Living in the NOW vs Looking for the HOW

When it comes to accomplishing something never before attempted, it’s been the natural tendency of humans to look back at what we’ve already done (what is familiar) and then to look forward at what could be done (imagination at its best) and while neither way is better than the other, neither way produces immediate results.

The human brain was created to enable and monitor bodily functions. The mind, however, operates separately from the brain and its main purpose is to assimilate, interpret, and translate any and all information that it receives, using logic and reasoning. The more adept one is at using their mind, the more intelligent they are. Yet there is another intelligence possessed by humans that is less often used-consciously. That is to say you have an awareness of when you are using your mind to reason; however your brain functions in the background of your awareness, sending commands to various parts of your body, causing them to act/react. Likewise, your heart; which was created to be your primary intelligence center, thus far has operated in the background of your awareness. Note that when I say heart, I am referring to your etheric heart, not the one that pumps blood, although your experience of both your physical and etheric hearts occur in the same general space of your body-the chest area.

Thanks to science, we know exactly where our physical heart is located and it’s functioning purpose. However we have also experienced sensations in our chest area much broader that the precise location of our cardiovascular muscles. This is the etheric heart, also known as the ‘seat’ of our spirit in our physical form. This heart, this place in you where your essence of being, or spirit resides was designed to be used as your primary intelligence and experiential center. Over the millennia however, we have systematically trained ourselves (as a species) to use our lesser intelligence center (the mind) as our primary perception tool inside of the context of survival. And it worked. We’re still here. The human species remains and we will continue to remain at some cost to ourselves and the planet we call home.

You see the human mind is hardwired to survive. Logic and reason are superior skills in a world full of real and perceived threats. Only in this ‘day and age’ the initial threats that promoted our mind to Chief Intelligence Officer are no longer present, and our lesser intelligence center, with no real threats to survive, maintains its position by creating perceived threats for us to survive. Our mind is destroying us and our planet. Some 30 million Americans are prescribed anti-depressants: the effect of a mind desperately trying to find something to survive. Quite simply we are using outdated and insufficient intelligence for the world in which we now live. As a species, and out of habit, we are living life the way we have always lived life but expecting that this time, we will produce a different result!

Our current reality requires us to use our primary center of intelligence, the heart if we are to thrive. Your heart perceives reality- that is your heart dwells in the ‘here and now’. It is your mind that looks to the past in order to assimilate the NOW experience that your heart is having into something familiar (that can be categorized and recorded)or the future to project what implications this NOW moment may have on events that have yet to transpire! Your mind is like a software program whose function is survival and it executes commands by compiling data (using logic and reasoning) from your brain and/or your heart and then files this data for future reference in a vault labeled The Past.

Here’s where things get tricky, I said before that only your heart experiences this NOW moment. Your mind simply perceives what is happening in the NOW moment in order to answer the question: How? How Is the ultimate question inside of the context of survival. How will you pay your bills? How will you know if you made the right choice? In the NOW moment, there is no how. Stop and allow yourself to get present in this NOW moment. What are you experiencing? What physical sensations are you present to? Your clothing on your body? Warm or cool air across your skin? The noisiness or the quietness of wherever you are reading this? There is no How ‘here’! There JUST IS , and your heart experiences this all day, every day. However, your mind almost immediately in the successive NOW moments takes your awareness from this moment, and focuses on the moment that just passed, or on the moment that has not yet arrived. Your mind is not needed to experience the present moment, however your mind has had years of training, in dominating your awareness. In other words, if you want to thrive rather than survive, you will be required to strengthen you heart. Allow yourself to ‘be’ in the NOW moment rather than allowing your mind to hijack your awareness and shove you into survival mode looking for ‘how’.

Collectively we have an extraordinary opportunity to fulfill on our desires as a species and to create a sustainable way of living together: with each other and the planet. By shifting our context from survive to thrive, we open up to the experience of life using our primary intelligence rather than the perception of life from our secondary intelligence center. We have been living a default, second choice life and now is the time to give our superior intelligence the free reign it was designed to have. When you look around, the world as we know it is an effect of our mind having free reign; looking for the how in order to survive.

The time has come for us to live in the NOW and to thrive.