Learn to live in the Present

The death of noted Supreme Court Lawyer and Immediate Past President of Law Asia, Mr. G L Sanghi made me revisit many of the Vedic laws. During the mourning ritual days with the family and friends, I noticed many talking about their experiences with Late Mr. Sanghi. Many of them were repenting that why they did not spent more time with Mr. Sanghi when they last interacted with him. 

Death is inevitable and so is its certainty. It is unavoidable and uncertain. When it will come, no one knows. Sudden death (death occurring within one hour of the onset of symptoms in an otherwise normal individual) is quite common.  In 40-70 years age group, sudden deaths are known due to cardiac arrest, prominent examples are Vinod Mehra, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar and Devang Mehta.

One of the Vedic laws says that one should learn to live and enjoy every moment of his or her life as one is not aware what is going to happen in the next moment. One should enjoy life as if you may not get the same time again. There is a description in Mahabharata where all the brothers start celebrating when to one of the queries Yudhishtira replied that this work would be done after a few days. The enjoyment was because Yudhishtira never spoke a lie and his answer was certain that all the brothers along with Yudhistira are going to live at least for few more days till that work is done. 

Living in the present is also called conscious living. Practically it means concentrating all your five senses: taste, smell, see, touch and hear in the present on the object of concentration. People who live in the present cannot worry about the past or fear about the future. 

During the phase of conscious living, when one is living in the present, one loses track of time. One often experiences these in life. Imagine how time passes when you are deeply engrossed in a four star rated movie (very good films) or are meeting a childhood friend after a long time. 

Living in the present means being aware of what is happening, what you are doing, feeling and thinking. It is being conscious of your thoughts and focusing them on the present. In this way one looks at situations as they are, without interpreting them with our past experiences. One sees things as they are, without being influenced by fears, anger, desires or attachments.

Meditation is nothing but a technique where one is taught how to live in the present. During meditation one is concentrating on the present, the object of concentration, with preference given to this object over the thoughts of the past or the future. In normal circumstances, a person cannot concentrate for more than 3 seconds as a new thought arises after every three seconds. A person who can concentrate on the object of concentration without interruption for at least 20 seconds is said to have learnt the initial process of meditation.

Trained yogis can concentrate without interruption from 2 minutes to few hours depending upon their level of expertise. Deepak Chopra in his book Synchrodestiny writes that when we learn to live in the present we create harmony between our inner rhythm and the rhythms of the nature, a phrase described in Vedic text as “ritam bhara pragya”. During this state of mind, one is in close contact with the nature and picks up the signals of the nature, which are often released by the nature to solve our obstacles or problems. According to Vedic texts, for all our obstacles, nature releases signals on a regular basis and we like fools ignore them as we are at that particular moment living either in the past or in the future.  If we spend every minute of our life, greet every individual we meet and think that to whomsoever we are meeting it may be the last meeting we will never regret in future.

This also explains the phrase we learnt in our childhood: “kal kare so aaj kar, aaj kare so abs; pal mein parlay hoyegi, bahuri karega kab.”

Living in the present is sometimes referred to as mindfulness. It also is propagated as a Buddhist concept, and is now incorporated into most stress management programs. If we live our lives mindfully, we will get more out of life.

While living in the present one should distinguish between “importance and urgency”. We often let life slip away by confusing these two concepts. Important tasks are those, which we place value on. On the other hand urgent tasks are those, which someone tells us to do right away. While we are busy with a task with an urgent deadline, we may be missing a much more important task.