Being In The Moment
“I live in the moment, I live moment to moment; I am not at all predictable or dependable. From what I say today one should not and cannot infer what I am going to say tomorrow. And what you understand while listening to me today or any day is not important. But if this listening adds to your understanding, your intelligence, it has done its work. Understanding is important, all-important.”
—Osho from Krishna: The Man And His Philosophy (p. 804)
When I was studying acting, one of the cliché phrases in the field that was used almost as nauseatingly as a raw foodist in the bedroom uses the phrase, “Looks like my celery stalk is a bit limp” was the phrase, “Being in the moment.” “You’ve gotta be in the moment”…“Stay in the moment”…and from the black theater, “Are there any mo’ mints—my breath smells like I just gone down on a black woman!”
We did an exercise in Meisner class called “Repeats,” where two people would sit facing each other and one would make an observation, such as, “You’re wearing a blue shirt” and the other would repeat his or her line, such as, “I’m wearing a blue shirt” or even, “I’m not wearing a blue shirt” if the observation was off. This was designed to forget about the need to remember a line and just “be in the moment.”
It took me awhile before I got the hang of “Repeats,” the first few months consisting of my partner saying, “You’re wearing a blue shirt” and me replying with, “What kind of inane statement is that? What do you want to talk about next, the fuckin’ weather?” I argued with the teacher that I was still “being in the moment” but he wasn’t having it and so I was assigned script-alphabetizing duty while the other students did the exercise. I kept breaking my parole by shouting loudly during the sorting, “This task friggin’ sucks—is that ‘being in the moment,’ for you, Professor Shakespeare?” and so I spent half the semester alphabetizing and cursing. Since it was theater, I blew the professor and got an ‘A’.
Ram Dass wrote circa 1971 the classic book Be Here Now. Bhagavan Das wrote in 1997 It’s Here Now (Are You?), which I had him sign for me twice over the years. In 1999 Eckhart Tolle wrote The Power of NOW which Oprah used to read while her husband went down on her and then searched desperately for a mint.
What’s the point of all this talk of “Being in the Now?” other than to sell some book that makes the person who wrote it enough money to plan how he is going to spend all his newfound money—not in the NOW but in the future—and to give people something to read on the subway that will make them feel all “spiritual” while they have their eyes glued to the page and completely dissipate once they reach their stop as they immerse themselves in the past of, “I can’t believe that bitch said that to me earlier!” or the future of, “I have to return the video, buy food for dinner, give my lover a blowjob which he’s been bugging me for all week and then hopefully have enough time to watch the latest ‘Family Guy””? The book would probably provide more use if you shoved it under the leg of a wobbly table.
ALL suffering results from essentially two causes:
(1) The world is not functioning how we think it should function, and
(2) We are not living in the moment.
Think about it, just about everything can fit into these two categories. If you are angry because you see pointless wars all around the world, this only means you have a fundamental belief that the world should not be functioning like this. You don’t look at a snake eating a rat in nature and cry out like Rodney King after a beating, “Can’t we all just get along?” because you accept this as the nature of things.
And yet violence has been going on since Cain brained Abel for trying to one-up him with God and you bleeding heart hippies still keep saying, “Violence is not our natural state,” sounding as unscientific as Al Whore’s man-made global warming fairy tale, and by “fairy” I am not referring to the amount of New World Order semen that he had to swallow in order for a boring loser like him to be placed in a position of prominence.
If you are worried you are going to lose your job, that is something that may or may not happen at some later date but while you are still holding your permission slip to be an indentured servant, your worrying is not about what’s happening in the NOW but in some possible future. Whether it be constant talk about Armageddon from a misread of The Book of Revelations or some pessimist who keeps worrying about money, they’re not “being in the moment” and their immersion in an undetermined future is fucking up the “Repeat” exercise for the rest of us and worthy of script alphabetizing detail! No, I’m not wearing a blue shirt!
I took a workshop with Alberto Villoldo, PhD who studied shamanism for about 25-years with the medicine men and women in South America and who one would need to sell their first three children into slavery for a decade in order to pay for one of his trainings. Someone asked the question, “As healers, aren’t we interfering with another’s karma if we remove their suffering?” Alberto answered, “Go into the shower and turn the water up really hot and then suddenly turn the knob to the coldest setting. That’s really torturous! Then make the water really hot again and put your hand on the temperature knob and think about how it will feel when you turn the knob to freezing.
What he was sharing is that life will never be without difficulties, frustrations, even pain but it is the mental churning that goes on in our heads, perhaps when we are not “being in the moment,” that is the real source of our suffering; either that or his own personal masochistic shower behavior. And I thought I was strange for hanging myself from the shower rod like David Carradine in order to have a more powerful orgasm.
