| ARE YOU HERE? A.H. Almaas "Are you here?" Are you really here in this room? I don't mean is your body here, because that is obviously the case. But are you here? Do you feel that you are here in the room? Are you aware ofbeing present here, and ofyour actual experience in this moment? Or are you lost in thoughts, fantasies, plans, emotional reactions? Are you here, or are you busy liking and disliking? Are you here, or are you busy judging yourself and everything else? Are you here now, or are you trying to be here, making a token effort because this is what we are talking about? Are you aware ofeverything and everyone around you? Are you aware ofyour surroundings, or are you lost in a whirlwind ofthoughts? When you hear the question, "Are you here?" it's not important in answering that you try to be good or correct. It's important only to sincerely explore for yourself, are you here or not? Are you in your body or oblivious, or only aware ofparts ofit? When I say, "Are you in your body?" I mean, "Are you completely filling your body?" I want to know whether you are in your feet, or just have feet. Do you live in them, or are they just things you use when you walk? Are you in your belly, or do you just know vaguely that you have a belly? Or is it just for food? Are you really in your hands, or do you move them from a distance? Are you present in your cells, inhabiting and filling your body? If you aren't in your body, what significance is there in your experience this moment? Are you preparing, so that you can be here in the future? Are you setting up conditions by saying to yourself, "When such and such happens I'll have time, I'll be here"? If you are not here, what are you saving yourself for? Regardless of the stories you tell yourself, at this moment, this very moment, there is only this moment, here, now. Nothing else exists. For your direct experience, only the here and now is relevant. Only nowis real. And it is always like that. At each moment, only that moment exists. So we need to ask why we put ourselves on hold, waiting for the right time, waiting for the right circumstances to arise in the future. Maybe the right time will never come. Maybe the conditions you have in mind will never come together for you. When will you begin to exist then? When will you begin to be here, to live? Regardless of the ideas about past and future that dominate your experience, right at this moment only this moment exists, and only this moment has any significance for you. The most direct and obvious fact of experience is that the moment, the here and now, is all that exists. This is all there is for this moment. Whatever is happening at this moment, that is your life. The future is not your life; it never arrives. What is actually here is always only this moment. So can you let yourself be? I am not suggesting that you let yourself be to get anything or do anything, even to understand anything. I mean just to be. Are you giving yourself the simple privilege of being, of existence? Why do you think that what you do, what you have, what you get or don't get are more important than just being here? Why are you always wanting to get something or go somewhere? Why not just relax and be here, simply existing in all your cells, inhabiting all your body? When are you going to let yourselfdescend from your lofty preoccupations, and simply land where you are? Stop striving after all kinds of things; stop dreaming, scheming, planning, working, achieving, attempting, moving, manipulating, trying to be something, trying to get some- where. You forget the simplest, most obvious thing, which is to be here. If you are not in your body, you miss the source of all significance, meaning, and satisfaction. How can you feel the satisfaction, if you aren't here? We miss who we are, which is fundamentally beingness, existence. If we are not here, we exist only on the fringes of reality. We don't sufficiently value simply being. Instead, we value what we want to accomplish, or what we want to possess. It is our biggest mistake. It is called the "great betrayal." We are always looking for pleasure, frantically seeking happiness in many ways, and totally missing the simplest, most fundamental pleasure, which actually is also the greatest pleasure: just being here. When we are really present, the presence itself is made out of fullness, contentment, and blissful pleasure. Our habits and conditioning lead us to forget the greatest treasure we have, our birthright - the pleasure and lightness of existence. We think that we will have pleasure or delight if we fulfill a certain plan, if a certain dream comes true, if someone we care for likes us, if we take a wonderful trip. This attitude is an insult to who we are. We are the pleasure, we are the joy, we are the most profound significance and the highest value. When we understand this, we see that it's ridiculous to think that we will get pleasure and joy through these external things - by doing this or that, or receiving approval or love from this or that person. We see then that we have been misinformed; we have been barking up the wrong tree. Happiness, value, and pleasure are not the result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature. If we simply allow ourselves to be, this is our natural experience. You are the most precious thing in the universe, but you behave as if you are the poorest, most trivial thing there is. It doesn't really take much to see this. Just stop the whirlwind that goes on. Let yourself relax and be there. You can allow yourself to do it wherever you are. You don't have to be in the Canary Islands to be happy. You don't have to be with someone you are in love with, and who loves you, to be happy. Putting these conditions on your happiness is a degrading way of looking at yourself. Sure, you can be happy in the Canaries or with someone you love, but how about the rest of the time? You abandon yourself, then start looking for satisfaction. You feel that something's missing, so you are always searching, becoming