The state of awareness is the state in which you see things as they are: the precious facility that life has given man to escape the mastery of the robot. It is the habit of the mind to destroy the state of awareness as quickly as possible. It does this by judging, for judging is thinking.
If you want to see what is inside a room, you open the door and look in. To see everything exactly as it is you have to be in a state of awareness, in the mental attitude of listening, and this state is possible only when you are not thinking. You can only see things as they are when you do not think.
All your opinions, dislikes and most of your likes come out of memory. They are the result of some personal experience in the past or have been gained through reading, hearing, being influenced or conditioned. What you have experienced is all past. You cannot know what you have not experienced.
It is an inescapable fact that only the moment, now, exists in relation to you. Every moment is new. If you look at what is new through the screen of the past (your opinions) it is no longer new.
If you say you do not like the type of table in the room there are two possibilities. One is that it resembles a table you have seen in the past and stored as an unpleasant image in your memory. The second is that it is in some way new in your experience. It is the habit of the robot mind to reject the new. The mind hates change and you will always resist the new if it conflicts with your opinions, especially with what you imagine your interests to be.
Quite often you find that the new leaves you rather indifferent and it is difficult to decide whether you like it or not. You find this embarrassing at times because you cannot form an opinion, and everyone is expected by the intelligent robot mind to have an opinion. But after your mind gets used to the sight of the new, such as the design of a new car or a new look in clothes, you will probably find yourself saying you like it; or you will make up or steal an opinion.
Before introducing a new look experienced designers and manufacturers condition the public robot mind by publishing photographs and impressions as widely as possible. And politicians seldom introduce the new without first conditioning the public mind through a leaked newspaper or magazine story.
So if you say you do not like the type of table in the room your opinion is based either on the past or on the mechanical habit of the mind. Neither is an intelligent state. Dislike is the robot’s judgment and a negative interpretation of the natural state of preference.
Preference, being the natural state, does not require thinking. That is why you like things without knowing why. What you mean when you say you do not like the table is that you would not choose it for yourself; you would prefer another. But it is not your moment to choose: you are judging someone else’s moment, their preference. By doing that you divide yourself from them; and division is disharmony. When it’s your moment to choose, just choose the one you prefer without disliking the ones you pass over. In that moment you are aware; and your choice is choiceless.
There is only one thing in your life you can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come.
You can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.
Everything that happens to you — the good, the bad and the indifferent — happens in the moment. It is the mind’s interpretation of the moment through an old impression that keeps you asleep. The moment occurs in your experience as a happening which is the fact. In the next moment your mind re-acts through a stored impression by responding to the happening as thought. You are then living in the past, hanging on to a moment that has gone. The moment, the new in life, is passing every moment, but by clinging to an old moment as an impression of this moment your mind keeps you unconscious of the only thing that exists for you.
The secret is that the moment is perfect. Thinking is the imperfection and is unnecessary. The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.
When you think about the future you invariably become gloomy, doubtful, angry or fearful. You use your emotional impression-memory which leads to confusion, worry and wishful thinking.
Irritation at having to do something in the future is the jarring vibration of having put the moment out of place: you mistake the disharmony you feel now for trouble in the imagined future. The strange fact is that nothing is tedious or unpleasant at the moment of doing it, unless you think.
But how do you plan for the future if you do not think? You make plans by looking, not thinking. You use factual memory, not impression-memory. You plan by looking at the relevant facts of your experience and the looking itself reveals everything you need to know, moment to moment.
For example, to remember the things you own all you have to do is direct your attention onto them and then, without thinking, up they come, one by one. You cannot remember all you own at the same moment. The process is to ask yourself ‘What do I own?’ Your mind is temporarily stilled and up out of memory comes one object followed by another and another until the line runs out.
When making plans, you obtain any missing facts by taking action; then you look again. Once you have made a decision, or you find you cannot proceed any further, you drop the subject from your consciousness; there is no thinking or worrying. You just stay aware and look again from time to time to see if there’s been any change in the situation.
Only one conscious action can exist at any one moment for any one individual. It is impossible for life to make two conscious demands of you at once. If it appears that there are two, one will be in your imagination — your impression of what you should be doing.
The moment is your only duty.
Your duty at any time in your life is to do what you have to do from moment to moment. What you have to do is what you cannot avoid doing. What you cannot avoid doing is what you do.
Life is not interested in the reasons that your mind produces for doing what you do. The reasons might or might not be correct, but the fact is always correct; and the fact is that you do it. It is the moment that is perfect and not the anticipation of it.
You do thoughtless, stupid, cruel, dishonest things. And afterwards either you or someone else labels the action in words; and mentally you suffer. You ask yourself, ‘How could I have done such a thing?’ But the fact is you did it. It is only because you are a machine that you suffer; and the purpose of suffering is to wake you up.
The moment is God’s will.
Life reveals itself only to the conscious. Sometimes you will find yourself facing the Mars element, which is always from your point of view the apparent conflict of two moments, but what appears as disharmony to you is not disharmony in life. The disharmony is in the robot mind’s desire to control life to suit its individual interests — an impossibility; but you keep trying.
We can rarely see things from the point of view of another person because we look at the facts through the screen of an impression or an interest which distorts our view; and then there are accusations, quarrels and misunderstanding.
You will become more conscious if you use the moment of being rebuked or blamed to observe your reaction. You will observe yourself making an excuse, giving a reason. You will make the excuse because you do not like being blamed.
Man always trots out an excuse. If the evidence is overwhelming and you can offer no explanation, you quickly find someone to tell your story to, with such wrong emphasis and lies that the listener will have to agree that your action was justified.
Each moment provides a challenge to you to become conscious. All things and all possibilities exist in the creation. You might meet someone; there might be a rain-storm, sudden pain, a letter, you might lose something — this is the world of the moment. No one can ever know what it will throw up because no one can ever know all it contains. The game is to be waiting, and aware.