Logging into the Present Moment

One Human Journey presents Logging into the Present Moment,

A guided meditation with Dennis Hunter.

Welcome everyone.

During this meditation I'd like to offer you a metaphor,

Or I'd like to take you on a bit of a metaphorical journey,

So to speak.

The reason I think this metaphor is useful and helpful is because it's one that's very relevant to people's lives in this day and age.

I think it's one that pretty much anyone will be able to identify with.

But before we go there,

Let's just take a few moments to arrive where we are,

Settle in,

Take a moment to check in with the state of your body,

Make sure that you're sitting in a position that's comfortable,

Where your spine can be upright and straight,

Allow the back of your neck to lengthen,

Your shoulders to relax.

The goal of meditation is never to be in pain,

So if a sitting meditation position is just impossible for you,

It's okay to do this meditation lying down on your back.

But if you are sitting,

You can sit in a chair,

You can sit on the floor with a cushion,

Whatever is comfortable for you.

Try to find a position that you can maintain for the next little while without moving around too much.

Try to find the body's natural stillness.

When you find that stillness in the body,

That helps you find the stillness in the mind.

And bring your attention to rest very gently,

Very naturally on the sensations of your breath,

Drawing whatever sounds are there in the background to be there.

Bring the natural rhythm,

The cycle of the breath to bring you towards a state of relaxation.

As the breath goes out,

There's a natural sense of letting go,

Relaxing,

And then you just rest in that space.

And you allow the next breath to happen naturally.

And then with the exhalation,

You go out again and relax.

So just take a couple of moments to stay with your breath.

Wherever you feel the breath most,

It might be at your nose,

It might be the rising and falling of your abdomen.

We're not thinking about the breath,

But simply experiencing the natural sensations of breathing.

And allowing whatever else is happening in our experience at this moment,

Sounds,

Smells,

Sensations within the body,

Thoughts that pass through the mind,

Allowing all of these things to simply be there,

Be part of our awareness without investing too much attention in any of them,

Without singling out any one thing to focus on,

But just resting in open awareness,

Allowing everything in this moment to be as it is.

Now that sounds very simple,

Allowing everything in this moment to be as it is,

And it is very simple.

But the curious thing about us as human beings is that we find that very simple act of letting everything be as it is in this moment.

We find that very difficult because we have all this conditioning within our minds that carries us away from that.

We have this pattern of thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking.

We're always moving away from the present moment into the past or the future.

Working with these tremendously strong habits that we've cultivated over the course of a whole lifetime.

But we have another force with which we can work with these habits,

Which is our own natural awareness.

Our awareness is actually larger than these habitual patterns.

The awareness is what sees when you've become distracted,

When you've wandered away into a thought about the past or the future.

It's the awareness that sees that.

It's the awareness that says,

Ah,

Thinking,

And brings you back to the present moment.

And then you just rest in that awareness.

This kind of meditation actually gives us very little to do with our minds,

Which is part of what makes it so very challenging for us because we're very conditioned to always be doing something.

Doing,

Doing,

Doing,

Scheming,

Scheming,

Scheming,

Thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking,

Planning,

Planning,

Remembering,

Daydreaming.

So to make things a little bit more interesting,

I'll give you something to do in the next few minutes,

Something to do with your mind.

So that's working with this metaphor.

And again,

I think this is something that everyone will find very familiar.

And that's the image that you could call to your mind of sitting down in front of your computer and opening a web browser.

And there on your web browser is a blank page.

That blank page is really this moment.

And that's really,

In a way,

That's what we're doing here in this meditation.

We bring the hardware of our body here and we sit down and we turn it on.

And then we tune in to this web page of the present moment and we look.

And it isn't actually blank.

There's a tremendous amount of content happening on the web page of the present moment.

There are sounds in the environment.

There are sensations within our bodies.

All these experiences that arise and pass.

And that's where we rest our attention.

Whatever manifests on the empty web page of the present moment is simply what we observe.

We try to observe impartially without commentary,

Without judgment,

Without getting too caught up in any storylines.

Just watching,

Just looking.

And the problem,

Of course,

Is that while we're looking at whatever is manifesting in the present moment on the blank web screen of our mind,

We have these annoying little pop-up ads.

