Be Here Now by Ram Das, published in 1971, was one of those books the title of which seems to preclude the need for the book itself. Like You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. Okay. Got the message. Thanks. Next? It's all right there, everything you need to know. Can't go home. Don't even try it. Be here now and it will be good.
But evidently there is a reason to read a book like Be Here Now, because not only is it still being published 40 years later, but there have been uncountable books with the same message also being published throughout those 40 years up to and including today, with Buddha Standard Time--Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now by Lama Surya Das reviewed in Sunday's LA Times. Just go to Amazon.com and search books in 'spirituality and religion' with the word 'now' in the title. There are nearly 4000 of them, from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, to The Naked Now, Embracing the Now, What About Now, The Tao of Now, The Bible Now, The Unfolding Now, Living in the Now, Happiness Now, etc. etc. Someone's reading them. Or at least buying them.
Why do we need so many people in so many books to tell us this simple truth?
For one thing it's because our culture trains us away from the now. We're taught to live in some as yet unrealized future where we will become happy 'as soon as...'
We're told by advertisers and the media continually that we are lacking something, whether it's white enough teeth or the proper brand of soap, to enough beauty, class, intelligence or hipness to be happy, and that until we get whatever is being sold us, we won't be okay, so we shouldn't even try to enjoy the here and now, we shouldn't even hang out in the here and now, we don't belong here and now; rather we should worry about what we don't have and make plans for getting it so that maybe one day in some unspecified future we can be happy.
The truth is, though, that appiness is what we are in our least excited state. The only place we can find our least excited state is in the here and now. So we need things like these books to remind ourselves of these truths. The way that one author says 'get present' might make perfect sense to me, whereas to you it might sound absurd, so we find kindred spirits who speak our own language to tell us what we need to hear, to remind us in a new way, to give us a few new tricks that may help us get present, that may allow us to hear something or someone other than the inside of our own head.
In the Vedic world view, we know that consciousness is all that there is. This means that if I am in a room by myself, no other human around, no matter what else is in that room it must be conscious. Even if it's an empty room then the space itself must be conscious. If I am sitting in that room in speculation with myself I am ignoring some expression of consciousness. It would be like going out to dinner with you and, rather than having a conversation, playing Solitaire on my iPhone. It wouldn't feel good. You might be offended. Whereas if I am hanging off your every word, asking you questions about your day or your childhood, about your favorite movies, you might be delighted. You might feel that I am seeing you as special. And you might start feeling a little special yourself and perhaps behaving as if you were a bit special. And definitely, you would be smiling at me, and then I might start feeling special, too.
What if the consciousness in nature feels the same way? What if everything around me is conscious and is waiting for me to notice? What if there's a book sitting on the table in this empty room and I let myself truly be here now when I pick it up, then as I'm picking it up I'm having the full experience of 'picking up the book.' I would be fully in my 'picking up the book' state, and because consciousness is all that there is, the more I am conscious as I pick up the book, the more the book itself would be consciously being picked up. It would be fully in its 'being picked up' state. We, the book and I, would be having an experience together, sharing an experience with each other, enjoying this experience with each other. Maybe I even could feel the book's joy at being picked up by me, feeling its consciousness rise in response to my own.
If I told you this was my experience, you might think I was crazy. Or lying. Or you might think to try it yourself, to get really present with some mundane task just to see if you could have the feeling that nature was responding, consciously, to you. Even having this as a concept, as one is doing the dishes, might make the dishes more enjoyable.
Like this, we find each day some way of getting present, again and again and again, until we begin to notice just how much more pleasant life is when we're in the here and now than wherever it is we go when we're not.
Today I will get present and insist on watching and listening and interacting with the world around me. Today I will not speculate.
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