How About Now? Just This!

Questionner : That moment when I get out of bed, something shifts. While walking, I notice I’m not really walking, I’m kind of going somewhere. There’s a pushing in the solar plexus – rib cage.

Rupert Spira : Yes, a straining at the now. Like a horse just pulling. The exploration we did yesterday hearing a sound at a distance and slightly straining to go out towards it, and then taking our stand as awareness and allowing the object to come to us. You can do that while walking. You feel this straining at the now. Even when you’re walking in nature, you feel you’re always becoming. You’re always just outside the now, or just straining at the now to become the next moment.
     You can experiment with this while you’re walking. Just walk and feel this. Feel what it’s like to be totally, 100% in the now, with no sense of grasping for the next moment, of needing the next moment to replace the current one. Feel the quality of walking, how it changes. 
     Sometimes literally you may slow down, but even if there’s no slowing down, there’s a kind of relaxation of a very slight tension in the body. That tension is the separate self - this subtle rejection of the now – straining on the edge of the now, wanting it to become the next now. In other words we live in becoming rather than being. And this becoming can be very subtle. Just this straining at the edge of the now, wanting it to become the next moment.

Questionner : I also notice when I’m cleaning my teeth – I want to be somewhere else.

Rupert Spira : Awareness is never straining at the now. Awareness is just a wide open ‘yes’ to the now. Totally lazy. Not the slightest impulse to avoid the now. It’s only the ‘I-the-thought-&-feeling-made-self’ that is pushing at the now, wanting it to become the next moment. The separate self lives on the edge of the now – in that becoming, right on the edge of the now, wanting the next now to happen. That is the separate self. That’s all it’s made out of. It’s mad. And we spend our lives there – in that becoming, in a state of perpetual becoming. We never become what we want to become. It’s always just more becoming. 
     What we want to become is the being that is already there. Yes, it’s really mad. What we are straining towards is what is already present prior to the straining, in this just being present, which is what awareness is, being present, being present, open, aware.

Above transcribed from Rupert Spira's video below: