Let’s make ourselves quiet. And if you do not already have a technique to quiet yourself with, then maybe you can by taking a few deep breaths and then slowly releasing them (up to thirty times, but you can stop when you feel relaxed). Then let a moment that you want to look at into your mind. Do not look for it, do not think about it—let it in by being relaxed and not getting anxious if it doesn’t come to you.
Once we have a particular moment, it is important to slow the moment down into fractions of the moment. Think of the moment as a movie reel made up of many frames. With life’s moments, there are very many such frames in each moment. In fact, as we get to regularly dissecting moments, we’ll see that the frames could be slowed even further, and further frames will emerge from any particular frame, which can again be dissected further into more frames. Get the picture?
It is probably unfamiliar territory, but any particular moment could quite possibly consist of hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of frames. We are complex beings. Our makeup is thought, emotion, desires, perceptions and so forth. In each moment, these dynamics meld together to bring our experiences.
So to reiterate, slow down the moment so it can be dissected. Our way of reliving a moment is to quiet ourselves and not to think about the moment, but to feel the moment. We could relive a moment in a few seconds, even while doing something else; it’s only necessary to become quiet and to feel it. The quieter we are, the more the moment will reveal to us. But the emphasis is on feeling the moment, then putting the moment into words, thus describing in words what we feel in the moment.
We could also walk for days to relive and capture the importance of a moment. We could even walk for months, and even longer, to relive a moment. When the moment is important to us, it shouldn’t matter how long it takes us to get to the bottom of such an important moment. It’s important, though, to get there.
That importance might be something so big for us, the truth of the moment holds us back from seeing it. All we can do is acknowledge this fact, and not fight or deny it. And it’s best that we don’t make just anything fit because we are keen to get there. When we lose it or don’t get it, nothing stops us from returning to dissecting the moment at a later stage: maybe even days, weeks, months or years later.
As we develop our skills for looking at moments to reveal their underlying value, we might return to a “stubborn” one later. If we miss out on it all together, thus not getting the underlying value of a particular moment or even never returning to such a moment at some later stage to determine its underlying value, some other, unrelated moment is sure to trigger what resulted in a particular or similar previous moment—a moment for which we want to ascertain its underlying value. While we are serious about uncovering ourselves from a particular moment, nothing is ever lost. At some point, possibly when we least expect it, all will be revealed for a particular moment.
Oh, and by the way, we could look at any moment, not only recent moments, but those as far back as when we were a toddler, or a baby, or even all the way back to after conception, while still in our mother’s womb.
When observing the moment, you’ll find noise—other things that keep popping into your mind. Look carefully; most of them are distractions. What you’ll also notice: We tend to instinctively engage with what comes up in the moment. Our minds get involved in what’s there in the moment, we engage the findings in the moment, and this stops the flow, like a blockage in a water pipe. As a result, the flow of moments stop and we don’t get any further. Sort of like the rest of the movie stops if the movie projector is interfered with.
What is critically important and also extremely difficult is to refrain all together from getting entangled in the things that come up in the moment. All that is required is to observe, observe, observe. We need to train ourselves to disengage and observe and to feel the moment. We don’t want to stop the flow. We don’t want to cause a blockage in the water pipe. We don’t want to stop the “movie of the moment” until we’ve seen the whole movie. We stop it by engaging rather than observing the moment. Oh, and disagreeing with what is revealed in the moment results in the flow stopping immediately. It’s about observing the moment and nothing more, definitely not engaging in the revelations of the moment.
Coming back to the importance of the moment, you might be asking how you’ll know that you got to the importance of the moment. The interesting thing is, until you know you’ve captured the importance of the moment, all you’ll know for sure is that you haven’t yet captured it. Or, to put it another way, guessing or thinking about it won’t get you to it. We aren’t able to force anything to fit into being it. But when we get to the importance of the moment, we’ll know we got it. And the more we stop and look at the importance of any particular moment, the more distinctly we’ll recognize the importance of the moment. We’ll know we’ve got the importance when we feel it. It is about observing and feeling what transpired in the moment, and then knowing we got to the moment’s importance.
The harder we try to find the importance of the moment, the less the importance of the moment will come to us. It can be likened to when we grab at water in a stream: we’ll probably not get any. But when we gently place our cupped hand in the water, it will fill up instantly. That’s what is necessary.
Now, if the importance of the moment eludes us, but we’re still interested in getting it, we’ll just let it go. We’ll notice that by letting go, thus getting away from it by removing the urgency of finding the importance of the moment by relaxing or by doing something else, it’ll most probably come to us in the quiet of whatever else we are busy with at another time. Just be aware. It might just creep up on you when you least expect it.
Mainly because this dynamic requires that we are calm, relaxed and quiet inside, we should definitely not be anxious—even though we might want to get to the importance of the moment urgently, it’ll only come when we are calm, relaxed and quiet. (If you need assistance to do this, you’ll find it in the following section titled, “Creating an Inner Calm.”)
When referring to the importance of the moment, it’s not necessarily something of life-and-death importance, but of course it could be. It might even be something small, usually not insignificant, but it could be small. We could see these moments and their importance as nuggets. They usually are like gold nuggets, in that when we’re looking to relive a moment, we’ll notice that, in amongst all the other stuff (emotions, desires, anxiety, pain and frustration) there’s something of importance just waiting to be uncovered: like finding gold nuggets when mining. (And here, there is no importance placed on gold nuggets; it is merely meant in a metaphorical sense.)
In the moment, the importance of it might be the reason behind making some choice, say, opposed to what we’d rather have chosen. Or the reason why suddenly we aren’t feeling well—feeling angry, or frustrated or the like. When stopping and retracing our steps and finding the moment from when we suddenly started feeling “off,” then when reliving that moment, it’s possible to uncover exactly what resulted in throwing us off and causing us to not feel well. This can be discovered from any moment, no matter how long ago.
We can use this technique, or dynamic, to get to the bottom of a daydream: to find its importance. In fact, it’s available to us for exploring any moment for any reason.
Say that we got angry and want to see why. Say we realize we feel euphoric and we want to see why. Say we feel anxious and we want to see why. This is definitely a great mechanism to also uncover the underlying source of our daydreams.
