Most of us have been brought up on the idea of finding something outside ourselves that will make us happy. It’s a hoax, of course.

This is something foisted on us by the Church and other major religions, wanting to usurp natural values and substitute their own particular cuckoo’s egg instead. By far the worst hoax they peddle is that happiness is some other time, some remote future, an afterlife, some other dimension. We think we have been stuck with this one far too long and it is now difficult to shake off.

It has become what we call in Supernoetics™ a cultural implant. We grow up constantly brainwashed to the belief that some time hence we will get what we desire. As a child, we yearn only to grow up. We go through school wishing for it to end and looking forward to freedom. In our teens we want to be men and women, who can marry, have kids and settle down. But life is never quite as we pictured it and we end up subscribing to the idea that we’ll feel great on weekends and holidays. Eventually, when the burden of work and living seems cemented in place, we start to dream that all will be roses and delight when we retire.

But when it isn’t, what is left? Time has all but run out before we discover for ourselves the fraud that the future is no place. When we reach it we have only NOW, which we had all along –but failed to notice or cherish, as it fleeted by.

Regard the warning words of Oliver Wendell Holmes “Too many people die with their music still in them. Why is it so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time has run out.“

There is no tomorrow; it is only a potentiality. It is what you make it. The past is gone: only we insist on dragging it around with us, to hurt ourselves with painful memories.

As Heraclitus said, the only thing that never changes is change. It is with us all the time. Zen Buddhism is a philosophy peculiarly integrated with the flow of change. This makes it a keynote psychology as much as a religion. To the Zen initiate, life is likened to a river: as it flows it changes. Yes, it is the same river. But it is never exactly the same. “You cannot step into the same river twice”, Heraclitus told his pupils. Life is ceaseless change. The only certainty is now because you have it in your hand.

We feel pressured by accumulating burden of painful yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. But what is all that about, when you start to think about it logically?

As Dale Carnegie put it so well in How To Stop Worrying And Start Living: “You and I are standing this very second at the meeting-place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured for ever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time“.

He goes on to make his real point: “We can’t possibly live in either of these eternities–no, not even for one split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and minds“.

So now let’s be content to live in our allotted time span–which is not “three score years and ten”, but from NOW until bedtime!

“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”

A Zen Memory Exercise

When you look back at what you have been doing, the moments you find easiest to recall are the times when you were most conscious or ‘awake’ while events were taking place.

The following is a time-honoured Zen approach to raising the level of consciousness.
Go over, in your mind, the precise events of the last twenty four hours. Get as much detail as you can. Whenever you sit down, at a rest point, having done some significant action such as going shopping, a board meeting or whatever, again, go over the sequence of events in precise detail, paying attention to all the sensory modalities–sight, sound, touch, body position, etc–and the emotion.

You will find that you get better and better at doing this, and that as a result you stay more fully conscious in the here and now. In a nutshell, that’s what Zen is!