Now

It is here that we recognize Essence in its purity as a timelessness that is really you—what you are experiencing yourself to be right now. If you experience yourself purely right now—without your ideas, without your beliefs, without remembering what happened to you in the past, without referring to what you are and what you are not, without thinking where you are going, where you come from, what affected you, who your parents are, whether you are married or not, whether you are a woman or a man, whether you’re young or old, sick or healthy, happy or unhappy—if all of these thoughts, beliefs, ideas, remembrances, and identifications are completely gone from your mind, completely obliterated by the radiance, and you are just here and you are just your consciousness itself, then you are in the timelessness of presence. Then you are that timelessness; then you are that presence. As this timeless moment unfolds, you recognize that this presence extends and expands until everything is included in it. This is the eternal now. Real time takes us to timelessness, and timelessness ushers us into the now. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, ch. 3

To see the world from the perspective of Holy Perfection, then, we have to be in the moment, in contact with our presence, our beingness. Our awareness must be with what exists right now—what we are experiencing in our bodies, what sounds we are hearing, what the temperature is in the environment. The more we are present in the now, the more we recognize that the now has nothing to do with time and that the now is everything. When we see that, there is a certainty, and innate knowingness, that this is how things are. When your lens of perception is finally corrected in this way, you innately know that you are seeing really clearly, and it is obvious to you how unfocused your lens has been. You know, then, that you are not interfering with reality; you are just seeing things the way they are. – Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, ch. 14

When people talk about being in the here and now, it is a more profound experience than simply being aware of the content of the experience of the moment. It begins with that awareness because the content of the moment is what is arising now. So, we are aware of the content of the moment—the physical attributes, the feelings, and the thoughts that are arising in the moment. But the more we are attuned to what is arising in the moment, the more time slows down as we become more present to the moment. And when we become more present to the moment, we begin to recognize the now-ness itself, which turns out to be the presence that is present to the moment.

So, my presence is the now-ness of the moment; they are not separate. It is not that my presence is present in the now of the moment; the presence is the now of the moment. That is how we actually know what presence is. In the practice of being where we are, it becomes clear that to be ourselves, to be real, we need to be in the present moment. We need to attend to the moment, we need to embrace and be completely aware, immediately in touch, with the moment. This immediate in-touchness with the moment is the in-touchness with the now-ness of the moment, which is the same thing as the Being of our presence. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 13

We know Being by being it, not by looking back on it or viewing it from outside. And Being is only now, so we must be the now to know it. This fresh, in-the-now knowledge challenges the stale state of ego, which is patterned by memories, images, and past experiences. Like a Chinese finger puzzle, ego binds itself tightly in the endless pursuit of some ideal, spiritual or otherwise. Even spiritual seeking itself is the expression of that striving. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 21

The freedom to be in the now is vital for knowing the truth of presence itself: that there is no need to hope for better or different experiences in the future, because the essential truth is right now. The immediacy of now is a slam-dunk into a timeless domain. Here we can relax into a felt sense of fundamental goodness and an absence of desire for what we’re hoping for. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 21