„The past and future stand [only by] clinging to the present.
While occurring, they too are only the present.“

Sri Ramana Maharshi, Indian spiritual teacher (1879–1950) – from Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, verse 15

After a short nap, I look out of the oval window. Outside, soft white clouds drift past an otherwise flawless blue sky. I'm sitting in a Singapore Airlines A380, on my way from Singapore to Frankfurt, where I'm also writing these very lines.

For my nap, I had taken off my watch, and now I have absolutely no idea what time it is. This is a day flight — it departed Singapore around midday, and because we're flying west, the sun travels with me for the entire 12.5 hours. Outside, it simply never gets dark.

I consciously don't follow the first impulse to reach for my watch. Instead, I allow a strange, soft feeling of timelessness. And within me, a deep calm spreads, which simply says: "It is now."

Quite naturally, we picture this now as one point among countless others — a point that has just arrived and, in the next instant, is already gone again, replaced by the next point, and the next, in an endless chain along a line stretching from the past into the future. This is how most of us picture time, without ever questioning it.

And yet nobody has ever actually experienced this line. Rupert Spira likes to ask who has ever stepped off the now and travelled back along the line to check whether yesterday still exists somewhere, a day away. We know the past only as a memory, arising now. We know the future only as an anticipation, arising now. This line, along which time is supposed to run — as useful as it is for planning a day or telling a story — is a concept laid over experience. Not a description of what actually is.

It is now.

I use this sentence, in similar form, in all my courses. You've surely heard it from me before when I've described meditation: meditation is when the mind rests in the here and now. Here and now — two words that sound perfectly obvious to everyone new to meditation. "I stay in the here and now. Then thoughts about the future or the past can't shake my peace."

And yet, however obvious that sounds, everyone who meditates eventually notices how hard it actually is to remain in the now, without being swept off somewhere in time by the stream of thoughts. That's partly just a matter of practice, and after some sessions we find it does get easier to dwell longer in the now.

But then, after some time of meditation — perhaps in one of the advanced courses — something else happens. A new thought creeps in: "When will I finally make progress? When will I get this 'awakened' view of the world?" Quite quietly, the mind has found itself a new goal, somewhere in the future: enlightenment.

When I say in the Vipassana courses, "Stay in the here and now," everyone nods. "Sure, we've heard that from Heiko a hundred times. But when will the change finally come? Maybe today's session will bring the breakthrough…" You can see it yourself — that's anything but being in the now.

It's similar when I try to explain what "enlightenment" actually is. At its core, it's nothing other than the fact that we are consciousness — and always have been — and that this consciousness becomes aware of itself again. We simply perceive ourselves once more.

But we already are this consciousness. If I ask you, "Are you?", you answer, "Yes, I am." You are aware of yourself — at least in this brief moment when I ask you. We are all conscious, we are all already "enlightened." Now, in this instant. Here too, everyone nods, finds it wonderful — only to go looking for enlightenment somewhere in the future again two meditations later.

Alan Watts once described it like this: our life is an endless cycle in which the meaning is always somewhere else. Never quite here. Never now. We're like people reading a novel who are only interested in getting to the last page. So we skim, we turn the pages frantically, missing all the poetry, all the drama, all the lovely descriptions, just to find out how it ends. And when we get there, we close the book and ask, "Was that all?"

Yet the whole point of the book was in the reading itself, in living through it. We miss the essential thing.

The NOW.

That's it — NOW — this moment! You are it.

The thought that something still has to come, someday in the future, with more practice, more effort — that has always been nothing but a beautiful fantasy. An illusion.

Just imagine it were exactly this moment. And that every other moment today was already exactly that too: enlightenment. Imagine that this moment, right now, is as good as it will ever get. That's it. Now.

The surest way to never feel the stillness of the space of consciousness — to never "wake up" — is probably to believe that something else still has to come. "This here isn't it. Not yet. I'm getting closer, but enlightenment must feel different." That's how we keep the illusion alive.

Even in the Non-Duality courses, where I try to make "oneness" tangible, it keeps getting misunderstood, again and again, as a nice concept. If everything is one — what more could there be to come? If everything is one — how could I possibly not be it? If everything is one — how could I be anything other than that?

You already are the One. Now — always.

And how do you live this, then? What do we need to do, so as not to keep chasing some imagined future? We don't need to do anything at all. That's the real joke of it. You also can't make an effort to be spontaneous. You can't strive to be effortless.

Take me at my word: you are — here and now. Don't chase after a happiness in the future, just because you believe it isn't here yet, that it simply can't be this already.

Give up the idea of something else. That's it! Here and now. Happiness in this moment.

And if you feel that what I'm describing here, and the meditations and exercises we do together, somehow still aren't enough — then I have one more small tip for you: book a day flight from Singapore to Frankfurt. Take a little nap, without a watch. And then look out of the window, timeless, and watch the clouds drift by. Now. In this moment. Happiness.

You can see me smiling — because you don't need the view from the airplane at all. Just pause. Feel that you are. In this moment. That's it. Now!

With love,

Heiko