The present moment
This is what best-selling author Eckhart Tolle has to say about the "present moment", starting with the more ordinary claims and building up to full-blown mysticism:
Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do.And it's not just Eckhart Tolle. "Being in the present moment" is held by most spiritual schools and teachers as one of the most important principles of spiritual development. And I just don't get it. Well, I do and I don't.
The Power of Now, page 20
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
ibid, page 35
The present moment holds the key to liberation.
ibid, page 23
As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggledissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out of present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of
quality, care, and love — even the most simple action.ibid, page 68
When you dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both directly and indirectly.
ibid, pages 133-4
First of all, what do they mean when they say "being in the present moment"? I mean, how could I live in any other moment? I lived in the past, but that was the present moment when it happened, and and will hopefully live in the future for yet a few more decades, but I'll have to wait for the future to become present for me to actually live in it. Whatever you do, you do it in the present moment. Are these spiritual teachers asking me to do what I, by virtue of existing in this universe and being subject to its physical laws, cannot help doing anyway? They might well be; that would be more sensible than hundreds of other things spiritual teachers have asked people to do. But what else could they mean by "being in the present moment"?
We are told to bring our awareness to the present moment, but when they tell us how to do that we realise that, generally speaking, what they are asking us to do is to pay attention to mental phenomena as they arise in the present moment. Once again, how could we possibly bring our attention to mental phenomena that arise in the past or the future? If we can pay attention to them, it is because they are happening, and things can only be happening now. So it seems that what they want us to do is simply pay attention to mental phenomena, to whatever arises in our consciousness. But what else could we pay attention to? Doesn't everything we focus our attention on present itself to us as a content of consciousness? I cannot focus my attention on the book lying on my desk in itself, only on my perception of it. They seem to be asking us to just pay attention, but one cannot just pay attention. We have to decide what to pay attention to. Sounds? Physical sensations? Emotions? The song stuck in your head? The feeling of wanting to scratch your thigh? Random thoughts? Mantras? Sexual fantasies? The unexpected memories of a trip you went on many years ago? The next post you're going to write on your blog? The geometry of the room? When spiritual teachers ask us to stay in the present moment, at least when they are talking about meditation, usually what they are really asking us to do is to, of all the mental phenomena we could pay attention to, stick to those which don't have any clear relation to the past or the future. If you pay attention to the itch in your nose, you're on the fast track to liberation. You can also pay attention to feelings and thoughts, but the moment they are about something that happened in the past of in the future — which is to say, the moment they are connected with things that are important in one's life, which always involve past and/or future — they cease to be an appropriate object of meditation. They distract us from the glorious, eternal, all-encompassing, non-dual present moment, in which there's only room for non-conceptual, spontaneous, impermanent, immediately felt, i.e. meaningless, events, like the transcendent itch in your nose.
After this cynical outburst I must admit that I can see the logic in restricting our attentional efforts while meditating to simple events like physical sensations, though not because they are more in the present moment — and therefore more valuable than any other contents of consciousness — but because it's easier that way. What I see much more nonsensical problematic is the extrapolation of the anti-past and future philosophy to life in general. The usual rhetoric goes something like this:
The past is already gone, gone for good, so there's no point in clinging to it. The future is not here yet, and you don't even know whether it will ever come — every moment could be you last. Past and future are illusory. There's no point in fretting about them. Only the present exists, and you should give your full attention to it. Live in the here and now, and you'll live creative and spontaneously. The present moment is perfect in itself, it doesn't need the past or the future to be completely fulfilling.
That is all very well, and I acknowledge that that way of thinking can be helpful sometimes. There are people whose concern about the future (being afraid of it, making plans, etc.) or about the past (missing it, brooding over it) can prevent them from ejoying life. They could do with some here-and-now awareness. The problem comes when living in the here and now is regarded as the single most important principle of spiritual life, the key to enlightenment, as it often is. I've had people literally gape at me in absolute disbelief when I dared to question that present moment awareness was all one needed in order to lead an authentic and fulfulling life. It is considered by many to be the most evident of self-evident truths, and I honestly don't get it.
We exist in time. Any particular moment of our precious human existence only makes sense if we see it as stemming from the past and projecting into the future. Spiritual teachers will encourage you to stay in the present moment by paying full attention to whatever you are doing: walking, eating, thinking, etc., but any of those things only make sense in time. For instance, walking down the stairs is what connects being upstairs — the past — with being downstairs — the future. If, to take another example, you are breathing consciously, you have to be aware, at least implicitly, of what moment of the inhale-pause-exhale-pause cycle you're at. If you inhale for too long, you explode; if you pause for too long, you go blue in the face. The very act of meditation has a beginning and an end in time, which you or somebody else must keep track of, and it is something you do because you've decided it and learnt how to do it — past — and because you expect to obtain some sort of benefit from it — future — although some would say that you don't, that you do it just because, but even they know that that's not true.
Going to a retreat with a beginning and an end date and scheduled meditation sessions; reading a book on enlightenment that lasts for however many pages, in the accurately timed slot between underground stations A and B, on weekdays only; commiting to a lifelong (or even many-lives-long, according to some) spiritual path. It seems paradoxical, to say the least, that one might do all these necessarily time-bound things in order to learn how to forget about past and future and focus solely on the present moment. Fortunately, our brains, evolved over millions of years to enable us to deal with the real world, will keep bringing us back to our goal and future-oriented mundane concerns, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that the future is some kind of distracting illusion.
And you know what? Despite all I've said so far, I actually think that being as fully as you can in the here and now, unconcerned with past or future, even completely losing all sense of time, can be a liberating, inspiring, mystical, comforting, or simply enjoyable thing to experience from time to time, even daily if you're really into it. But turning that into an absolute, into the highest spiritual good, the key to liberation? I'm sorry, I must be very thick, but I don't get it.
