Did you ever stop to realize that your life is never not now? It cannot ever be in the past or the future.

Yet so much of the time, we are oriented toward the past or the future because we are completely identified with our thoughts, which tend to revolve around a mentally-constructed “story of me.”

When we inhabit the “story of me,” we experience only a very limited sense of ourselves, and the story we tell ourselves causes us a great deal of distress.

Now, a shift in consciousness is occurring on the planet. This shift isn’t about improving our ability to think. Rather, it introduces us to a dimension in ourselves that’s deeper than thought and deeper than the flux of emotions.

There is an unspoken belief that who or what we are is not yet enough. “I need more to be fully and completely myself” is a core belief of the mind.  So we are always trying to get to the next thing, which we imagine will fulfill us. Because we are waiting for the next moment, when surely things get resolved, we live with a lot of strain.

In the new consciousness, there’s no deep-seated need for the next moment, no need to add something to ourselves to make us complete. Instead, we find ourselves in a state of relaxed, alert presence, perceiving whatever we are perceiving without telling ourselves we have a need for more.

The shift in consciousness is an enormous transformation in a human being. You are no longer dominated by a continuous stream of thinking, but experience consciousness without thought. You go from being based in thought to being based in awareness.

Of course, thought will jump in and make even this freedom from thought something to be achieved!

To be conscious is simply to notice. If you become aware of the space between words, for instance, awareness of this space does something amazing in you. Whereas awareness of the words just creates more thoughts, every moment you notice the space you are becoming aware of the space inside you. It’s a moment of pure consciousness, pure awareness.

No matter what you achieve in life, you are poor and deprived if you haven’t found the space within yourself. There is tremendous freedom in the vast spaciousness within you, enabling you to go beyond a purely personal sense of self.

The mind compares, evaluates, and looks for the next moment to be better. But when you perceive everything that happens through stillness, instead of through the conditioned mind, you don’t label things. Instead, you enjoy all the simple things of life without mental commentary. Of course, the mind will then come in and say, “Oh, it’s happening without mental commentary!”

Consciousness is so close to you that you can never get there if you create a distance by believing something will enable you to get there. That’s the danger built into every technique. You put the technique between the space and yourself, creating a little bit of future.