BACK TO THE FUTURE -AGAIN

“People resort to vows and rites, hoping to ward off the evil that stars may bring about! But no effort is made to win the grace of God. Let the pomp and the paraphernalia of worship not be merely superficial, if they are, they will not confer lasting benefits; at best, they prevent you from using that much of time and money in harmful ways! It is the ‘why’ of these rites that matters, not so much the ‘how’. The ‘why’ has to be the realisation of the reality of the individual, which is also the reality of the Universal! So be devoted to the Universal; be eager to become ‘That’. When you pray to God for a job, or a son, or a prize, you are devoted, not to God, but to the job, to the son or to the prize. Pray to God for God; love, because it is your nature to love. Expand your Self, take in all! Grow in Love.” Sai Baba (Underlining emphasis is the author’s.)

Robert Zemeckis is the progenitor of the film series, “Back To The Future”. He conceived and began to develop the idea when he was at Northern Illinois University, 12th floor Stevenson South. At that time period, he was known as “Can Man”. And it wasn’t because he had an 8mm movie camera. It was because he was a slight fellow who was once unceremoniously discarded in a garbage can, head first, legs dangling above. Robert Zemeckis had the idea to create a motion picture that used technology to time travel (not unlike “The Time Machine”). Time being an awful constraint to overcome, it was a successful adventure in ‘what if’.

Going into the past and back to the future where we came from would/could play havoc with cause and effect. That speculation played out in the movie as well. The other novelty that showed up on the screen was the conditioned responses we would have and our struggles with them, whether we were in the past, present, or the future. These patterns of behavior were most difficult to upend. The story could have ended in so many different directions, even if just one of the characters would have not responded to the loading of predictable patterns.

We all have some degree of commitment to the future. In many of our lives, there is a profound over-commitment to ‘things to come’. So much so, we push ourselves (and others) incessantly. This particular struggle forward creates a lot of unnecessary turbulence in our lives.

It is always the Eternal Now, now. To think that it is just a concept, that ‘It’ is now, is not Now, when ‘It’ is just a concept. Conceptual thinking is unable to capture the location. That is, other than the location being what you ‘think’. To understand that the Eternal Now is present now, is to understand that It was present during the reading of the last sentence. And It will be present in the reading of the next sentence. But It is not there because we think It is. IT is Present because we can actually feel it. IT has a Presence.

If we look at the parade of life we are in, as foreground, and we look at the permanent part of us that is always present, as the backdrop to all that pomp and circumstance, we can better understand that this perennial timezone is in the perennial background, always. So when we are truly in the Moment, we are accessing all that cool jive called ‘connectivity’. This means we are directly, without intermediary, connected to the ‘What Is’. And connecting to this graciousness, is connecting to ‘It’ all. ‘All’ meaning timezone, Being, Awareness, and Bliss. It is not to be divided, although that is what the mind fishes for to understand the ineffable, hence the division. The mind separates us from Ourselves because that is what it does to dumb-down to the conceptual level. This effort is only an unsuccessful attempt to secure a specious understanding a la ‘the mind’.

Understanding that the Now is “unchangeably Present”, is the knowledge of the changeless emptiness/fullness Being always there. The ‘there’ is where everything is born, every idea it’s source, all creativity and change originating from that emptiness/fullness. To just ‘say’, that that, is the Eternal Now, is only to ‘say’ it without knowing it deeply. When we ‘feel’ the embeddedness of the entire phenomenol world as clearly being the Beginning (with no beginning) we ‘are’ IT. It can Be no other way.

To acknowledge the un-separateness, is to acknowledge everyone’s connection to “The Energy”. The timezone of ’Now’ does not need the mechanism of time to construct itself. In other words, the “timeless Now” would certainly be a synonym for the “Eternal Now”. Names are nothing anyway, except more forms. The names are there as guideposts but can easily serve as distractions, given the nature of delusion.

Perfunctorily knowing that it is always the “Eternal Now” is cliche-like. Experientially living in that field is something else. The base of one’s existence is headquartered there and not in the so-called ‘parade’. The quality of the energy from these two locations are infinitely apart. Streaming “The Energy” versus the instability of the ‘parade’ as our source, feels compellingly different.

Knowing the above, when we regularly leave the field of energy that is our source, by migrating through our struggling, to the future, and migrating, through our regrets to the past, we court unreality. We define our experience with the elements of this unreality, supplanting Being with belief systems, to maintain the distortions.

The so-called ‘future’, is problematic for the seeker because this is where we store our hope. If we did not have a future, what could we hope for in life?! Where could we ‘find’ the change we are so desperately looking for? Is there a need for unreality? It is back to the future, again and again. What is always displaced under these circumstances is the Present.

IT is always The Now.

Revisiting the future is what we do when we struggle ‘trying’ to Be. We are not good enough, not smart enough, and gosh darn it, people don’t like us enough, to Be as we are. It would be a comedy if we did not make so many egregious errors in the Way of effortlessness.

“Can Man” can make another movie about time travel, but we create time travel not only every day but practically every moment. The entertainment value of ’this’ time travel is not entertaining. A hamster’s wheel may be making more progress than the one we are spinning on, unfortunately.

To showcase our work on our path we can demonstrate that our character in the play of life has actually learned something different about herself/himself, that begins to completely change the story. Or, we can predictably become cast in the role we continue to replay day after day.

It would help us immensely if we, for once, can listen to the Director within. Oh, and we must be sure to understand ‘listening’ better. The direction is solid gold Oscar material. The “Best Director” Is the one within.

Be The Moment.

This Iz Daddy’O