by Leonard Jacobson: I want to begin by saying that I know who you are. You are an eternal Being. You are love, acceptance, and compassion.

You are strength, clarity, and truth. At the deepest level, you are pure consciousness, beyond form and content. You are powerful beyond imagining. You are an instrument of God’s will upon the earth. You are a champion of God and your ultimate destiny is to awaken into Oneness. You are the champion of your own soul. It is through your awakening in this lifetime that your soul will be restored to its immortality. You are the redeemer of Oneness and the revealer of Heaven on Earth. You are Buddha, revealing the pure mind of God. You are revealing the pure heart of God. And you are Lao Tzu, revealing the way of God in the world. You are awakened man. You are an awakened woman.

You are eternal but you are on a journey through time. Your journey has taken you from Oneness into duality. It has taken you into a world of illusion and separation. It has taken you from the present moment into the past and future. It has taken you from truth into a world of idea, concept, opinion, and belief.

The journey is purposeful but, for the most part, we have lost our way. We have forgotten who we are. We are now functioning as egos in our own private and separate worlds. We have strayed too far from the truth and we are following in the footsteps of the prodigal son.

Because of our technological advances, we have become too destructive to continue living unconsciously upon this earth. It is time to awaken, but before we can awaken, we must recognize how and where we are lost.

THE DILEMMA OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

Most humans are living in a state of unconsciousness. Even though our eyes are open and we appear to be awake as we walk and talk and live our lives, in truth we are not awake.

We are lost in the mind, which is a world of the remembered past and imagined future. It is a world of thought, memory, and imagination. It is a world of opinion, idea, concept, and belief. It gives us the sense of ourselves outside of the present moment. And that is the great illusion.

In truth, there is no life outside the present moment. The world of the human thinking mind is an illusory world and yet almost everyone believes that it is real. It is as if we have fallen asleep and the life we are living is a kind of dream, from which we must awaken.

To awaken spiritually or to become enlightened is to awaken out of the past and future world of the mind into the truth and reality of the present moment.

It is not until you awaken and become fully present that you will realize that you have not been present. It is not until you awaken that you will realize that you have been asleep, dreaming that you are awake. To be enlightened is to awaken out of the dream. It is a profound and dramatic shift in consciousness.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE TRULY PRESENT?

To be present is to awaken into that dimension of yourself and life that transcends the thinking mind. You are silent and you are fully present with what is actually here now.

If you are fully present, there is no moment other than this moment. That is what it means to be awake in the truth of life.

At the very deepest level of awakened Presence, the past and future have disappeared and only this moment is available to you. You are awake in the eternal now. You cannot function within the world of time for the simple reasons that there is no time. There is no sense of your self outside this moment.

This does not mean that one who has awakened is always functioning at the deepest level of Presence. It is possible to function at a more superficial level of Presence so the world of time becomes available. Even when you participate in the world of time, you are still deeply grounded in Presence and the present moment is always recognized as the truth of life.

If you are fundamentally awake in Presence, you live without judgment, fear, and desire. You live in a state of acceptance. You live as love in the world. The illusion of separation is dissolved. You live with a strong sense of the Oneness of all things, and a continuing awareness of the impersonal an eternal dimension of existence. You see others as equal and enlightened, even if they are unaware of it. This extends to animals and the world of nature. It is impossible for you to intentionally harm another. You are compassionate and you always act with integrity. You cannot be dishonest. There is something inside you, which simply will not allow it.

When you are fundamentally awake in the truth of life, you are substantially free of ego motivations, desires, and reactions.

This is not to imply that one who is awake is somehow perfect. At times, you can react like anyone else, and experience fear and uncertainty, or feelings like hurt and anger. The difference is that now you know that you are caught temporarily in the illusion of separation. You do not identify with emotional reaction. And yet, you take full responsibility for what ever is arising. The experience is owned and accepted but not acted upon as if it is the truth.

Excerpt form Journey Into Now.