The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time:
2. This voice inside your mind is responsible for anxiety, depression and a host of other negative mindsets.
3. You can free yourself from your mind by focusing on the present.

Impressions

I really enjoyed reading this book. The concepts and ideas are so out of the ordinary, but when grasped are pretty revolutionary for how you view and control your relationship with your mind. The Power of Now is packed full of actionable steps to achieve a state of internal peace. I think if you can get past the wishy-washy writing and religious/spiritual suppositions that are prevalent in parts of the text, there is a lot to gain.

Top 3 Quotes

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

Realise deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.

Summary & Notes

Virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time:

It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy.

You can free yourself from your mind.

Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can.

Listen to it impartially.

You'll soon realise: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realisation, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.

When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. You are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state.

It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that gives life to the physical body.

As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, as it is sometimes called in the East, you realise the state of pure consciousness.

Instead of “watching the thinker,” you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment.

This is the essence of meditation.

In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention.

I would say about 80-90% of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness.

Enlightenment means rising above thought.

In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.

If you cannot feel your emotions you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.

If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion or rather feel it in your body.

Observing our emotions is as important as observing our thoughts.

It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds unless there is enough presence in you.

For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered “speechless,” sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.

Emotion literally means “disturbance.

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfilment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being.

Buddha means “the awakened one”.

Every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time.

The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future.

Have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.

Dealing with internalised “pain”: Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyse. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” and find that there is no death.

There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

Remove time from the mind and it stops unless you choose to use it.

The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfilment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

The more you are focused on time past and future the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

The Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind.

In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally.

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you.

Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

The mind cannot know the tree. It can only know facts or information about the tree.

Make it your practice to withdraw attention from past and future whenever they are not needed. Step out of the time dimension as much as possible in everyday life.

Through self-observation, more presence comes into your life automatically. The moment you realise you are not present, you are present.

Intense presence is needed when certain situations trigger a reaction with a strong emotional charge.

This does not impair your ability to use time past or future when you need to refer to it for practical matters. Nor does it impair your ability to use your mind. In fact, it enhances it. When you do use your mind, it will be sharper, more focused.

Clock time is not just making an appointment or planning a trip. It includes learning from the past so that we don't repeat the same mistakes over and over. Setting goals and working toward them.

Is most of your doing just a means to an end?

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry all forms of fear are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

Your life situation may be full of problems most life situations are but find out if you have any problem at this moment.

“Problem” means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self.

If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing.

See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.

When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love even the most simple action.

So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action just give attention to the action itself.

In some rare cases, this shift in consciousness happens dramatically and radically, once and for all. Most people, however, have to work at it.

You lose the Now, and you return to it, again and again. Eventually, presence becomes your predominant state.

Many people use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, work, television, or even shopping as anaesthetics in an unconscious attempt to remove the basic unease.

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come.

Those challenges are your tests.

Once you know how to dissolve ordinary unconsciousness, the light of your presence will shine brightly, and it will be much easier to deal with deep unconsciousness whenever you feel its gravitational pull.

Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind has created around the situation

Recognising its futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing with any situation.

Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease.

Ordinary unconsciousness is always linked in some way with denial of the Now.

Are you resisting your here and now?

Wherever you are, be there totally.

If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time.

Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation. You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part.

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future;

This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.

You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life.

When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.

Deal with the past on the level of the present.

As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought.

The state of presence could be compared to waiting. There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it.

Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master.

Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature.

Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modem art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions.

They are never in touch with that place within where tree creativity and beauty arise. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities.

Presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness.

While individual users may get some relief from the daily torture inflicted on them by their minds, they are prevented from generating enough conscious presence to rise above thought and so find true liberation.

You can substitute “Christ” for presence, if that is more meaningful to you.

The only difference between Christ and presence is that Christ refers to your indwelling divinity regardless of whether you are conscious of it or not, whereas presence means your awakened divinity or God-essence.

Eternity does not mean endless time, but no time.

God said: “ I AM THAT I AM .” No time here, just presence.

If you are drawn to an enlightened teacher, it is because there is already enough presence in you to recognise presence in another.

Identification with form means ego.

A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity.

Don’t get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction.

Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion.

No one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of- the-body experience.

Transformation is through the body, not away from it.

All spiritual teachings originate from the same Source.

All such teachings are signposts pointing the way back to the Source.

The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes.

Negativity cannot affect you anymore, and you tend to attract new circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.

Feel your whole body from within, as a single field of energy. It is almost as if you were listening or reading with your whole body.

Do not give all your attention away to the mind and the external world. By all means focus on what you are doing, but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible.

There is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.

The more consciousness you bring into the body, the stronger the immune system becomes.

If at any time you are finding it hard to get in touch with the inner body, it is usually easier to focus on your breathing first.

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.

The Unmanifested is the source of chi. Chi is the inner energy, field of your body.

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source.

Can you imagine what it would be like to go into dreamless sleep with full consciousness?

Love isn't a portal; its what comes through the portal into this world.

You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.

Space has no “existence.” Space is nothing, so it was never created.

If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.

One last portal will open up for you immediately after the body has died. There are countless accounts by people who had a visual impression of this portal as radiant light and then returned from what is commonly known as a near-death experience.

The root of this physical urge is a spiritual one: the longing for an end to duality, a return to the state of wholeness. Sexual union is the closest you can get to this state on the physical level.

True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain.

For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are.

The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.

You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.

If you react at all to your partner's unconsciousness, you become unconscious yourself.

It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening.

once you understand the root of the dysfunction, you do not need to explore its countless manifestations.

As a general rule, the major obstacle for men tends to be the thinking mind, and the major obstacle for women the pain-body, although in certain individual cases the opposite may be true, and in others the two factors may be equal.

When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.

Your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy.

Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.

The ego believes that through negativity it can manipulate reality and get what it wants.

No other life form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.

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