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Contacting the present moment means being psychologically present: consciously connecting with and engaging in whatever is happening in this moment. Humans find it very hard to stay present. Like other humans, we know how easy it is to get caught up in our thoughts and lose touch with the world around us. We may spend a lot of time absorbed in thoughts about the past or the future. Or instead of being fully conscious of our experience, we may operate on automatic pilot, merely “going through the motions.” Contacting the present moment means flexibly bringing our awareness to either the physical world around us or the psychological world within us, or to both simultaneously.
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HPOC
But neither spirituality nor science knows the exact relationship between consciousness and matter yet.
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When someone is using his finger to point to the moon, a one year old kid would look at his finger. It cannot understand that it is supposed to look at the direction that the finger is pointing to. But as an adult you can understand what you are supposed to do. When a spiritual teacher is instructing you, you need to treat his words as finger pointing to the moon too. The reason this is mentioned is because people often get too attached to the words and concepts.
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Witnessing So, let me give you something to practice. Sit in your chair and pay attention to your thought process. Don’t try to think anything with your own effort but don’t try to stop your thoughts either. Let thoughts arise and you just sit back and witness them. An attitude of detachment is necessary to do it properly. Don’t judge any thought as good or bad. Assume that you are peeking into someone else’s mind. Just observe each thought and be curious about the next thought or the bundle of thoughts that will arise. Even if you find yourself judging your own thoughts, recognize that as just another thought. You may forget this witnessing and get lost in the thought stream again and again. But don’t feel guilty about it or feel that you failed. Because this is bound to happen again and again. But the key lies in recognizing that you missed the attention. As soon as you realize that you have forgotten to pay attention to the thought process, you will be back on track again. Along with your thoughts you can also pay attention to your body, if you have to move it for any reason. Let us call this practice ‘Witnessing’. This method of Witnessing was recommended by Osho (Rajneesh) to his disciples.
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ILLUSORY TRUTH EFFECT V GAPISM
Here is what Buddha says in Kalama sutta: “Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ “ "Kalama Sutta: The Buddha's Charter of Free Inquiry", translated from the Pali by Soma Thera. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wheel008.html First he says, ‘Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing’. When you hear something over and over again, you start to believe in it. Psychologists call this as 'The illusory truth effect'. It can be defined as the tendency of our mind to believe in anything after we are exposed to it repeatedly. A study done in 1977 in Temple University near Philadelphia, confirmed this as a fact . This study was published in Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behaviour with the title ‘Frequency and the conference of referential validity’. (Hasher L, Goldstein D, Toppino T - 1977).
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