To compare living beings reveals no truths. In fact, such activity only serves to obscure the living reality within them. This is because to compare living beings you must first reduce them to objects that can be compared. When you reduce others and yourself in such a manner, you perpetuate many forms of identity confusion. This is when you start to feel bad about yourself or superior to others. While in truth the living reality within us all is simply incomparable. You are neither above nor below anyone or anything. Comparison is a skill for specific purposes—like comparing cars when deciding what you need. But to compare lives? It misses the artful spirit of life entirely.
How would you relate activities such as visualization with being in the present?
Presence, or being present, is our default mode. This is for the simple fact that the present moment is all that exists. All of yourself, your wholeness, is only ever to be found in the only place that existence happens: Now.
In order to not be present, you are in some way lost in your imagination. That could mean getting stuck contemplating futures or reconstructing memories of the past or even just interpreting the present. Sometimes you will need to engage your mind to analyze things. The key is that you do so from the present moment and when those activities have served their purpose, you let them go. You do not get hung up in the mind.
Visualization practices are like this too. When you utilize visualizations, it is for a purpose. Eventually that activity comes to an end and you return to your default mode, Presence.
It is important to note that when we talk about “the present moment,” it is for lack of a better term. Because the present moment of which we are speaking is not the same as the concepts of Past, Present, and Future. When you think of the present that way, it is just a small slice of time with the past and future stretching out endlessly in each direction.
Rather, the present moment is something that exists outside of time. It is always now and never was anything else. Past and future are contained within that eternal present.
The whole concept of time is something folded into the ego, the individual sense of self. You don’t need conceptual time but the egoic sense of self derives much identity from time–your personal history (where you’re from, what schools you went to, your past traumas that you carry, etc) and your ideas of the future (career plans, romance plans, family plans, etc).
Learning to be free from time and learning to use conceptual time without being defined by it are skills acquired through meditation and mindfulness practice.
“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.”
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