"Past has gone, forget it; future is far away, don’t worry;
present is here, use it."
If only we could decode the wisdom in this
quote, we may be able to make our lives a lot easier, but easier said than
done. The only force that can either facilitate us or keep us away from using
the present is our mind. It is the most powerful thing, in a very awesome and
mysterious way, that human beings possess in their bodies and without any doubt
it rules over human lives by shaping them according to its functioning.
The mind’s favourite pastime is
preoccupation. It loves to live either in the past or in the future and this needs
no training at all. Despite the fact that the outcomes of the past events in one’s
life cannot be changed, the brain enjoys going over all those events, tragic or
fantastic, petty or vital, charming or horrific and gets a strange kind of
satisfaction or dejection depending upon the experiences of the past.
Likewise, the other favourite preoccupation
for the mind is to live in the future. The mind remains in a state of worrying
about what might go wrong in the future or what might be an exceptional
experience. Regarding tragedies and sad incidents, if the future flight of
thoughts were limited to thoughts only, that would have been fine but the
problem is that the mind, being an exceptionally powerful magnet, starts
attracting those tragic events, which are focused upon owing to worries, into
one’s life in whose skull it resides. This is how some people die many times before
the actual death; fail many times before the actual failure in the future and
face a variety of tragedies before the often-thought-of tragedies actually
happen in their lives. The interesting thing is that sometimes those tragedies
never happen depending upon the intensity level of one’s focus. The mind’s
flight into the future also needs no training. When our minds think about the
past or the future, they are on autopilot mode and we lose all control on them.
But to bring our minds to the very moment we live in, to the present moment, to
the now is a real challenge that
needs rigorous training.
Living in the moment is what we all need
because it is the real life. Living
in the moment means coming to the now
because we only live in the now
moment. Whatever we did in the past is gone and has lost its reality and
whatever we will do in the future are mere plans, far-fetched dreams and
ambitions. They are not yet the actual physical reality. That proves that we
live bit by bit, second by second or more accurately now by now. When we come
out of the autopilot mode of our mind, which is also known as preoccupation, we
come back to life and start living the very moment. If we don’t cherish that
moment, we do not live the true and literal meaning of life. In short, coming
out of the autopilot mode is coming to the now
and this situation is called mindfulness, the opposite phenomenon to
preoccupation.
But it should not be forgotten that living in
the future for the fulfilment of our dreams is a wonderful idea provided that
we think about positive outcomes: success, wealth, health, love and fame,
because that is what the mind is going to attract and that is what most people
live for. Attracting positive outcomes can only be possible when we know how
the mind works and how it hijacks our lives if it is allowed to go on autopilot.
It has been researched that in autopilot mode, the mind is mostly engaged in
negative pursuits and creates negativity effortlessly. That is why it is very
important to know about the working mechanism of the brain; how to stop it from
going in autopilot mode; and how to train it to think positively to manifest
future dreams.
Multi-tasking is another aspect of preoccupation
which means doing several things simultaneously. Multi-tasking results in the
lack of quality in everything that we do and every action that we perform. For
example, when we are over the phone, we mostly find ourselves engaged in
working on a computer, taking down notes, giving instructions to others using
the body language or driving a car. All tasks done in this fashion seriously
lack quality due to the absence of attention on the part of the doer and need
re-doing in majority of the cases. There is one extreme disadvantage of such
sort of multi-tasking i.e. stress. It is because the process of re-doing and bringing
in the required quality to a task takes double time. Therefore, we always run
out of time and remain in a continuous state of chasing things around. Such a
situation, continued over a long period of time, creates stress which is the
mother of majority of ills that we have in our society today.
Paying attention on purpose to the present or
the now and then discerning anything
with clarity is called mindfulness. This is a very powerful state of the mind
where the healing process takes place. God has bestowed upon our minds great
healing powers. These healing powers are only activated when we are mindful and
consciously know what we are doing. When we live in the now, the mind is extremely relaxed and in this state of ecstasy, it
starts fixing our maladies, whether big or small. As discussed, the mind loves
to live like a vagabond and goes wherever it likes in imagination, whereas on
the other hand the body lives its own life. It is one of the most difficult
tasks, more difficult than moving mountains, to bring the vagabond mind and the
non-nomadic body into a state of perfect harmony. If we can achieve this
harmony between the mind and the body, we must expect unparalleled things to
happen.
Mindfulness or paying attention is a skill that
can be learnt but unfortunately it is taken for granted. Teachers in schools,
colleges and universities keep telling their students to pay attention and
sometimes get cross with them for not being mindful, especially in schools;
parents also get angry with their children for not paying attention and so on.
But the problem is that no one, neither teachers nor parents, teach us how to
pay attention, how to be mindful, how to live in the present and how to come
out of autopilot mode of the mind to live a true life in order to achieve our
dreams. Preoccupation is a dangerous commodity for all, especially for students
who are in the process of laying foundations of successful and enviable lives ahead.
By learning how to focus, how to meditate and
how to pay attention, monstrous maladies like stress, tension, depression and
anxiety, which are the top killers of modern times, can be avoided. Now that we
understand how the mind works, we are left with only one option if at all we
are serious in improving the quality of our lives and manifesting our
long-cherished dreams:
Either to get control of the mind and live in
the now and the future at our own
will or be mere helpless spectators and allow the mind to drag our lives into the
kingdom of sheer negativity!
"Whatever you focus on the longest becomes the strongest."
