Let’s Live the Now at the Center of Eternity (Part 1)

Let’s live the now that makes the past and future all shine

Most people on Earth who live physically usually have their consciousness carried off only by the phenomena that appear on the surface of the world, and don’t give a thought to “the original cause of why the things and matters they grab onto and get caught on appeared that way,” right?

So they dither this way and that over everything, thinking, “Not this, not that,” doing nothing but calculating gains and losses, or strapping themselves into the roller coaster of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure and letting karmic thoughts leak out everywhere. But as those people of Earth all evolve their consciousness from here on, every one of them will graduate from such a short-sighted way of living and can live “the now at the center of eternity” with an unshakable heart.

Today let’s remember the state of mind of living this “now at the center of eternity,” and talk about the basic recognition for living, ahead of humanity, a now that makes the past and future all shine.

First, about “the things and matters we grab onto and get caught on”: these are the man-made movements that appear in people’s thoughts, words, and deeds, and they also concern the movements of physical phenomena and all the ways they change.

Human beings with a gap between divine consciousness and the physical self have their hearts shaken whenever someone says something or does something, enjoying and grieving, rejoicing and getting angry.

And thinking about how politics is going, how the economy is going, how the weather is, how the earthquakes are, their hearts wobble—they feel relieved or anxious, satisfied when their greed is fulfilled or deflated when they lose out, and even watch for a chance for revenge, don’t they?

All such movements of thought are temporary recognitions and thoughts from the time when the soul was young, completely unrelated to the original divine consciousness of life.

Every one of them is destined, at some point, to be lit up by the light of life and fade away.

Human beings are those who grab onto those fading waves of thought and think they are real. That way of being is a use of consciousness in which the “gap” (ma) between you and life has been left missing.

That’s why, alongside the word hito—”person,” which can be written to mean the spirit staying right there—there is also the Japanese word ningen, “human being,” written with the characters for “person” and “gap.”

“Missing the gap” (manuke, the Japanese word for a fool) isn’t a discriminatory word belittling anyone; it means there is a distance between the light of life and Physical Body Consciousness, so one isn’t living one’s true life.

So if, simply as a fact, there’s a gap between life and the physical body, it becomes a simple matter of filling that gap by changing how you use your consciousness. (To be continued next time)