presence.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

Question: I can not believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems

Answer: You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now. There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.