Living Well -- What's the key to fully enjoying life?
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Do you understand what ‘living fully’ means? My answer here will surprise you.
We all want to live fully, to live deeply. Alternative: living a shallow life.
The shallow/deep analogy is a good start. Who lives a shallow life?
Someone who is scatter-brained, constantly flitting from one thing to the next. A nervous Nellie, often fearful, too anxious to calm down.
There are 2 sides to our nature as human beings, namely, what we are, our being, and what we do, our doings.
What are our doings? Our physical and mental behavior. Thinking is a doing. To think is to conceptualize or understand – learning isn’t always easy. It can be hard work.
Relate this to living fully: when do we live fully? There’s only one possibility:
in the present moment. The past and the future don’t exist.
So, the question becomes: “How is it possible to live fully in the present moment?”
Again, thinking is a doing. WHEN WE ARE THINKING, WHICH WE DO ONLY IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, ARE WE DOING SOMETHING OR BEING SOMETHING?
We are doing something, namely, trying to understand. We use concepts, principles of classification to do that. Where do those concepts come from?
Obviously, we didn’t learn them in the present moment. We learned them in the past. When else could we have learned them?
Therefore, when we are thinking, we are importing the past into the present. In fact, we are blocking living fully because we are busy doing something else, namely contaminating and deadening the present with the past!
A COURSE IN MIRACLES: “look on everyone with no reference at all to the past.” Cf. my ARE YOU LIVING WITHOUT PURPOSE?
If so, how is it possible to enjoy living fully? By dropping thinking, “no-thought.”
Our experience of the present moment is often unnecessarily contaminated by something unreal, i.e., the past. When we do that, we prevent living well.
Why not stop doing that? Haven’t you had peak or optimal experiences in which you were fully conscious without thinking? That’s living well, isn't it?
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