This may sound strange to some people, but we are not practicing emotional mastery, we are practicing emotional self-mastery and as long as we are unconscious of our daily routines, there is no self present. There is a collection of memories and habits—learned behaviors operating on auto-pilot—but are YOU present in the moment, from moment-to-moment? This is a question to ask yourself, study and resolve, but most importantly, do not let it interfere with or delay your efforts to practice the six heart virtues. You can practice while investigating your degree of presence in daily activities.
This issue of being present in the “here and now” is not new. In fact, many books have been written about it and perhaps the most influential thinker on this topic was the philosopher and teacher, J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986). Whether or not the concept is new does not reduce the subtle importance of staying in the present moment. The point is that the heart’s sensitivity is of little or no value if there is no individual present to detect the signals and initiate an action, such as the when-which-how practice.
I am sure many of you have had the experience of sitting across from someone who is telling you about an incident of some kind and you suddenly realize that for the last minute or more you have no idea what he or she has been saying. This can become even more embarrassing when your friend asks you what you think about the incident. Or have you ever gone on an errand, reached your destination and had no memory of traveling there?
Where were we on these occasions? We were running on automatic pilot, but we have little information about what happened during our absence. Have you ever had your spouse or significant other suddenly say, “Are you listening to me?” And you reply, “Oh yes.” And then the challenging question, “Then what did I say?” Your answer: “Hmmm…I’m not sure.”
These examples bring up a startling realization. Namely, that we are often asleep—even when we are supposedly awake. We simply are not really “here” even when we think we are. We are mainly operating in a self-maintained, mentally-constructed hologram of our own reality. This is the ego filter through which the outside world flows into our brains. As we have just seen, apparently we don’t even have to be present in order to perform our daily routines. However, we can be operating with much more efficiency and alertness if we can learn to be present in the now.
In the popular science fiction television series, Star Trek, the starships have at least two types of propulsion systems. The impulse engines operate in “normal” spacetime, but the warp engines allow faster-than-light speeds, transcending the limits of space and time. In addition, instantaneous communication in Star Trek takes place through sub-space (quantum, non-local), thus overcoming the tremendous distances between worlds and the time it takes to send messages back and forth.
We are like an impaired starship from the sci-fi universe of Star Trek, only operating on our spacetime restricted impulse engines and never taking advantage of our faster-than-light warp engines. In this analogy, our ego-personalities are impulse engines and we communicate via the time lags of spacetime. (Recall news reporters whose conversations are confusing due to the time delay of communication satellites.) Living from the heart through emotional self-mastery is incorporating warp drives and sub-space communications into our everyday lives. These take us beyond the limiting spectrum of third-dimensional ego-personality living and extend our range of living into the higher dimensions of the energetic heart and soul.
Returning to our main discussion, our psychological space is filled with so much content that the field of our awareness is blocked by all the “stuff” of our constructed reality. We are so preoccupied and distracted by our own psychological content that we cannot see, hear, and feel the individuals we encounter every day. So, as Krishnamurti often pointed out, we never actually come into contact with others. We only contact our constructed thoughts and feelings about others. In order to avoid absolutes, I will say that most of the time we come into contact with the past image of people, not the present reality of people. We often tap into and communicate with the image we want people to be, not the image projected by those people in the present moment. This is the double irony of the situation. We are all, for the most part, communicating with each other through false images, images too often frozen in the prejudices of past judgments.
Hopefully, you can see the implications of all this on the practice of when-which-how. Our task involves working from the consciousness level of the soul and energetic heart. Otherwise, we are acting from our ego-personality’s constructed idea of who and what others (and the world in general) should be. Recalling the Star Trek analogy, the ego-personality is using an impulse engine that is spacetime-based. In order for us to be truly effective in our practice we must operate from outside spacetime even while living within spacetime. This is not about excluding an “inferior” spacetime world, but about expanding and extending the range of our conscious living into unexplored dimensions beyond our dominant third-dimensional reality.
Simply put, we are awake, present, and focused in the moment and not lost in thoughts about where we have been, where we want to go, or where we would rather be. We are not dwelling in the past or escaping into the future. We are simply present and attuned to what is before us.
