Today (as of publication, June 20, 2024) is the longest day of sunlight in the northern hemisphere. Soon the warm to hot days of summer will appear in July, August, and perhaps even September. Will we remember the ice-cold days of winter and the great blizzards that have blanketed us indoors for days at a time? Or, will we just perspire and mutter about the heat?
Oh how fickle we can be! Part of us delights in change and part of us yearns for stability. Generally, however, our active minds feed on change while our bodies tend to prefer not moving.
The funny thing is this: the stability of the eternal watchful presence of NOW is not boring partly because NOW witnesses CHANGE! In fact, if we can learn to be ever-mindful, the adventure becomes far more interesting.
For starters, ever-new change aspect of life automatically means half of it is welcome and the other half is unwelcome. Since this is a mere fact, it is only through the ever-stable, ever-watchful soul-Self that this great drama can appear to be what it really is: nothing but a drama, a play! Otherwise, the constant change can eat us alive, wear us out, take us to a high and then drop us to the floor in pain. Change eventually becomes pain because even pleasure contains an element of pain (pain at the fact it must end, e.g.) and even pain contains an element of pleasure (in anticipation of its end or the great story we will have to share later).
Paramhansa Yogananda and the rishis of India assure us that when we achieve endlessness in enlightenment this, too, will have an element of unending bliss. Yogananda appended the phrase “ever-new” to the traditional description of God consciousness as “bliss.” In this way he assures us that “heaven” itself will NOT be boring. (Heaven in this case doesn’t mean a place at which to praise God or strum harps. It is the consciousness of God as pure bliss.)
In the meantime, let us hone our powers of observation and mindfulness that we are one step away from the unceasing drama of change, with one foot in the Eternal NOW of the “witness box.”