The Power of Now - chapter 5

1. loin, gird If he had "kept his loin girded and his lamp burning." which is one of the analogies that Jesus used for presence, he would have noticed the master coming up from behind and stopped him or stepped aside. 2. esoteric The esoteric meaning of "waiting" 3. qualitatively There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. 4. lest So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest the miss the master's arrival. 5. vigilance Because of the narrowness of that gap and a lack of vigilance and alertness on your part, you were probably unable to see the fundamental difference between the perception, the thoughtless awareness of beauty, and the naming and interpeting of it as thought. 6. seer This is what the ancient seers of India asked themselves. They saw the world as lila, a kind of divine game that God is playing. 7. squander, destitue This process is explained by Jesus in his parable of the lost son, who leaves his father's home, squanders his wealth, becomes desitue, and is then forced by his suffering to return home. 8. respite Already for most humans, the only respite they find from their own minds is to occasionally revert to a level of consciousness below thought. 9.temporal/discursive The words I am used in a sentence that starts in the past sentence indicate a radical shift, a discontinuity in the temporal dimension. It is a Zen-like statement of great profundity. Jesus attempted to convey directly, not through discursive thought, the meaning of presence, of self-realization. Raise the concern for The power of now, Chapter 5 The state of presence. "I am that I am" Paul's answer/comment: There's just one now. It's not the case there are a lot of now moments. Take movie/screen as the example. For the characters, they have no idea and cannot realize they are just reflection of the screen pixels. Time is illusion. It seems like everything changes but the screen is still the screen. Nothing matters. Consciousness/Now is the screen, and you are the characters. Quote for most people: The mind is a cage with no prisioner. Quote for the seeker: Nothing happens.