For all you armchair arguers who want to seek an exception to the rule and thereby damn my statement, let me save you the brain strain. I suppose if one were burning in a tub of hot oil and accepted that this fit in perfectly with the way of the world and was fully present in the moment to the bubbling of his skin and the sensations of pain in his body, you might say that he is still “suffering.”
As one online dictionary defines suffering as: An instance of pain or distress, we could probably agree that our deep-frying friend is suffering—unless he’s a chicken, in which case we can dismiss his suffering by saying he is too stupid and tasty to feel pain. This is why I used the word “essentially” regarding my two causes. I could even argue that if someone were so totally in the moment of pain, this would be a thing of beauty and not suffering but I would have few supporters other than the most sadistic who would think the oil-boiled man good entertainment and worthy of a Pay-Per-View spot.
Most religions, even the ones we call “spiritual,” in practice are nothing more than tools to stay out of being in the moment. In Christianity, life is solely about getting into a made-up Heaven that is more exclusive than the VIP room at the Viper Club. In the Muslim faith, life is solely about blowing shit up in order to get laid in a made-up Heaven, which happens to be the rule in the backwards land of Bizarro but not here on Earth. Judaism contains tons of rituals to follow in order to “stay right with God,” which if you don’t believe in instant punishment is pretty much living for the next moment God is not on vacation playing golf and has a minute to take your call or notice in his busy schedule how you’re screwing up.
Childish religions such as Christianity provide “the opiate of the masses” as Karl Marx phrased it during a break while filming one of his Marx Brothers movies. They allow a slave to be beaten every day on the sole belief that, “Some day I will be sitting in Heaven on Jesus’ lap and he will rock me like his baby—not that he had a baby, mind you, as he wouldn’t fuck Mary after all 12 disciples had their way with her—and if he gets wood I will just take it like an altar boy,” or an impoverished Muslim to think, “Just one jihad and I’ll be sitting on the lap of Muhammad who won’t get a hard-on if I get there right after he had his way with a 9-year old girl like he did on Earth.” I like to date very religious girls and constantly abuse them as they’ll put up with anything if, like a lying clergyman, you tell them, “When I marry you in a few years, I will be a perfect husband to you,” knowing that marrying them sometime in the future is just as fictitious as floating around with wings and harps in made-up Heaven.
What about Buddhism? Hinduism? Jainism? These Eastern religions are generally nothing more than living in the future, preparing for a made-up enlightenment where you think you can take your ego with you, the same way another fools may think he can take his body to Heaven. Even Mindful Meditation, which on the surface appears to be totally about being in the moment, is really solely to achieve something in the future—be that greater awareness or enlightenment—and not an actual tool for living in the moment day to day.
Just play with it and you will see how eating mindfully—“Notice how my mouth opens when the fork approaches. And how my tongue reaches out for it. And how I push the food to the right side of my mouth. And how I chew the food. And how my salivary glands secrete…”—or having mindful sex—“I feel my penis throbbing as it starts to engorge. I just licked my lips in preparation to kiss her. As I don’t see any mints in the vicinity, I will forego going down on her. I am leaning on my left forearm and my right hand is guiding my penis inside of her vagina. Notice how when I start to penetrate her there is a feeling of warmth in the head of my penis and maybe, by comparison, a coolness in the base of the penis”—kills the enjoyment of two activities that just about any mind-less person finds enjoyable.
If your parents had died in a car accident, smashing into a truck transporting scalding oil to a chain of fast food restaurants and you didn’t know about it, would your life change in any noticeable way? That’s kind of my sicker version of, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?” whose answer is, “That depends on your operational definition of ‘sound.’ If you define sound as vibrations that are necessitated on being received by a human source in the moment then no, the tree does not make a sound. If you expand your definition of sound to include the reception of the vibratory stimuli at a later date than the actual occurrence, one could put a recorder at the site of the tree falling and listen to the recording at a later date, to which case it would in fact be classified as making a sound. If you weren’t so egocentric and on arriving at the scene saw a bunch of newly deaf animals most probably due to a sudden increase in the surrounding decibel level to damaging levels from the falling tree, you might accept that a loud sound was the cause—whether you heard it or not.” This was the reason I was put on scroll alphabetizing duty at the Zen monastery.
