“What exists is the present, you have to be in the present not in the future.”
Excerpt from a talk by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
Original video, text and translations: www.amruta.org/1982/05/14/advice-on-right-side-brighton-1982/
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This futuristic behavior starts in a society where people always think of the future. “What will I do, what am I to do tomorrow, what am I to achieve tomorrow?” And all these things, when they start doing their attention goes to the right extreme.
Now, in this place we are very dangerously placed, very dangerously placed, when we start looking for the future and the future seeing is a imaginary stuff, is absolutely imaginary, because what you think of the future doesn’t exist. What exists is the present, you have to be in the present not in the future.
But people will say you have to be in the present, but how? We cannot. Either we are in the past or in the future. Because when the thought wave rises, it comes up and goes down. Another thought wave rises, goes up and comes down. Now, this thought wave which comes up we go with it but we don’t see it’s going down. Another thought wave that rises we see that but don’t see where it goes out. And so we are jumping on the cusp of these thoughts and we do not know perhaps we are with the past or perhaps with the future. But in the center of these two thoughts there is the present and we don’t know how to take our attention there, which is a very difficult thing and just to say that you should be in the center is not possible. All these things, “You should do this, you should do that,” is not going to work out unless and until there is light. For example, there is no light in this room and you say, “Walk straight,” you cannot walk because you can’t see where is the passage, how to walk. Even if you order, do whatever you please, you cannot just walk straight without touching any of these chairs because there is no light, you can’t see.
So one has to understand that in the futuristic life when we live and we plan too much for the future actually what we are doing, we are living in an imaginary world. We have many stories of people who lived in imaginary worlds and how they found that everything was destroyed. And there are people who work it out through their physical efforts and when they go into their physical efforts they create another problem for them because they just become physically oriented people. And if you are just physically oriented, the Spirit gets angry with you.
So the right side movement is for the people who are very , you see, which you can call the people who are very particular about the time and who are very firm about things, who are very dry people and who are very straight and they won’t tolerate any nonsense. One sort of people, you see, that you find normally and that sort of people become a headache and they are very boring, you see. You can’t just bear their company, they can be very boring people. And they give you big lectures about how to be straightforward and how to walk straight absolutely. In the nature nothing is straight, it all moves so beautifully because the nature is created out of varieties, and variety brings the beauty. They don’t think of beauty, they don’t think of love, of compassion, nothing. For them it is a very meticulous world and that’s how they live. Such people are developing a big ego within themselves, as you see there, is a yellow stuff in the head called as ego.
By the action of the left side, emotional side, we develop a superego, but by the action of the right side we develop a ego. Now this ego is not easy to be seen. Because if you have a superego you have pains in the body, you are a miserable person, you have wrinkles on the face and you look absolutely worn out. But if you have ego then you look so dynamic. We can say that Hitler was the extreme of this ego business. And he got into his head that he is some sort of a god incarnation and that he has to save the people and he was the one who knows about races and everything and he is supposed to save some race. This kind of idea comes from these people who are right sided, they are very aggressive, they may be very good to talk to, they may be very humble to look at, could be very good business men, could be anything but they do not know that they have this Mister Ego coming up on their heads just like a big balloon and they are floating in the air. The end of ego is stupidity.
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But for people who do not know the tricks of the superego they can be very, very, very dangerous because they are very subtle, you cannot see them, they mesmerize, and they can possess you and they can be very sly and they can work out all sorts of methods which you are not aware. So it is not easy to choose which is better, which is not better. Both things are wrong to go to extremes, on the right or to the left.