Nothing but the Present Moment

“If you don’t have a good relationship with “Now,”
you don’t have a good relationship with life.”
Echardt Tolle

There is a wave sweeping the globe right now. For those of you who have not caught it, you may want to tune in.
Oprah, one of Hollywood’s most influential celebrities, has a book club that thousands, if not millions of viewers join on a regular basis. About a month ago, she chose Eckhardt Tolle’s recently published book, The New Earth, for her book of the month. Mr. Tolle is a consciousness teacher who until now was most known for his book The Power of Now.

Like only Oprah can do, overnight she made Eckhardt Tolle a household name – around the globe. On Monday, March 3, she and Mr. Tolle started hosting a 12-week web cast addressing a worldwide audience. In this live, 90 minute program using a question/answer format, they take questions from viewers via skype and email, based on that week’s chapter. The first week they had 700,000 viewers, the second week 1.6 million viewers and the third week they had over 2 million viewers.

The beauty of this telecast is that the show is not just preaching to the choir—the new age community. It is reaching out to people from various religious backgrounds, ages, race, and gender. This is made evident by the call-ins coming from the U.S., Germany, India, Siberia; even countries as remote as Transylvania. They even had a call from a 13-year old. The books basic message is not new. Ram Daas wrote Be Here Now in the 60’s offering similar teachings as The New Earth. But to many who were not part of the baby-boomer, hippie generation, this is a first. And, the web cast is making it available to anyone who has access to the internet.

The book’s basic teaching is that everything happens in the present moment. For example, if we are thinking of something that happened in the past, we are still thinking of that past moment in this present moment. Same thing goes for anything we might be thinking of in the future. That thinking is happening now. The present moment is all there is.

As Mr. Tolle would say, don’t just take my word for it. If you do, it will just be buying into another concept. And, we certainly carry around enough concepts around as it is. To take it out of the conception mode, you must experience it for yourself and then decide if it is true for you. So to help you try this on, I ask you to see if you can do anything in any moment but the one you are in “right now.”

Try experiencing something in a moment other than now. If you are eating, notice, you are eating now. If you are thinking about what you had to eat 3 hours ago, even if you are re-experiencing all the tastes, smells and images, you are still experiencing that memory in the present moment. If you are planning a vacation or a trip to the store even in an hour from now, you are still planning it in this present moment. You can only recall something from the past or plan something in the future in the moment you are currently experiencing. When you get to the moment when your plans materialize, you are again in the present moment of that materialization. Try using any scenario, and you’ll see that you keep coming back to this moment. Get it? I’m assuming you do. (If not, feel free to email me with any questions.)

So, now let’s take a look at the quote at the top of the page, “If you don’t have a good relationship with now,
you don’t have a good relationship with life.” If life can only happen in the present moment, and you are wishing that moment were different, then you are struggling with life. If you resist it strongly, you are suffering. If, instead, you accept the present moment and embrace it like you might a newborn baby, kitten or something that you truly love, how differently might you experience each moment of your life?

The Dalai Llama says that suffering is a condition of being human. Christ said that when you learn how to suffer, you no
longer suffer. Trying to change or argue with what is present in any moment is like trying to argue with Mother Nature. When it
rains or snows, no matter how we might want it to be different, it is what it is. If we apply this same logic to our moment-to-moment encounters, our life becomes less stressful and more relaxing and we cease to suffer in the same way we do when we argue with what is.

If this makes sense to you, you might want to go to Oprah.com and sign up for the web cast. You can also listen to past shows when you have the time if you can’t see them live. If this doesn’t make sense to you, you might also want to visit Oprah’s website and join in. If enough of us catch this wave of consciousness and end our day-to-day struggle, strife and suffering, we might just have the 100th monkey effect on humanity and then of course, all sentient beings and our great Mother Earth.

Jasmyne Boswell is a Life Coach, Writing Coach/editor and Marketing Consultant. For over 28 years she has been a mid-wife to professionals in all fields, helping them successfully overcome personal stumbling blocks and birth their businesses, practices, and projects. She uses her creative gift with the written word to help bring your ideas into form. Jasmyne can be reached at 808-268-5807 or by visiting www.jasmyneconsulting.com.