Live Now… Love Now…

3 minute read

I had an article like this in mind for some time, but this may be both an ending to the expression of my inner life and a new beginning for what I live within.

Live now, or live the moment... but I do not mean living a life of entertainment simply to feel alive, to feel that something is still moving inside your brain. Those who need adrenaline live only at full speed, as do those who deceive themselves that this means living fully, that their reckless acts are a celebration of existence, while moment by moment they lose the encounter with the inner master.

People persuade themselves that acting and doing things must be for their own good, and that this brings them closer to some achievement imagined by thought. Instead, they become lost in the thicket of their thoughts and run for entire lifetimes only to reach, at best, the place from which they began. This is the illusion: the world in which we live is a real dream, and to lift the veil that covers the eyes of the soul, thought must suffer a short circuit.

To live now means to be conscious of every moment of your life, both inwardly and outwardly, because you do not need to abandon one in order to find the other. It means becoming conscious of the silence and the abyss within, beyond thought, of the sounds and vibrations of the inner world, but also of the rustle of existence outside, from the sound of the wind to the song of crickets. The city has separated us from nature, from silence and from the connection we have with nature through the soul. This is why the world has gone mad. Alongside the urban environment, stress and the challenges of tomorrow consume our thinking and our inner life, taking us even farther from the soul.

Today, people increasingly try to cover the emptiness in the soul and attain enlightenment under conditions hostile to a genuine inner search... This is why hermits and saints withdrew into nature, lived in caves and wilderness, in places untouched by human feet. Once they had attained enlightenment, they all said that place does not matter, that what is inside matters, and that we must build our dwelling within. Yet nature is very important to the soul. It helps the soul find itself and see the essence of all existence reflected most clearly in nature.

Love now... means not measuring the experience of love against the past or the future. You love... then declare it now and rejoice in living it in the present; do not live through empty dreams and plans. You want to attain enlightenment... then do not wait to take the first step until some future day, after improving your professional or material life. The soul longs to be freed from the slavery of thought, but thought will always deceive it with time. If you feel the hunger and the need to live love, to search within and to find the meaning of life, begin at once to practise what makes the soul happy: prayer and love. Perhaps you will not yet be conscious of its taste and experience, but how could you feel it if you do not at least begin to eat and calm your inner hunger? You can live on illusions and intellectual talk, but at most they will ease your pain... they will not heal it.

If you have encountered love, do not run into the future in order to live it, but do not measure it against the past either... Who knows whether tomorrow it will still be physically present in your life? Rejoice in its presence now. Live it fully and consciously.

First published in Romanian on 10 June 2012. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Trăiește acum… iubește acum….