Living in the present.

It is sad to see that our approach towards life is becoming so tactical. We live from one day to another day. Forget thinking about doing good work, earning good karma for the betterment of next birth/life. We don't want to spend time thinking about this life! It's all right here, right now approach.

Life is about living in the present moment. Because there is nothing else to life other than the present. The spiritual context of living life in the present means, drop all your karma at this minute and move on. I had attended a corporate workshop conducted by the Isha Yoga Foundation (Coimbatore, India) few years back. Our spiritual teacher taught us that the only way to happiness is to live in the present moment and drop all your karma at this moment and move on.

But what do we do instead? We carry this baggage of karma with us all our life. And like the bag that Santa Claus carries with him, we keep filling the bag with life's experiences!!! The good and the bad. Happy moments and sad moments. Love, hatred, likes, dislikes, attachments, anger, and many more mixed bag of thoughts, memories and feelings. With passing age, the bag only but becomes heavy. And we carry this weight with us. Remember, had we dropped all the little and big karma on the way and moved on, life would have been so light. So carefree. So happy. Living in the present means moving on without the karma.

Coming back to where I started from, the definition of living in the present has taken a dangerous meaning today. For most, living in the present means shrugging off their responsibility towards a better future. "Why should I worry about the future? I am not going to be here when the glaciers melt. I am living in the present. Let those who come in the future worry about their present."

It is right here, right now. This attitude is creating a recklessness in all of us. We have become careless about our actions and their consequences. Because, we may not live to see the consequences of our reckless actions. The future feels somewhere far away and distant. It is not the next second which has to come after the present moment has gone in the past. The glaciers will take a long time to melt, the last tiger will take a long time to disappear from the earth, it will be long time before humanity is wiped off from the surface of this earth. That is what everyone is thinking. There is 3 kinds of visible life on the earth and we have started a war against all of them, to DESTROY THEM!

Why else are we destroying nature by cutting forests and trees?
Why else are we destroying rare species of birds and animals?
Why else are we destroying humanity by planting bombs and killing each other so mercilessly?

Because we are all living in the present. Right here, right now. We know that the future of our planet is very bleak and scary. But who cares. We will not be here to see our planet gradually die away. Whose planet is it anyways?