If not Now, when?

“Ksana tatkramayoh samyamat vivekajam jnanam” 

         Yoga Sutras of Patanjali III.53

“By samyama (control) on moment and on the continuous flow of moments, the yogi gains exalted knowledge, free from the limitations of time and space”. (B.K.S. Iyengar – Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)

“Patanjali began the journey towards the spiritual kindom with the word atha meaning “now”. He ends with the word iti, meaning “that is all”. The yogi has reached his goal.” (B.K.S. Iyengar – Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)

The most valid in Yoga, teacher and philosopher Patanjali negotiates with these sutras the subject that is the beginning and the end of all spiritual teachings worldwide. He speaks about the Now. Now, is the eternity and the most precious good. It’s the only reality. The eternal Present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.

All the spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the esoteric dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret. It is certainly not taught in churches and temples. The depth and radical nature of these teachings are not recognized. No one seems to realize that they are meant to be lived and so bring about a profound inner transformation.

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 your Self, 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.

The great Zen master Rinzai, in order to take his students attention away from time, would often raise his finger and slowly ask: “What, at this moment, is lacking?” A powerful question that does not require an answer on the level of the mind. He designed it to take their attention deeply into the Now. A similar question in the Zen tradition is this: “If not Now, when?”

“The moment is everlasting, changeless, sacred: it is, in fact, the secret of samadhi”.   (B.K.S. Iyengar – Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)

The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: “The Sufi is the son of time Present.” Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: “Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.”

Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.”

The key is the end of the delusion of time. Time isn’t precious because it is an illusion. What is precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time, on past and future, the more you miss the Now, the really precious thing. It’s all there.

“The yogi keeps aware of the moment and thus conquers psychological and chronological time. He remains attentive to the moment, and does not allow his attention to slip into the movement of moments”. (B.K.S. Iyengar – Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)

Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace — and you do so Now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it Now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal Present. Their reality is “borrowed” from the Now. Nothing exists outside the Now. 

The essence of Now cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Self, from time to Presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Self. The Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Self.

Don’t seek your Self in the Mind and move deeply into the Now. End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops. To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honour and acknowledge the Present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfilment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind. The basic mechanics of the mind is the creation of a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true Self. The ego’s needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem. The ego, of course, loves that. It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self, and it will readily attach itself to your problems. This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

So once you recognize the root of unconsciousness as identification with the mind, which of course includes the emotions, you step out of it. You become Present. When you are Present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is not dysfunctional. It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are. It then becomes the egoist mind and takes over your whole life.

They have the capacity to live in the present moment as it is and not as it might be. Those who live in reality, which can only be the present, will assuredly die, but will have lived before they die. Many people die without having lived”. (B.K.S. Iyengar – Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.)

In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to Presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness.

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now — that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don’t need to climb a mountain; you can enter in state of Now, only now!