Our minds are preoccupied with dividing, ordering, controlling and possessing our environment, including our own lives. The concept of time is a mental phenomenon: we focus much on the past and the future, to the detriment of our enjoyment of the present.
Through meditation we learn detachment from our minds’ preoccupations, including our obsession with past and future: as we enter deeper into our hearts, we become more centred in the moment, in the Eternal Now.
The Eternal Now is also the Eternally New.
They say there is nothing new under the sun: everything has always existed and will always exist, though in ever-changing forms. Newness is relative to our lived experience: for a child, riding a bicycle for the first time is a “new” experience, though people have been riding bicycles for hundreds of years. When we discover something that has not previously been known by mankind, we say it is “new” – a new country, a new species of butterfly, a new deposit of gold, a new law of mathematics – though all of these things have always been there, awaiting our “discovery”.
Newness lies in uncovering Truth, whether on the physical, mental or spiritual plane. Meditation affords us the most direct access to planes of spiritual Truth beyond our minds’ perception, and hence access – from the point of view of our experience – to the ever-new.
Living only in our minds is like living in the same room with the same furniture. We may rearrange the furniture, but the room remains the same. We become stagnant, bored and boring.
Our spiritual heart is the source of ever-expanding experience, ever-deepening Truth – and constant newness. Only in constant newness can we remain always inspired, enthusiastic, energetic, happy and fulfilled.
How to live in our ‘now’ of eternal newness?
Meditate!