This is a scene from the novel Romancing the Truth in which Abhilasha, an old student at the Academy of Overabundance takes CC, a new student, under her care and teaches him a few things.

In the next couple of days, Abhilasha taught CC an easy trick to become aware of the ways in which one misses opportunities for overabundance. “Maintain a record of how ‘alive’ you feel during each moment of the day. Usually most of the day passes doing routine chores in a daze, while our minds are preoccupied with something else. There are only a few moments, if at all, when one is truly alive,” she explained. “I want you to be aware of each moment. Record all your activities – eating, walking, talking, even brushing teeth, having a bath, or going to the toilet… right up to how soundly you slept and how fresh you woke up – and observe whether those actions were performed with the awareness and joy of being alive, or were merely done as a bore chore.”

“Maintain a daily diary. Divide the 24-hour day into 48 half-hour units. Then honestly give yourself marks, depending on how intensely you lived those half hours.  Give yourself zero marks for just mindlessly doing the chores without awareness; a minus half for each half-hour spent in negative thoughts or feelings, a plus half for each half-hour of alert and aware activity. A plus one, for each half-hour of activity done with joy and overabundance, when you were really involved and enjoying the ‘now.’ By the end of the day check how many hours you truly lived in that day, and how much of your life was mere unaware existence,” Abhilasha advised.

“So, I have to keep myself under the microscope of my own awareness and try to achieve the state where I can stay alive twenty-four hours a day,” CC surmised.

“Aim to live so intensely that you live even forty-eight hours in a day!” Abhilasha stressed. “When I started maintaining a record of my daily activities, I discovered that on most days I ‘lived’ minus hours in a twenty-four-hour-day – having lived with negative thoughts and worries. This routine analysis, day by day, made me aware of where I was dissipating my energy, how I was missing the opportunity of being joyful and overabundant, and how and where I could improve. And you know, within three months I began scoring a plus one for most of my activities, at times being ‘alive’ for even thirty-six hours in a day! Now everything is a miracle, every moment a quality moment. I dance under the shower, walk with a skip and a jump, and relish each mouthful of food. I do each task with interest, awareness and enthusiasm. Being in the ‘now’ is now my nature – my EABS.”

“So, no past, no future, only the lively present,” CC commented.

“If I ever delve in the past, it is to learn from it and not to feel any regret or guilt. If I think of the future, it is to plan something positive and not needlessly worry about the unknown,” Abhilasha clarified.

“You learnt this exercise by yourself, or did Vivek teach you all this?” CC wondered.

“Oh, Vivek just drops hints… we had to pursue them through our queries and learn from his responses! You know, when I asked Vivek how we could plan for a fulfilling life, he just told us to plan for living One Perfect Day.”

“That makes sense! Life is one day repeated 365 days a year. Perfection should lie in daily routine,” CC agreed. “The joy of life is not in escaping into an annual vacation, but living each day so perfectly and completely that there would be no need, no desire to escape from daily life.”

“It sounds simple, but it’s not as simple,” Abhilasha quipped. “To plan for one perfect day, day after day, one needs to be mature enough to know oneself, with knowledge about one’s dreams and desires and one’s value system and priorities in life. Planning for one perfect, balanced, fulfilling day needs hard-hitting, life-altering decisions. One needs to decide where to live, how to earn money, how much to earn, and what amount of time and effort to spend on earning money, how much time to have for oneself and one’s family, what creative or soul-satisfying activity to pursue.”

“Ideally one’s work and one’s soul-satisfying activity should be one,” CC added.

“Yes, and one needs to take such decisions before one gets trapped in the rat-race! This requires a high IQ, with clarity of thought and far-sightedness at a young age. It is counter-productive to grab a high-paying job if, by the end of the day, one has no time and energy left for what one really wants to do in life – be it spending time with children, or writing a book, or playing a game, or even enjoying spending what one has earned, or simply Being.”

“Another exercise that Vivek normally recommends is to become aware of the shade of love you give and receive in your relationships – be it with parents, spouses, children, friends, acquaintances or even strangers. Most love has shades of attachment, insecurity, pity, caring, need, expectation, duty, lust, desire, pleasure, possessiveness. Only when we are alert and become aware of the tint that is tainting our love, can we strive to be untainted, and only then can we become capable of pure unconditional loving, without any tint or shade, any motive or desire, save the loving in itself.”

“All these are practical 24×7 exercises in awareness or ‘mindfulness.’ Living in a state of perpetual awareness of one’s actions, relationships, and hierarchy of values makes one constantly aware of one’s awareness, till the awareness of awareness becomes an effortless state – one’s EABS.”

CC now realized why everyone in the Academy of Overabundance seemed so full of positivity and overabundant energy. It was not that difficult. They were simply being mindful instead of being mindless – mindful of body, of thought, of emotions, of feelings, of beauty, and of a myriad other things that make up each moment. Mindfulness had become their natural state of mind.

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