Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other. Excerpt from article.
SEED QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: What does being fully unified with your experience mean to you? Can you share a personal story of a time you got the feeling of the eternal present into your bones? What helps you avoid resisting the present?
"The imminent unknown is not to be avoided, but embraced. Our resilience, our adaptability, is reliant upon us being completely sensitive to the moment, and understanding it as being a new, unique experience."
When I am immersed I lose my sense of my self in the experience of what's happening. Not thinking "oh this is happening to me" there is just this "happening" which somehow merges this being here into the experience itself. Embodied, or "in my bones", for me means that direct experience doesn't require thinking about it or remembering, it's just awareness of being here beling alive.
“Mindfulness” is simply being present to what is. Not necessarily an easy state of mind and body to reach especially in our highly distracted technological and secular age. The truth of mindfulness is a perennial truth that contemplatives have known for centuries and tried to “practiced”. It is the emptying of nothingness of Buddhism, the “centering down” of Christianity, and other “practices” among the religious.
To be one with we eperience, to live in the present moment without getting distraced by the thouhts of the future or the past is the key to living fully, joyfully and happily. This is the art of living. When I take walks in nature, I feel a deep sense of oneness with soft wind caressing me, birds chrping and the stream flowwing.I feel this sense of oneness when I meditate. A shift takes place spontaneously from the doing zone to the being zone where the distiction between expereince and experiencer fades away. When my mind gets distracted, breath awreness helps me to be centered and present.
Sadly, we are bombarded with many more distractions than before. These distractions take us away from nature, from the people we love and from our own selves. We are losing the most precious gift of living fully in the present moment.
Namaste!
Jagdish P Dave
Being fully unified with my experience means to me to be one with it, not distracted or attempting to multitask, but together with it, integrated, self-harmonious. I've had the feeling of the eternal present in union with an other and in union with nature. Moments of being fully in the present are glorious, sometimes ecstatic, and eternal. When I avoid resisting the present, what helps me is knowing that the present is where the fullness of life is, and I want and hunger for that fullness of life, so I'm open to it. I don't want constructs of life, I want life, and the present is where life is.