The Power of Now

I was driving to my office today, when I again I had that feeling .. that I was most happy in the moment and the past did not matter. And I realized how it came about. When I had the feeling, I realized that I am totally happy about who I am right now. There are no grudges or resentments. And since I am happy about who I am right now, my past has to be complete. This is because of our inner feeling that who we are right now is because of the past. If you are at peace with who you are right now, then you can be at peace with everything that happened in the past. If suppose you could change one thing in the past, then you must realize that you will not be what you are right now .. because each event in the past shaped you ... and whether you can see it or not, each event directly or indirectly causes your happiness in the present moment.

Now .. how do you become happy in the present? By realizing that the past does not have any influence over you! That the past was in the past and is not happening right now. Search for happiness in the present moment. And be with it.

I know those two paragraphs are sort of contradictory, but hold on to one of them, and the other one follows. Either be totally complete with the past, so that it stops having any influence on you in the present, or realize that the past can in no way actually have any influence over your present and then find that the past is complete. Either way, realize the power of Now and stop giving power to the Then.

Too often we look for sources of happiness in things outside of us. Like buying new things, adventure, relationships etc. But soon after getting that, unhappiness manifests itself again. And then we again try to look for happiness in our environment. This has no end. Ultimately we will die unhappy or in a state of temporary happiness. The reason is that we feel an incompletion inside of us. The incompletion we try to fill with happiness from where we can get. And yet it never gets filled. Now realize this that there is no incompletion in us. The real us is whole and complete. It is the false identification with the mind/ ego that causes the feeling of incompletion. The Being behind it is whole and complete and that is what you feel when you are happy in the present moment. That feeling eliminates all the unhappiness.

Some time back, whenever I was in the state of happiness in the now, my mind would start thinking something like '... but what about the time when that happened .....?'. That was an attempt from the mind to regain control. Now however, I feel my past is complete, and this question arises less & less. It is an ongoing feeling now ... that the past is complete. But the mind has all the tricks up it's sleeve. So now instead of reminding me what happened in the past, it tries to bring limitations from the past into my future. It tries to tell me how I will fail. And temporarily, I feel fear. But then I realize that does it really matter? How can anything make me unhappy or affect me in any way? When I am happy and that happiness is not a function of anything happening on the outside, then nothing in the future too can make me unhappy. The trick is to make this feeling a belief. An unshakable belief.

And then again, the smallest of unhappiness manifests itself in some corner of my mind, without me even being aware of it. And it first starts diminishing the happiness in the now. I only realize it when I feel the smile on my face vanish and my energy drop a bit. But it is so small, that I can hardly feel it. It is only that I do not feel the same ecstasy that I felt in the morning. I mean either I have gotten used to that feeling or there is something trivial at the back of my mind. One of the two. Nothing a bit of mind exercise can not solve.