Fwd: How Present Are YOU?

On Sunday, June 26, 2016 at 7:46:59 PM UTC+5:30, Angel Of Peace wrote:
> You're sitting in the meeting, someone calls your name and you suddenly notice you haven't heard what's been said for some minutes.  In a split second your attention is back in the room and you realise you had drifted off.  Not into sleep but into 'absence'.  You're not exactly sure how long you were away!  You were lost in a story that you were running on the screen of your mind.  You remember now.  One part was a memory of an unhappy encounter with a member of your family the night before, which then dissolved into some worries about possibly having to sell your house in the next six months. 
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> During the course of your absence you went through a series of judgments, regrets, assessments, worries, hopes, evaluations and criticisms.  You were busy in your absence!  In just a few minutes you not only made your self unhappy but you missed some vital information that was shared in the meeting at which you were assumed by others to be present.  Your body was in the room but you were not!
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> This is something that happens to us all at some time or other.  And for some it happens all too frequently.  Many of us are often absent from our life but we don't notice our lack of presence.  We are not aware of making our many escapes from being fully 'here' and completely in the 'now', until we realise we've been away!
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> You could argue that 'being absent' is not a new phenomenon in human consciousness, and it's definitely not a new and exclusive habit to this generation or this era. But like stress, abuse, interpersonal conflict and levels of anger, it seems it may be on the rise. 
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> Deepest Addiction!
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> One of the obvious reasons is we all now live in the 'age of distraction'.  Every day our attention is up for auction.  We are surrounded and hounded by a media driven world with vast industries spending huge amounts of time and energy trying to hook our attention in order to get into our pockets.  That, combined with a sophisticated array of technological windows on to the world and the result is an 'addiction to distraction' unknown to previous generations.  So it's easy to understand why we have a tendency to create the habit of escaping into a multitude of events, messages and other people's lives.  We have become superconscious of 'what's happening now' both near and far.  But this kind of 'now' is not an indication of real presence simply a habitual desire to know more about what's going on somewhere else or to someone else. 
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> And then, when we do attend the meeting, or sit quietly somewhere with our coffee, or take a stroll through the forest, the 'habit of absence' kicks in and we start to run a variety of stories in our heads.  Absence is when we lose our self in a mental story entirely created by our self on the screen of our own mind.  The stories are filled with those judgments, hopes, guilts, evaluations, regrets and many other thinking habits and emotional patterns.  We are not aware that they are just stories, that we are the creators of the stories and that we are losing our self, our awareness, in the stories. 
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> Resisting Reality
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> Even if someone were to point out that we are attempting to escape from the reality of our self, or from the reality of what's in front of us now, we would probably reply with something like, "But it's natural ...or... I'm being creative...or...But we need to think about these things ...or... I am anticipating and preparing for what might happen in  reality".  When, in fact, we are more likely to be resisting the reality of the present moment, fighting the reality of what's happing in front of us now or just succumbing to the habit of avoidance.
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> We sometimes notice however, that our feelings of sorrow, irritation, frustration and all our fears are arising from all those moments when we lose our self in our mental compendiums of fictional tales. We sometimes notice that they disturb our peace and drain our energy. It's not easy to see, but in truth we lose our self in our own 'interpretations' of previous experiences or in constructions of future speculations.  Even in the cinema we will lose our self not in the movie but in our 'interpretations' of the movie.  That's why no story that we ever run on the screen of our minds is ever 'true'!  There is always some distortion or deviation in our interpretations and re-interpretations.  Which is one of the reaons why 'truth' can never be captured by the mind.
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> Living fully in the present is quite a different 'insperience'.  The inner signs of being fully present include a quiet mind which is no longer busy running stories of our past or future, or of other people's lives.  All forms of resistance to the world, or projections onto the world, have ceased, and there is a serene acceptance of what is happening in the world 'out there' around us.  There is an easiness that feels like an ability to flow with the ever changing currents of events and circumstances alongside an inner wisdom that supplies the clarity not to just go with any old flow!  There is an inner calm that seems to give us the power to remain internally stable no matter what happens in our life or in others lives.