Sitting still in the sun, listening to the rustling of leaves in the tree, the songs of many birds near and far, distant voices, wind chimes…the more I listen the more sounds I notice.
I notice my breathing, the moving of my body as I inhale and exhale, still the birds twitter. I feel the environment, I notice all. I am calm and peaceful.
These things are there always, the background that surrounds every moment. We can instantly connect to it and become still and at peace within it.
The thing is we rarely notice them as we drown them out with our repetitive thoughts. We are unaware of background. We are unconscious.
Being aware of the background means being conscious and free of thought. It means being life in this moment.
Stillness contained in the background of awareness.
Problems are only a problem if you choose to label it as that. Problems are a mind-construct based on projection to a future moment where the mind chooses to imagine a situation that can be labelled as problematic, which then induces psychological fear within us and the resulting emotional state in the physical body.
The mind, its ego and the story of ‘little me’, or more accurately ‘poor little me’, thrives on the drama of problems and if we do not have any, there are always others who have plenty that we can latch onto too.
Instead we can realise that right now, this moment, there are no problems, there are only real life situations, and I’m not a betting person, however, if I was to bet, I’d put a sizeable bet down that says you have no problems right now in this very moment you are reading this.
We may from time to time, and again fairly rare, have a situation that occurs in the present moment, and we can either deal with it right now, or we can’t and therefore, we can choose to let it go. If we are conscious in this moment, then things that happen now can cause no suffering as we have not had any time to imagine the suffering that the situation may cause, we just accept something has occurred and we deal with it.
As soon as the mind projects forward into the unreal realm that is the future, then the mind can, of course, find endless problems to suffer fear, worry and be anxious about. But why would we choose to do that?
Instead, if we remain conscious, then we have no problems anymore, and whatever occurs now, we can simply deal with.
Therefore, the problem with problems is that we have to choose to have them.
Philip Dodson 