by Tham Poh Peng

Created on: July 25, 2009

A Zen monk can sit immobile on a rock but his mind is in such a heightened state of alertness you could almost feel it emanating from his body.

That alertness is the moment of your present reality. Most of us have never thought of it to be something you can always have within your reach if you only make a sustained effort to see things differently. You must be liken to that of an adventurer, taking a bold and quantum leap into the unknown, ready to be tested for your valor and perseverance in search of knowledge.

Conversely, we have actually never left our state of being in the immediate 'now.' We strive to do the best in our lives, we develop strategies and innovative ideas to improve the environment, we face head-on the countless problems we seem to be creating for ourselves, we let loose the myriad of emotions in our hearts, we conquer the mountains, and all the time we are oblivious to the fact that we are experiencing all these, ad infinitum, in the moment of 'now'. We take our immediate reality for granted!

Many times we know that we are unable to capture the liveliness of the 'here and now.' There was a popular Zen story about two monks returning to the monastery and the elder of the two monks had helped a beautiful woman cross a puddle of water by carrying her to the other side of the road. Later at the monastery, the younger monk said to the elder monk: 'Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman. How could you carry her across the road?' To this, the elder monk responded immediately: 'I've left her on the other side of the road. Why are you still carrying her?'

In the anecdote above, the elder monk hauled the younger monk back to the present moment he was in! The episode was over and the younger monk needed to focus his attention on what he had been doing and not dwell on the past that was no longer there. It would not bring any benefits to his immediate situation.

There is an urgency to recreate our reality in life so that we clamber out of the monotonous cycles of unconscious awareness of which we are always caught up in. How many times have we been nudged in the past for not listening when someone was speaking: 'Hey, are you with me?' By learning to focus our attention to stay in the moment, we gain mastery over the control of our thoughts that are always whirling non-stop in our mind.

To focus is to be alert, attentive. By placing our attention on what we are doing, the mind becomes totally absorbed with the action at that particular

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