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I often find that my next step in life is revealed by living in the present moment, wholeheartedly, enthused, and unabashed. How so? Because it is in those moments that I am free from the limited perspective of my mind. Consciousness takes over control of life from the mind in those moments.

Imagine that you are an amateur chess player competing in a chess match for a multi-million dollar prize against a world champion Grand Master. Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? But let’s say you were allowed to have an adviser, such as former world champion Garry Kasparov, sitting by your side. Would you take his advice? You know for a fact that Kasparov is your only chance to win the match. But what if he recommended a move that just went against all logic, like a queen sacrifice? Would you take the advice?

Anybody with common sense would take the advice. But sometimes the mind gets the best off us and we resist. Instead of following the wisdom and experience of our adviser, we rebel and follow the dictates of our own mind.

That reminds me of some famous lines from the great Sufi poet, Hafiz:

Befitting a fortunate slave, carry out every command of the Master without any question of why and what.

About what you hear from the Master, never say it is wrong, because, my dear, the fault lies in your own incapacity to understand him.

I am the slave of the Master who has released me from ignorance; whatever my Master does, is of the highest benefit to all concerned.

It boils down to a simple question. Can we surrender our limited and finite minds to the universal mind of infinite intelligence, like a chess player taking the advice of Garry Kasparov, even when it defies logic?

That’s how it is with life. The Infinite Intelligence that created the universe, that created you and me, places us in situations that are most conducive to our advancement, urging us to say yes to life. But we resist. And our resistance is nothing but our minds rebelling from a lack of perspective and understanding.

If you have a GPS navigation system in your car, you depend on it to tell you where to turn. If you are going to a new destination, you wouldn’t ever think of turning it off. But in life, when we fail to live in the present moment, that is in effect what we are doing. We are turning off our navigation system.

Our navigation system for the game called life is consciousness. It is infinitely rich, dynamic, and it sees the whole picture. In any situation we find ourselves in, we have two choices — to follow the dictates of mind (full of fears, desires, phobias and rooted in the past) or consciousness (no fears, no desires, no phobias, and actively engaged in the present moment).

The mind follows a script. Everything is pre-programmed from our past. Consciousness, on the other hand, is creative. It sees possibilities that the mind never guessed even existed.

When we follow the dictates of the mind we are being resistant to what is. The mind labels what is according to its experiences from the past. I read a blogger recently who said, “I don’t think I like that.” That is the mind.

The mind is all about projections of what it thinks. I remember Thomas Edison would sometimes invite possible future employees to his house for dinner. If they put salt or pepper on their food before they tasted it he would eliminate them from consideration. The reason: they were not open to “what is” but approached life based on projections from the past.

The Catholic mystic from the 18th century, Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote in Abandonment to Divine Providence, “All our learning should consist of finding out what God has planned f or us at each moment.” That is, each moment has been planned out for us. It behooves us not to resist it, but to accept it as the next step on our journey to our own awakening. Otherwise we are trapped in a maze of our own workings, unable to advance in our soul’s purpose, on the journey to the realization of who we really are. I like how Emerson’s expressed this sentiment of living in the present moment in his essay, Compensation:

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in today to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday…nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, “Up and onward for evermore!” We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.