Life is here. Life is now. This moment is all you will ever know. Yesterday is a memory here and now. Tomorrow is a fantasy here and now. Life is only ever here and now, and it is all you will ever have. The mature capacity to place and keep attention in the present moment and on your present experience without getting lost in it, is what I call Awakened Attention.
Awakened Attention means an intensely energetic and alert attention, never lost in experience yet always aware in the midst of experience.
Using Awakened Attention, your habits of rejection, avoidance and resistance to your present experience can be observed. You can learn to observe your Life experience unfolding moment to moment, and your conditioned behaviors, habitual patterns and personal strategies can be brought to light and exposed.
By maintaining 'Awakened Attention', you may also start to notice your habit of compulsively attempting to manipulate your external Life to fulfill a sense of emptiness, incompleteness and dissatisfaction. You look 'out there' for something that will do it for you once and for all. With Awakened Attention it may start to dawn on you that what you are really looking for is much closer, and not really outside of you at all.
With Awakened Attention it is useful to look at a framework of 'three times', which include past, present, and future, as well as a variety of practices that would involve exploring and bringing to attention the dynamics of each time including:
¨ Looking at your past with Awakened Attention is called healing your relationships and experiences.
¨ Looking at your present with Awakened Attention is called living at your highest level of functioning.
¨ Looking at your future with Awakened Attention preceeds an unfolding of potential development.
You may contemplate some difficult questions as a means of exploring your beliefs, biases and blind spots. As a practice, you might consider these great questions without ever hoping for an answer. What this means is you probe into a great question using great curiosity and focus, allowing the possibility of an answer to come from the experience of a deep and oftentimes wordless place. The question itself IS the answer. Who am I? What is the meaning of Life? Where am I going? Am I loving well? What is my deepest purpose?
My favorite question: 100 years from now we will all be dead, what is important to you???
In summary it is my experience that suffering and attachment are 'wake up calls' beckoning me towards the human capacity to explore the depth of my experience, the unfolding of my potential, and my passion for the Mystery of Life. In the last 17 years I have examined the wisdom traditions of East and West in an effort to answer Life's big questions, but at this point the Mystery of Life has only grown deeper.
What I hope I have offered here is not an answer or cure for any of these great questions, but rather a variety of skillful means to enter into the vast and various Mysteries of Life. Of course there really are no answers, and even this understanding is but a swirling pattern in the open space of Mystery that is this present moment ... and this
* 2008 All Rights Reserved.
Aaron McNaught, aka "The Wake Up Guy", is the author of five books, a Life Coach and Transformational Speaker who practically owns the term. (Google "Transformational Speaker" in quotes and see for yourself). Aaron is known for his demonstration of awakeness and has commited his life to bringing light into the world.
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