Your woes about your parents’ death would probably be related to a future desire of yours to talk to them or hug them or have them treat you to dinner or nag you, which will no longer be able to be met. Since my talking with my parents inevitably results in me arguing that 9/11 was an inside job, and hugging them inevitably results in the creepy feeling I get when I notice that their hands are on my ass and squeezing it in a non-parently way, and dinners usually result in a sour stomach from arguments about 9/11 being an inside job and more ass-grabbing, and I lost the flavor for being nagged by them when I was 6-months old and my mother said to me, “You shit your diaper again? Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a clean ass for me to squeeze?” if my parents met an untimely death involving boiling oil, I would probably go to the accident scene and enjoy some Mr. & Mrs. X nuggets.
Even if a robber with a gun is holding you up, the actual NOW moment is not so bad: you are standing here, he is standing there—not really a big deal. The suffering that happens is that you are fearful of a possible future where he will possibly shoot you or you won’t be able to afford flowers to put on your parents’ gravestones from the freak boiling oil accident because of this setback.
A soldier on the battlefield may be killed at any moment. So why worry about it? He might as well enjoy himself in the meantime—crawl in the dirt; shoot your toy. If today is your last day of life, if you are going to die anyway, why not cherish it by filling it with life? And if it’s not your last day of life, why waste it being anxious?
Motivational speaker Sam Crowley said that most people are dead by age 25 and it just takes them 50 more years to actually die. Our worries about “what may be” have made us forget that life is much more than just a beating heart and respiring lungs. When are we going to take our life back from the grip of fear?
.
I met Slow Duck and when I looked into her eyes deeply I saw that we came together at this point in our evolution to reconnect our soul connection, for how long I did not know. Whether it is meant to share a life together or a deep lesson or just to share some heartache, a soul connection will leave you transformed. And while we are currently 3,648.31 miles apart and I don’t know whether I’ll ever see her in body again, the one thing I do know is that in reconnecting with this soul, I have been changed forever.
I had walked her to the subway and we were at the point where she was going to have to go through the gate and I was going to have to go on my merry way. The last time I had asked her for a kiss proved to be disastrous. We were on the subway together and my stop was coming up. I did a version of a Woody Allen bit from Annie Hall [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nePSHhfgN-I]:
“Look, my stop is only two stops away. Let’s kiss now so that when the train gets to my station we don’t have that awkward moment of ‘Do we kiss/don’t we kiss?”
I thought it was cute; she found it somewhat repulsive. Needless to say, I didn’t get any kiss, except from the homeless wino at my stop—who really kisses pretty well and if it weren’t for the overwhelming taste of Ripple on his lips, I might ask him to be my steady.
But I didn’t let this catastrophe stop me from getting back on the saddle. Many use cowardice to justify not getting back up after being thrown while someone with courage, like Christopher Reeves, spends the rest of his life trying to remount from a fall. I consider myself more “Christopher Reeves” and only in part because I need someone to wipe my ass.
I told her again that I wanted to kiss her. As much as that seemed unspontaneous and I should have just planted one on her, the last time I did this I was arrested. Granted that was with a nun and I wasn’t wearing any pants at the time, but still, it left its mark on me.
She started to tell me what I had already heard, that she was leaving the country for good in a little over a week and that, “It doesn’t make sense to—“
“Look, I’m asking you to be in this moment with me. Get out of your head, get out of the future and just be with me—right here, right now. If you are always thinking about ‘logic’ and ‘what can be’ you completely destroy the present moment.” My impassioned speech was as exciting as any Obama ever gave, with the one difference that mine was filled with truth instead of rhetoric. And she gave me the requested kiss. And then I kissed her a second time. Granted we didn’t do a tongue Tango but our lips touched and while fireworks might not have exploded from our hearts, it seemed like the fireworks warehouse lock was smashed and the future had the potential to be explosive.
In the remaining week, Slow Duck honored not only me but also her by allowing herself to be fully immersed in the moment and sharing herself with me fully without “logic” and “reasoning” to be a cockblock. The result was that we were both transformed. Well, I was transformed and I know she experienced something much more magnanimous than if she had “played it safe.”
I remember the day she was leaving. She had her bags all packed and her long, white puffy winter coat already on. I told her to take off her jacket, that I wanted five more minutes with her. While sex did cross my mind, I had already asked for 5-minutes and at this point I didn’t know how I would fill the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds. So instead I put on the song “Dela” by Johnny Clegg & Savuka, a lucky CD find bought at the local junk store for $3…and we danced.
It was heavenly, and by that I don’t mean made-up and ridiculous. Moving our bodies, seeing her beauty reflecting back to me, bathed in both music and love. In that moment I was so happy and fulfilled.
