The Kenyan Scholar

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift and that is why it is called ‘the present’”

This quote is more meaningful than ever in adulthood, when time appears to flow faster than it did when I was a child. With adult life's demands consuming nearly every waking minute, the present moment has never been more scarce. It seems to always be consumed either by the regrets/nostalgia of the past or the anxieties of future plans. Perhaps, this is why time appears to move faster now, many years later since you first set foot in school.

My goodness, so much time has gone by. Do you remember when you first went to school. You went to kindergarten and here, the idea was to push along so you can get into first grade, and then push along so you can get into second grade, third grade, and so on, going up and up, and then you went to high school This was a great transition in life and now the pressure is being put on. You must get ahead.

You must go up the grades and finally be good enough to get to college. And then when you get to college, you’re still going step by step up to the great moment in which you’re ready to go out in the world. Upon getting into this famous world, the struggle for success in profession or business begins.

Again, there seems to be a ladder of sort; something for which you are reaching all the time. Then, suddenly, when you reach 40 or 45 years in the middle of life, you may wake up one day and say, “Huh..., I’ve arrived, and by Jove I feel pretty much the same as I’ve always felt. In fact, I am not so sure I don’t feel a little bit cheated.”

You can’t live at all unless you can live fully, now, in the real world.

But what is the real word? In one of his famous speeches, Alan Watts explains that some people have the theory that the real world is material or physical. Other people have the theory that the real world is spiritual or mental. But I want you to point out that both those theories of the world are concepts before we decide either to save the planet or to destroy it.

Now, we then need to pause for a moment of silence. I mean real silence in which we stop thinking and experience reality as reality is. This is after all because if I talk all the time, I can’t hear what anyone else has to say. And if I think all the time, and by that, I mean specifically talking to yourself sub-vocally inside your skull, I have nothing to think about except thoughts. And so, I am never in touch with the real world.

You will find, therefore, that if you get with reality, all sorts of illusions disappear. Let’s begin with some very down to earth ones like money.

Money is a very useful method of accounting. It is a measure of wealth. You could have fantastic quantity of cash money and stock certificates on a desert island and they would be useless to you. Money simply represents wealth in rather the same way that the menu represents the dinner only, we are psychologically perverted in such a way that some of us would rather have money than real wealth.

But you know, you cannot drive in five cars at once, even though they be Cadillacs. You cannot live simultaneously in six houses or eat 12 roasts of beef at one meal. There is a limit to what one can consume. So that’s one of the sorts of confusions I’m talking about.

Now, the present is the only real time. There is no past and there isn’t a future and there never will be. We think ordinarily of the present as an infinitesimal point at which the future changes into the past.

We also do a terrible thing where we imagine ourselves to be results of the past, and we always passing the buck over our shoulders like when God approached Adam in the Garden of Eden and said, “Has thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told you thou shouldst not eat?” And Adam said, “This woman thou gave this to me, she tempted me and I did eat.” And God looked at Eve and said, “Has thou eaten of the fruit of the tree whereof I told you thou shouldst not eat?” And she said, “the serpent beguiled me and I did eat.” And God out of the corner of his eye looked at the serpent; serpent said nothing.

So, you see, we are always passing the buck and don’t realize that the past is caused by the present. We’ve all got excuses. But the truth of the matter is it all begins here, in the present. This is where the creation of true reality begins.

Consequently, there is a practice throughout the world, rather more in Asia than elsewhere although always by a minority of people, a discipline called meditation, which is to get in touch with reality. The word meditation in English doesn’t have quite the same meaning because when we talk of someone meditating, we thing of deeply pondering about something.

If Orientals are asked, what do you meditate on? They may look slightly puzzled and say, “we don’t meditate on anything. We just meditate.” It means very simply to stop thinking temporarily.

We talk sometimes about the practice of meditation as if it were like practicing the piano, preparing for a concert. It’s much more like the practice of medicine as when you say, “well I practice medicine” means you do it every day. It’s your way of life.

So, this odd and very hard to understand for many people because we are so fixated on the future. When we say we want to put something down, we say it has no future. Well, do you?

It is much better to have a present. Because if you don’t, it’s useless to make plans. Because when they work out, you won’t be there to enjoy them. You’ll be thinking of something else.

So, meditation is one activity which is curiously different from all others. It has no purpose. But in this, you are released into reality. That’s why it is said that the angels in heaven have harps and why the circle the throne of God and sing Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. So then, it has to be understood about meditation that it’s not an exercise, it’s not a gymnastic, it is not the ordinary sort of self-improvement procedure.

One does it not to be good for you, but just because you dig it, because at last you find yourself in the center: the eternal NOW, in which past and future drop way, in which divisions created by words drop away.