more and more frantic as all the things you acquire or accomplish don't fill you. This whole pattern occurs because you have stopped being. If you just let yourself be there, there is nowhere to go, nothing to look for, because it's all there. It is not that some people are satisfied by being and others not; no, we all feel satisfied when we are ourselves. It is a quality of our human nature. It is our natural endowment. It is the meaning of being a human being. The only thing we need do is to let ourselves be. If you simply feel yourself at this moment, even if you don't feel your being in a full, satisfying way, you will naturally become aware of what is blocking your being. What is stopping me from being at this moment? Why do I want to go somewhere else? Why am I always thinking about what's going to make me happy? We can become naturally curious, and begin to unravel the beliefs, hopes and fears that create the blocks to being aware of our being. When we stop to consider, we recognize that happiness is not something we're going to get somewhere, nor is it the result of some action we take. The very fabric of our beingness is itself what we are always actually looking for. We seek pleasure, joy, happiness, peace, strength, power. But these are simply aspects of our existence. Our nature, our origin is the most precious thing there is. The existence itself, is a delight. This existence, this delight, is the very center of reality, all the time. Because we forget our origin and our true nature, we tend to stay on the fringes of existence and never let ourselves live in and from the center of ourselves. It's quite a tragic story. When teachers tell you that you are asleep, or have gone astray, they mean that you have gone astray from your existence. You are asleep to your beingness. But it's not exactly that you have gone astray in the sense that you were somewhere else, lost, and now you're here. Actually, you were here all the time. You have actually always been here, but you kept looking elsewhere. Your beingness is what senses, what looks, what feels. We are a beingness, not a thought following another thought. We are something much more fundamental, more substantial than that. We are a beingness, an existence, a presence that impregnates the present and fills our body. We go so far away from ourselves, but what we are looking for is so near. We constantly put our attention on whether the situation is what we want or don't want. Is it good or bad? But the significance of any experience is our mere presence, nothing else. The content of any experience is simply an external manifestation of that central presence. So what is the point of waiting? What exactly are you waiting for? Is somebody going to give you what you always wanted? Will a train come from Heaven bringing you goodies? But nothing that could ever happen could be as good, as precious, as who you are. What stops you from being, from being present, is nothing but your hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps you looking for some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you'll never get there. The mirage stops you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a great distortion, a great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow the mirage you are rejecting yourself. Of course, when you let yourself be, as you let yourself sink into reality, you might experience unpleasant things; but these are simply the barriers that stop you from being. In time, with presence, they will dissolve. You might experience discomfort, fear, hurt, various negative feelings. Theseare the things that you're trying to avoid by not being here. But they are just accumulations of what has been swept under the rug of unconsciousness; they are not you. They are what you confront on the way to beingness. When we acknowledge and understand these feelings while being present, they dissolve, because the idea of ourselves that they are based on is not real. When the illusions dissolve, what is real, your nature, will surface and remain. You go through a process of purification, not because Being itself is sullied, but because you have so many accumulated assumptions and beliefs about reality. If you continue to hope, and tell yourself stories, you will remain asleep, because reality is still the way it is whether you like it or not. The mirage hasn't worked for you yet and it will not work with more persistence. Would you want it any other way? Would you want your happiness to depend on something other than your nature? Our work is not to get somewhere or to accomplish something, but to allow our Being to emerge. Just inhabit your body. We're not talking about something you do once in a while, when you meditate, and the rest of the time you do the important things in your life. That's how we think: "I'll meditate now, and then get on with my day, get on with my important agenda." What's important? You're important. You don't need to do anything important to be important. You don't have to achieve enlightenment or accomplish any noble action to give importance to your life. You are. That is the most important thing there is. You're very special, always. You are not important because someone thinks you're special, nor because of any unusual capacities or accomplishments. You are important because of your nature; you cannot help being important and precious. Nothing can prove it or disprove it. You are important because without your actual presence, there is no significance in life, no value in life. When you are conscious of your existence the experience is unmitigated pleasure. This pleasure is there regardless of what you're doing - scrubbing floors, going to the bathroom, creating something wonderful. Every moment is precious, and lived to the fullest. You are not the feelings or the thoughts or the content of your awareness. None of these are who you are. You are the fullness of your Being, the substance of your presence.
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