Making your own observations will show you that when you arrive at a new situation, a new moment, the optimum strategy for dealing with that situation is to quiet down and hear the totality of it.
This is so you can hear all of the variables within it, and how they’re all working together. It’s listening in just a quiet, intuitive way, and out of this will come an optimum action. The more you are present in the moment, the more you are present in that moment of choice, and the more you can expect an optimum response. ‘Optimum’ in the sense that it is from the deepest harmony on the most planes of reality.
The best practice for being in the moment, at that moment, is to practice being in the moment in this moment. Otherwise the planning you’re doing for that situation is missing the existential components that will exist in that situation, but don’t exist now, you are planning in the absence of all the data – you cannot plan around this.
For example I can plan that I’m going to give a lecture on Thursday night, but I don’t know whether or not what I had for dinner that night is going to affect my consciousness in a way that’s gonna make that lecture other than the one I’ve planned for as of right now. So, what I’m gonna do Thursday evening when I’m sitting with that audience is very much a function of what has gone on that day, and what I’ve eaten, and what happens in the hall, and who comes to the lecture, and all that, and how it all works together. The minute I make that plan now for then, what will happen is when I get there, if I’m so wedded to the plan I had then, I do violence to the existing moment in order to impose my plan at that time.
We’re all used to doing that all the time. We’re all used to having plans and then our inertia of mind, our inability to let go of our plan into the new moment, leaves us strangely out of sync with everything, because we aren’t allowing it to happen.
Like, you meet somebody, and you have a model of a romance, and then you meet them again, and the situation offers something entirely different than what you thought it was gonna be, but you can’t let go of your model. After you begin to observe that phenomena occurring again and again, that you have to make plans, just begin to try and hold very lightly to them, and always realize that the fullness of being in this moment, which includes the future and the plan, the fullness of this moment is the best preparation for when that time is ‘here now.’ Ok? So being ‘here, now’ is the best preparation for being ‘there, then.’
-Ram Dass
Whoever reads this, I love you