The Present: Jump In!

After reading the first 125 pages of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I started trying to escape from negative thoughts by moving sharply into the present.  I would look at a tree, gaze at the sky, take a deep breath, listen to a tape, and immediately my mood improved.  I felt connected to the universe and a higher power, and whatever I’d been fretting about grew proportionately much less important.

         This morning I woke from a really terrible dream, and just couldn’t shake it off.  What a negative waste of time and energy.  Then I realized I hadn’t yet done anything to replace the dream, instead I had dragged it out of the night and into the day.  So it was occupying not only the immediate past, but the present as well. 

         I turned on WFMT and started listening to music, and the dream faded.  By the time I came in after my powerwalking hour outdoors, the dream had become just one of those nighttime oddities.  Out of “sight” out of mind.

         My goal is to get as close as possible to 100% of my time in the present.  That way I actually have a life!



Practicing Spirituality in Prisons

I have a friend who says, “What you push against gets stronger.”  She’s right. 

         Big example: During the recent souring of my marriage, if I tried to change my estranged husband’s negative opinion of me, my day became a fruitless battle.  When I surrendered to my powerlessness over him, and went on to tasks and pleasures about which I actually had a choice, I had a good day.

         Small example: Suppose I call someone who doesn’t answer.  I could throw myself against the problem, texting them, emailing them, calling them again.  But this just leaves me angry and frazzled.  When I simply leave a voicemail and go on to other things, the eventual call-back feels like a lovely, unexpected surprise.

         Last Sunday, The New York Times had a story about American prisons learning this same principle.  In American prisons over the last thirty years, it became more and more standard to throw unruly prisoners into solitary confinement.  But what the prisons were “pushing against,” namely disobedience or lawlessness, just got stronger. 

         Eventually, in the summer of 2007, in a prison in Parchman, Mississippi, “violence erupted…an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang.”

         The reason I’m posting about this has to do with a spiritual experiment that followed.  A spiritual experiment with a spiritual result.  Stay tuned.