Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything in my life.  Actually, I think I’ve accomplished quite a bit– it’s hard not to, considering that I work 12 to 14 hours a day.

All  of us have had our shares of successes and failures in life.   Still, we sometimes awaken to despair and even panic that so many of your years have managed to slip away virtually unnoticed. We may blame our hectic lifestyles and the demands of work and family.

The truth is, if we don’t dwell in every tiny moment that makes up our reality, our whole lives will have passed uneventfully. Every moment in our lives is immensely sacred in its own right. To awaken to the present moment is to experience the sanctity of being alive.

We may consider getting married and giving birth to a child as exceptionally significant moments in our lives. In fact, they are. However, if we give value to only a handful of memorable moments in our lives, the countless other moments that make up our existence will have seemed pointless.

If birthdays, anniversaries, travels to exotic destinations, and other important events in our lives can have so much meaning for us, then why not the present moment? The present moment is the only moment in which we are truly alive. This is not to say that we should not celebrate our birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, and other major milestones in our lives. It’s  just that every moment has an intrinsic value in itself.

Attention is what gives meaning and significance to everything. By attending to every moment in our lives with great care and diligence, we render it as special as our wedding or birthday.

We seldom ponder about being present in our own bodies because we already know that we are. Therein lies the problem. So many aspects of our lives are put on automatic pilot that we have come to rely on habituated thought patterns to sustain a stable, predictable world. We know that we are in our bodies so that we do not have to be aware of being in them. While daydreaming, planning, speculating, and so on, we effectively have an “out-of-body experience”.  Our minds are projected away from our bodies into the realm of thought.

In reality, the mind and body are inseparable and, to a large extent, indistinguishable from each other. We normally think of the body as the physical, tangible “stuff” of which we are made, and the mind as the nonphysical faculty of consciousness, perception, thought, emotion, and memory. In reality, every thought or emotion arises from an electro-chemical change in the brain or nervous system. That is, every mental event is made possible by a physical event involving bodily components– without the body, there can be no mind. Vice versa, the mind contains the cosmos of information that directs every aspect of the complex biological machinery that is the body– without a mind, there can be no body.

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What does it mean that every moment is infinite?

A person’s lifetime, no matter how short or long, is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments. A single day is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments. Even a single second is made up of an infinite number of smaller moments.

If we are able to dwell in the infinitesimally small moments that make up every second of our realities, then we can experience infinity itself. Time would seem to stand still. This is why we often experience timelessness during meditation.

Mindfulness is the art of arriving at the present moment. By inhabiting our bodies, accepting all things that are happening both inside and outside of us, without resisting, we arrive at the present moment. We can say to ourselves, “This is it, I am here.”

Mindfulness is the quality of being here now. Being here now means dwelling in the present moment and actively participating in the unfolding of our own reality. When we actively inhabit our bodies and attune our awareness to the here and now, we dwell in the eternal stillness that is this moment.

Having a desire to succeed in life is great. It drives us to work harder and to make the most of our abilities. At the same time, attachment to success habituates us to equate happiness with career achievements. When we strive for something, we should remind ourselves that what we really want is contentment.

We may think of contentment in terms of earning an advanced degree, making a lot of money, driving an expensive car, and winning approval from family and friends. But these are just motivations for striving, not contentment itself. When we reach a new milestone in our career, we may be happy for a while, but our feelings of contentment are quickly replaced by a more powerful desire to reach the next target. Life then becomes a state of constant grasping, always reaching for something onto which we cannot hold.

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In mindfulness we embrace stillness. Stillness leads to clarity. If puddle of muddy water is left undisturbed for a period of time, it eventually becomes clear on it own as dirt particles settle to the bottom. Clarity is an addition by subtraction– we value what is not there rather than what is there. Just as clear water is a potential of a muddy puddle, a clear mind is a potential of mental clutter. When we breathe mindfully and observe the arising and passing of our thoughts, without resisting or clinging to them, our mental turbidity will gradually decrease, leaving a clear mind that dwells in stillness.

