To each moment, in the spiritual path to Awakening, is the space of either forgetfulness or wakefulness. You are either absent or present to what is in the Now. Both cannot occur concurrently.
“What is in the Now” is not what you are experiencing, but rather how the mind is experiencing it. When you are in the experience, it is when you are in the space of Absence – you got identified, entangled in it. It does not matter whether you are identified with your thoughts and feelings or with what is out there. You’ve lost yourself at that moment, so to speak and taken in to what the mind has conjured.
Whereas when you take notice that what is in the Now is simply how the mind is relating to each experience, that the mind has a nature of its own, doing its time, you are now Present to that.
Only when you are awake can you see the reality of your mind, the great conjuror that makes all your experiences seemingly real. Absence to the mind only makes what is unreal real. Thus when you are stressed by an event or situation outside your control, you think it is that thing that is causing you the stress. The matter of fact is that the world cannot give you stress except your mind’s relationship to it. Thus what is thought or felt real is merely conjured by the mind, by its relationship to it. When you don’t have the wisdom to see this reality, you may try to change your relationship but that does not work as your mind’s nature of relationship to each issue is something pretty ancient to your space. It is being built up and conditioned by the past of Absence – where holding on or resistance is the way it responded accumulatively.
Thus, when you are able to notice the pattern clearly as not yours, but simply ancient, that is when the Great Masters like Jesus, QuanYin, Archangels or any Bodhisattas become important to your space. You can request from them assistance to clear those patterns. Not that their presence to your life is necessary but they are simply helpful in providing you the guidance in assisting you to accelerate and transcend all the old patterns once and for all. You are in actuality able to transcend all those patterns with wisdom for them to be uprooted entirely. But it is also potentially possible not to wait for those moments but to trust what you realize is sufficient for it to be transcended. Your only job is to no longer see those nature as necessary and also not truly “you” but merely old conditioning playing itself up again and surrendering or rather giving them up to the Masters whose function is to support you in that. For that is what they are offering you irrelevant whether you are a believer in them or not. Your only job is to trust their presence and what they can do for you – surrendering these patterns to them what is no longer necessary in your mind. Explore for yourself – do not take what is written here at face value. Your experience will bring you to your realization of their potential in your spiritual journey. You can only realized it by yourself, alone – hence whatever doubt, be it of your own or others can only be resolved through direct experience.
In accelerating your journey of awakening, your only job in this lifetime is to be aware, to take notice of the nature of the mind, without any meaning of self in it, transient, and merely doing time, until you wake up to it. Then Mara, or the illusionist of the mind, will not bring you back to experience it again and again, lifetime after lifetime. :)