25. You Need Life to Live
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One word, is all that it takes to make us angry or elated.
In our daily interactions, just one word is enough to take our mind wandering on its own journey. We will be physically present in an air conditioned room with our colleagues but mentally we might be sitting in the hot sun and re-live an humiliating experience from the childhood.
Or we might be sitting there thinking, 'I will wait for the day I become the boss. I will show them. I will do this.... I will behave like this.....'
Be clear! In both cases, when we travel back in the past or jump into the future, we are not living! We are not alive when we don't live in the moment!
There is a simple truth that enlightened Masters have been teaching for centuries. It is so simple that people cannot accept it. Unless we live in the moment, relax in the moment, enjoy or feel everything that happens to us deeply at any moment, and then move on to the next moment with freshness, we are actually not alive. We are living in a dream.
We often think of our golden days as being in the past or in the future. If we live in the past or future, or enjoy the memories from the past and dream of the the future, we are actually not enjoying life. We are enjoying a hangover. In Sanskrit, a word describes our emotion filled attachments, samskara. We are living with a ghost, when we live in the past.
If we are living with a ghost, living in the past, if we think past is eternal, if we remain in the past celebrating all that we have achieved in the past, we lose the power of our life. If we dream of a golden future, planning far into future, then we lose the tataka.
Tataka is a word Buddha often used to indicate that we should remain in the present to enjoy life. Life will fleet past us if we live in the past or future. We will be living with a ghost or a dream. If we live in the present, live in now, live in the moment, we are alive.
When we live in the present and in the moment, we experience things differently. We experience a depth that will keep us continually happy and in bliss. When we live in tataka, we become sensitive. When we live in tataka, we get life.
Experienced life by living it.