Ram Dass reminded a generation of hippies to Be Here NOW.   Thirty years later, Eckhart Tolle is RE-reminding the same seekers, older and no wiser..of the Power of NOW. Thousands of years before either of them, sages and enlightened masters, East & West, understood through experience the inherent power in the present moment – where the pure potentiality of creative intelligence does its magic!
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali elegantly mapped the mind-games people play..clinging to the past/hoping for the future and thereby suffering and missing the BLISS!
The concept is so simple but implementing it is so difficult that volumes over centuries have to be written to constantly reinforce this truth. But add music to the words and somehow the message sticks! After all .. how many of us can sing along to the entire RENT score?  Recently released on DVD, RENT presents itself to a whole new audience who will hear and be moved by the powerful theme of love and life and NOW.

The heart may freeze or it can burn
The pain will ease if I can learn
There is no future
There is no past
I live this moment as my last
There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
No day but today

got it? “sing” it! — if not NOW, then when?!

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist, Poet & Philosopher, 1817-1862)

cosmic grace  mandala art dkp © 2005
In thy dance, Divine Dancer, freedom finds its image and dreams their forms.
Its cadence weaves the threads of things and unwinds them for ages;
Charms the atom’s rebellion into beauty, gives rhythm to the symphony of the stars;
thrills life with pain,
And churns up existence into surging joys and sorrows.
~Rabindranath Tagore

get up life’s too quick I know someplace sick where this chick’ll dance in the flames
~Out Tonight from RENT

And out beyond the edge of space and time where waves of consciousness roll
our spirits dance toward cosmic grace to timeless rhythms
~ MORE – poem/song lyrics by john v. rouleau

Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another™.For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. -  The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism – By Fritjof Capra Fritjof Capra (1939 – )

 The entire Universe is engaged in movement and endless activity – an uninterrupted cosmic dance of energy. In Yoga  the image that represents this dance is Nataraja, or Shiva in his Ananda Tandava pose – the Cosmic Dance of bliss.  With arms waving and hair flying and encirlced by flames, he holds a small drum in his upper right hand that keeps the rhythms of sound, the vehicle of the word transmitting revelation tradition and enchantment.   The top left hand, in ardhachandra mudra (half moon), carries a Flame, the element of destruction. The second right hand gestures peace and protection, while the last left hand, points toward the left foot symbolising liberation from the enchanting veil of Maya.