Those things in your life which you remember in such a way that the memory itself is almost as strong as the event itself; those are the moments of life that you really have. Those are the moments in which you were present, moments of authentic "presence", of genuine three-centred connection, of real self-remembering. In the majority of us, these experiences are both infrequent as well as accidental, that is, they are based on exterior shocks. Hey, we do our best, we convert what we can during our pass through the lifetime.

Let's say you receive a phone call from a friend who asks you to come over and help with a task, any task. You're at home on a Sunday. It's the middle of winter. Outside there is snow on the ground and it is as cold as all getout. You're sitting curled up in front of the fireplace reading the latest in a series of great spiritual-ecological-planetsaving books. It happens that your friend's car is broken down right outside his house in the snow and he needs you to come and help him fix it. So you're a good guy; you get dressed all warm and go over to help out. You spend hours dismounting some assembly, fixing it and then remounting it. Your hands feel frostbitten. You arrive back home in the dark, starved and exhausted, in need of some serious thawing out. And the following day you find out that your friend didn't even use the car. In fact, his wife used it that very morning and the car broke down again about two city blocks from the house.

Nevertheless, if you did your work with presence and attention, each moment will be good for something, because it is now permanent. While you were working you were "permanentising", making real what was potential, solidifying. You were doing your work, converting, in that space. The physical results, whatever they might be, are not as important as the doing. And the only thing that you are doing, just so you do not forget, is invoking your presence and exercising your attention. Fixing the car is not what you are doing. It is simply the task which gives you the structure, the framework, on which to place your attention and presence. So if you do your work with presence and attention, each moment will be good for something because it will all be permanent.

Those things which we have already converted are permanently converted. So mainly, our task is to convert what does not exist into useful substance which does exist. You might ask what this substance is good for. We can say that it serves as a form of food somewhere else beyond the human sector of the labyrinth. Sometimes it is known as "majestic fodder". Or, then again, there are those who say, "Our fodder, which art in heaven... "

Eternity is that enormous desert which some day we are going to have to cross. Surely we do not wish to end up dehydrated, suffering from malnutrition and exposure when we make the crossing; so it would be best to carry some provisions with us for the journey. We have the opportunity to gather these provisions here and now in the lifetime. But in order for this to happen, we have to "do" something. They don't just happen by themselves.

When we use the word "doing" in relation to work, the only possible way in which we could be using this word and that it might have any meaning, is in describing some activity that presupposes presence and attention, because any other form of "doing" just doesn't exist. Everything else is simply "happening". If you thought about something twenty-four hours a day for several weeks, and then "decided or "chose" to follow a certain line of action in your life, this would not be "doing".

And the reason why this continues to be a vague and understood term, is that humans tend to interpret "doing" in relation to an organic identity and their environment. In reality, these are activities of the human biological machine.

If you did it without the waking state, that is, without presence and attention, then it does not exist in the Real World and will not survive; it has not been realised at all, and is, therefore, wasted. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that those things done in the sleeping state have no value; it is just that they have not been concretised, and thus they have no immediate value.

Anyway, you don't give up. You keep moving forward, because you don't wish to get hung up, to obsess by dramatising your failure "to do" in the waking state. If you do, you will s the work which is taking place at the present moment, for example, right now, as you are reading this. That is, you will be appropriate in the sense of two-days-ago appropriate. This happens more often than you think. Remember that ancient Sufi dictum: "Don't cry over spilt milk".

So, as an eternal voyager, as a fragment of the Absolute, what we call the essential self, there are only two things to do. Attention and presence. All the rest is shadows and more shadows. You can invoke your presence into the present and you can exercise your attention. Doing these things, one way or another, sooner or later, you will enter the waking state. Anything you do with presence and attention is an essence task. You do it for your essence, not out of the goodness of your heart, nor from a sense of morality, not to make someone else feel good, nor to improve yourself in any way.

You cannot do something FOR your essence which is not done BY your essence. Only your essence can do something for your essence, and you, in essence, can only do two things. The thing is: until you really know this, until you accept it, until you totally realise that these are the only two tasks that the essential self needs to be able to carry out, you won't do them. At least not in a consistent and reliable way.

Literally, you aren't given your life, your life isn't yours, and anyway you don't really have it now anyway. The only life you have is that spent in the waking state. Those immortalised moments or hours survive the death of the human biological machine. Nothing else will.

The practical aim of all of this can be arrived at by the formulation of two small questions:

 
If you don't do it, who will?

If not now, when?