It is hard to live in the present. The past and the future keep harassing us. The past with guilt, the future with worries.

So many things have happened in our lives about which we feel uneasy, regretful, angry, confused, or, at least, ambivalent. And these feelings are often colored by guilt. Guilt that says: “You ought to have done something other than what you did; you ought to have said something other than what you said.” These “oughts” keep us feeling guilty about the past and prevent us from being fully present to the moment.

Worse, however, than our guilt are our worries. Our worries fill our lives with “What ifs”:  “What if I lose my job, what if my father dies, what if there is not enough money, what if the economy goes down, what if a war breaks out?” These many “ifs” can so fill our mind that we become blind to the flowers in the garden and the smiling children on the streets, or deaf to the grateful voice of a friend.

The real enemies of our life are the “oughts” and the “ifs.” They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and the now.

Here and Now: Living in the Spirit
Henri Nouwen

Henri Nouwen
1932-1996

Background on Henri Nouwen

Divine love has no conditions. We are invited into it not as an abstract idea or as a ritual only, but as an experience. Contemplation is the experience of God that is becoming continuous and permanent even in the details of everyday life and amid the distractions of computers and the ghastly horrors of violence throughout the world. The divine goodness and the presence of divine love are always there. As our contemplative clarity deepens, we move from the occasional experience of the Presence to a permanent state of loving interaction on a moment by moment basis.

Reflections on the Unknowable
Thomas Keating

Background on Thomas Keating

As awareness becomes more penetrating, it breaks through into the realm of pure consciousness, Mind, or Spirit. Here there are no objects, thoughts, or things, no time or change, no minds to suffer or bodies to decay and die. There is only the bliss of unbounded awareness, transcendent to space and time, eternally free.

At this stage exclusive identity with the body and mind are gone. Practitioners never again wholly believe that they are merely separate egos, bound to and by the body, and inevitably doomed to die with it. Shankara, 9th century spiritual philosopher from India, described this recognition as one in which “The knower of the Atman [our underlying self, or soul] does not identify himself with his body. He rests within it, as if within a carriage.” The practitioner discovers that though all things change and all bodies die, there is a realm beyond things and bodies, and therefore beyond all change, suffering, and death.

This understanding naturally weakens attachments to the world and its transient pleasures, which pale in comparison to the bliss of the Divine. In Shankara’s words: “a man is free from worldliness if he has realized Brahman, the infinite bliss.”

The advice of Jesus now takes on a deeper meaning:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust can consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven [which is in your midst and within you, Luke 17:21] where neither moth nor rust consume and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.
…..— New Testament, Matthew 6:19

The key insight is that a sacred realm of pure awareness is our natural, true nature and home, and that by awakening to it, suffering can be transcended and divine bliss directly known. The challenge is to stabilize this insight and to reorient our behavior so we experience and express this revelation in more and more of our life.

Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind
Roger Walsh

Background on Roger Walsh