We have a pop-up ad that comes in and tells us what we're planning to have for dinner tonight.

We have a little pop-up that comes and gives us an instant replay of that irritating conversation we had with our boss at work today.

Sometimes we have those really annoying interactive page takeover ads where some big storm of thoughts and emotions comes in and just sweeps us away.

It takes over our whole web browser.

It eclipses all of the content that we were trying to look at in the present moment and we're just swept away in some storyline.

So what we do in meditation,

As we do when we're sitting in front of our computer looking at our favorite web page and those ads pop up,

There's a little X in the corner of the window.

We just click that X,

Close the pop-up,

And we come back to the present moment.

We close those pop-up windows with a sense of gentleness and non-judgment,

What we normally do in our everyday lives when we're sitting in front of the computer and we have those pop-up windows.

We get very annoyed.

We close those windows with a sense of irritation.

So here we're doing something different.

We're just recognizing when we're being distracted,

When we're wandering away from the present moment and we just allow that distraction to go.

And what we find with practice is that we don't actually even have to click the X when a pop-up comes,

When a thought comes.

As long as we don't feed it,

As long as we don't follow it,

It simply dissolves on its own.

It really has no power to persist,

Take over our screen unless we turn our awareness towards it.

So when we simply recognize the thought,

The emotion,

The storyline,

And we choose not to invest our awareness in it but to simply come back to the present moment and rest,

And that's actually a very powerful experience of freedom.

We're training ourselves in how to be free from the conditioning of our habitual patterns.

And we just do this again and again.

It doesn't matter how many pop-ups you have,

The technique is always the same.

Just let them go without judgment,

Without adding any additional commentary.

Let them dissolve and come back to presence.

Now the metaphors can be dangerous if you take them too far,

But let's try to take this one one step further if we can just to see how much meaning we can pull from this metaphor.

Because I think this experience we're having in the present moment is really not like any ordinary web page.

It's more like a full-on immersive 360-degree virtual reality experience.

It's coming at us from all directions.

It's coming through all our senses,

Our eyes,

Our ears,

Our nose,

Our sense of taste and smell,

Our sense of touch.

What Buddhism refers to as the sixth sense,

Which is the mind,

The thoughts that pass through the mind.

It's like we're inside the web page,

Completely inside.

We're in this virtual reality simulation and we have this little avatar that we call me.

We have this little avatar that's inside the simulation going through all these experiences within the simulation.

We have all these storylines attached to the avatar we've created.

Things about who the avatar is,

Used to be,

Will be someday.

Everything the avatar likes and dislikes.

Who the avatar's friends are and who its enemies are.

Where the avatar has been and where it's going.

Somehow we have projected ourselves into this simulation and we're experiencing the world through the lens,

The filter of this avatar that we've created that we call me.

We actually believe that this virtual reality avatar really is who we are.

But within the context of this metaphor,

Step back for a moment and ask yourself,

If there's an avatar here in this simulation,

Who's behind the avatar?

Who is having the avatar's experiences?

Who is it who's here in this moment experiencing these thoughts,

These feelings,

These sensations?

What is it that's actually here experiencing this being human?

It's helpful when you ask these sorts of questions in meditation,

Not to necessarily try to grasp it and answer,

But just ask the question.

Ask the question and see what arises in response.

Just be curious and look.

I was recently using an application on my phone to manage a Facebook page and I got a very strange error message that I thought was actually a wonderful meditation instruction.

The application had somehow gotten hung up in some kind of error and it popped up this message that said,

Your session has gone stale,

Please log in again.

I thought that was a really wonderful analogy for what happens in meditation.

Our awareness,

Which is resting in the present moment,

Decays into some kind of distraction,

Gets carried away with one of those pop-up ads,

Gets swept away in one of those interactive page takeover ads.

And our session goes stale.

The system begins to turn in one of those loops where you see the spinning wheel on the screen and it's just spinning,

Spinning,

Spinning.

So what we do in meditation is when we find that our session has gone stale,

Our awareness has decayed into distraction.

Just bring ourselves back.

Just redirect your awareness to the present moment.

There are no user names or passwords required.

Whenever you direct your awareness to the present moment,

You're there.

Or to be more precise,

You're here.

Namaste.