If we were lost in the woods and came across a small muddy puddle of water, we would be wise to wait patiently until the mud settles before drinking from it. To still the mind also requires patience. In the same way that agitating a puddle of water with a stick makes it muddy, we muddle our minds by getting caught up in our thoughts. Getting involved in thoughts saps our energy and contributes to the restless chatter in our heads. If we can gain some degree of detachment from our mental phenomena, our thoughts and feelings will come and go without taking hold of our minds. The mind then calms on its own.

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When we think of meditation, we normally think of sitting motionless in a quiet place away from the distractions of daily living. This is actually sitting meditation. By limiting sensory input during sitting meditation, we are able to calm our minds and reach the meditative state more easily. But meditation is not just limited to sitting in one place doing nothing. We can meditate by simply doing the ordinary things we do everyday with mindfulness. What we want to achieve in meditation is stillness. Stillness does not necessarily mean physical inactivity or even mental inactivity. In anything we do, be it eating, walking, driving, washing dishes, and so on, we have a capacity for stillness.

While the mind is fully engaged in physical activity, it is less likely to wander away from the present moment. While washing dishes, for instance, we attune our awareness to the moment-to-moment bodily movements and sensations involved in the chore. While the mind is preoccupied with the physical actions and sensations, it is less likely to be thinking, “Oh, this is such mindless drudgery; I have better things to do with my time!” Thoughts and feelings will continue to come and go, but as long as we can manage to hold our attention on the small details involved in getting the dishes cleaned, our minds will be attuned to the present moment. Dishwashing then becomes our object of meditation.

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One of the most persistent struggles of life that it seems that the more we know about something, the more we realize we have to learn. As knowledge can become a constant source of stress and frustration in life, it might make more sense to discard the knowledge we already have and espouse ignorance, instead.

If ignorance is the answer to problems created by knowledge, then a person who has never attended a day of school in his life would be the ultimate sage.

That is not quite true.

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Why do we meditate?

People meditate for different reasons. The reason I meditate (or at least attempt to) is to perceive reality in a more objective way. Human perception is subjective since it does not give a particularly accurate picture of the world around us, or the world within us, for that matter. For instance, the human eye is capable of detecting a very narrow range, namely the visible spectrum, of the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s why doctors use x-ray to see our bones and internal organs.

If our eyes were capable of x-ray and infrared vision, which themselves are but small ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, objects would appear entirely different from they do normally; our perception of the world would change fundamentally. As all of our perceptual organs are similarly limited, what we perceive is a really only a conceptualization of the world around us, not what it really is. So, there’s more to the world than meets the eye, so to speak.

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When I was a young boy I used to enjoy staring blankly at the wall whenever I had a few minutes to spare. It was a pastime to which I would return time and time again. It gave me a sense of peace and happiness that I could not really describe. I was not sure if there was a name for such an activity and wondered if other people also indulged in it.

Despite having visited the Buddhist temple with my family on a regular basis, I had a very vague understanding of meditation. I thought it was a special magical practice done only by the monks. Their unintelligible chants seemed to be some form of communication with the higher realms to which only they had access. Meditation was definitely not for the lay people, let alone a young child.

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Multitasking has become a way of life in today’s fast-paced, profit-driven corporate world. There is an assumption that efficiency and productivity are increased by having a few workers do the work of the many. Our performance in the workplace is tied to our job security, our material well being, and ultimately our sense of self-worth.

While having a sandwich on lunch break, we may find ourselves making a business call or planning next week’s presentation and forget altogether that we are eating. As if our hectic schedules are not enough, we must make time for our families, friends, and religious and civic obligations. In the West (and perhaps the industrialized East), the fast-paced, high-pressure life that revolves around material accumulation is one made necessary by economic and technological progress. Lagging behind is our capacity to make sense of our chaotic lifestyles and to find meaning in the hustle and bustle of everyday living. This kind of life may give us financial security and good social standing but yet leave us in a spiritual vacuum.

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