And then it hit me suddenly, like an Italian man in a wife-beater T-shirt hits his wife. I may never see her again. I felt all at once my heart rise to my throat and a pressure on my tear ducts to start flooding like the levees in New Orleans after they were blown up with C-4 explosives by our government. I said to her in a cracked voice like Peter Brady going through puberty, “It’s hard for me to stay in the moment.” With her encouragement I was able to come back to the NOW and enjoy the present moment.
And when I left her this time at the subway, while the kiss was not a Catholic school dance with a ruler’s-distance requirement between genitals, but a tongue Tango that was hotter than Carmen Miranda boiling in oil, the end of the kiss was punctuated with the reality that this may be the last lip dance I would have with her as my partner.
I walked my dog through a snowy Central Park, a walk I take almost every night and yet it seemed somehow different as seen through the schizoid split in my mind between the present moment and the future moments that can never be. When I got home, I toweled off my wet dog, fed her, snacked and turned on “Dela” and danced. I became bizarrely aware that while perhaps I “should” have been sad—in the moment I was having a pretty good time!
Due to the snowstorm, her midnight flight was delayed for about 15 hours and so she called me and came back to my place at around 3:00 in the morning, where I fed her and warmed her up by wrapping her in a fleece blanket as well as the blanket of my love. We went to bed and held each other close and in that very moment life was perfect. I think life is always perfect; it was just painfully more obviously perfect to me at that time.
The next morning, I took my dog out on my trek to the health food store to pick up some breakfast for Slow Duck. When I came back, it was later than she had hoped to leave and she barreled through breakfast as fast as a person runs in Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls to avoid an ass-goring.
I shared with her how to be in the moment would have her unrushed and fully present with her breakfast and the one who lovingly prepared it. While she acknowledged that would be ideal, she said how she had to shove it down, for if she left on empty she would surely starve. I thought of bringing up the fact that there are thousands of African kids who miss breakfast every day but then realized that they do starve and thought that wouldn’t help my argument and so I just smiled and nodded, a tactic I attribute to getting me through four years of college. This got me to thinking of the practicality of being in the moment in a society that is designed to keep you in the past, in the future—anywhere but the present.
I remember doing some temporary job with an advertising agency where it became clear to me that everything was due yesterday and whenever you accomplished any task, five more would immediately fill the gap whose half-life was about a billionth of a second and not nearly enough time to drop my cortisone levels back to non-hyper mode. How would a society even function that was in the NOW?
REGARDING WORK:
“Where were you yesterday for work?” says the boss angrily.
“I was on my way here and took a shortcut through the park. It was so beautiful there, with the sun shining down and reflecting on the lake, the ducks swimming in their packs and the trees providing shade for people who sat under them, that I decided to stay. That’s not exactly true, I didn’t ‘decide,’ I was just fully in the moment.”
“That’s a beautiful story—you’re fired.”
REGARDING EDUCATION:
“Mom, Dad, I wanted to go to college and was wondering how much savings you put aside for me to pursue my education,” says the son.
“’Put aside,’” laughs the father. “We spent our money in the NOW and didn’t put it away for the THEN. There is no money saved.”
“That’s alright,” says the son, “My second choice was to become a vagabond.”
REGARDING LOVE:
“What the hell are you doing in bed with another man??” says the angry husband who came home early from work because Larry Silverstein decided to “pull” his building like he did Building 7 at the World Trade Center.
“You were not here and he came to check the meter. We both found ourselves aroused and I wanted to honor the moment.”
“I am going to ‘honor the moment’ that I am feeling right now and get my shotgun.”
“It’s impractical,” you say. Of course it is while our society is based on living in the past and future. But think about this, if we had a society where people actually did what their true passion was as their “job,” they would actually look forward to going to work and the possibility that they would blow it off because of a sunny day would lessen tremendously.
But even if they did take a day where instead of coming to work they enjoyed a day in the park, if we were a society that supported the individual’s ultimate happiness and actualization, we would be happy that he honored his personal needs in the moment. In fact, a boss seeing that a person had drifted out of being in the moment at work, instead of yelling at the worker would offer her encouragement and support by asking, “What would help you come back to your joy in the moment?” and if that involved getting the fuck out of the office and going to the park, she would support that action.
Life itself would be such an education that to send a child to a cement enclosure to sit in a windowless room with 500 others to listen to a boring “never-was” drone on with memorized information that he passes off as wisdom, would be such a foreign concept that no one would put aside money for something that was free except for the cost of living versus vegetating. Then again, I didn’t think bottling free water would sell either.
And if we weren’t insecure and possessive, if we walked in on our partner while she was banging the Con Ed guy, we would be happy that she was enjoying herself and maybe, if the urge hit, we’d wack-off ourselves while they finished their business. Of course you think this ridiculous while your mind is still flooded with the false need to possess another and the belief that your self-worth is based on your partner finding you and no one else attractive and your need for her to sacrifice ever experiencing love-making with another person because you were raised in an insecure society that hasn’t grown up past, “This is my toy and you can’t play with it!”
Our “practical” society has made us very efficient but has left us completely empty. It has made us very productive but surrounded us with a bunch of useless crap. It has made things convenient but has robbed us of the experience that working through inconvenience provides. It has given us the world and in its acquirement we have lost our Selves. All any of us really want is just to express our inner nature with joy and without judgment and this society teaches us that the only way to be accepted is to be a carbon copy of someone else, be it Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson or Archangel Michael.
As I wrote in a past piece [“Raw Spirit Radio Interview With Swami X—Part I, http://rebelyogi.com/raw-spirit-radio-interview-with-swami-x-part-I], the Zen teacher Alan Watts said that we had a choice in how we decided to live life, either not trusting or trusting. Not trusting has us looking over our shoulders, locking our doors, carrying a gun and always worried; trusting has us living in joy but occasionally getting screwed.
Another choice we can make at any given moment is whether we want to be fully present or to be partially or wholly in the past or future. To be partially or wholly in the past or future means that our suffering and our pleasures are only mental fabrications being held together by the glue of attachment called death. To be fully in the present means to be committed to and immersed in life and not fantasy, no matter where it may lead.
Slow Duck left today, no more delays, and my future-oriented societal inculcation does have me drift into periods of thinking “What if…?” and “If only…” I took a nap earlier and when I woke up, while it was nice to have my dog Abandon curled up in a ball by my side, the bed did feel a bit empty without Slow Duck enmeshed with my body.
How do I even know that her leaving what to me felt as premature as cumming in your pants just as your date finishes asking, “Do you want to come inside for a little?” wasn’t the saving grace that will keep our love forever young in my mind, like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, and not old and gray and bitter like Johannes Heesters? While I could argue—and you know I can argue—that when you have a true soul connection, certain things are certain, I would be slightly bullshitting not only you but myself, for the only thing that is certain is the moment—and, of course, that 9/11 was an inside job. And while sometimes I may bullshit with you, I never bullshit myself.
Perhaps I would piss her off with my constant repeating of tasteless “South Park” humor or comic reenactments of “Family Guy” violence and she would hit me with a hammer and I would thereafter repeat every 15-minutes through drooling lips, “DING! DING! DING!” like a church bell announcing the latest virgin boy being deflowered by a priest. Perhaps our personal idiosyncrasies would drive each other to the point where pillow fights turned into “pillow smotherings.” Perhaps she would meet another person with whom she found more attractive and want to be with him and I would pull an O.J. and do a mountain of coke before killing her and her innocent friend. And perhaps we would love each other until death do us part and when it did “do us part” I would then join Muhammad in Muslim heaven and fuck 9-year olds.
Maybe I will cry heartily tonight fully expressing the feelings I am having in the moment, even if they are based on thoughts that are not. I have a feeling I instead will enjoy the crisp, silent air of Central Park with my dog and a hot beverage on our arrival back home, a nice song or two on my stereo system and the comfortable snuggle of my blanket as I lay in bed while having my dog lick peanut butter out of my butt crack. Then again, maybe I will cry.
Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” It seems that Christians took this to mean that they should instead think only about what Swami Beyondananda calls, “imaginary real estate in Heaven.” What Jesus meant was that if we want to meet God, it would not come by dragging around a dead past of prophets and book knowledge and personal accomplishments. And it would not be at some time in the future when our schedules lined up perfectly with His and we were judged worthy of Him inviting us to the company outing. He meant that God is already inside of us and all we have to do is be fully present in the moment and we will be in His presence right NOW.
All we have is “the moment” and it seems completely insane that we piss it away occupied by what may or may not be somewhere off in the future. Like the true teachings of Jesus and not the disempowering message the church teaches, only through an alchemical process of true personal transformation can we enter the Heaven that is here and now. Instead we remain insecure, fearful, and judgmental and think that government welfare and peace treaties are the way to world peace.
We have buried pieces of ourselves in the past and stored away other pieces of ourselves in the future, and so in the present—the only place where we are always safe and at home—we feel somewhat disjointed and ill at ease. Our Mother and Father are with us now and we can’t enjoy them because we are too busy making arrangements for their funerals. We are the Angels of Death and yet rather than finding a new vocation, we bitterly complain about the circle of destruction that surrounds us. We have buried the full expression of our Selves long ago and rather than mourning what is alive and may one day perish, we should shed our tears for what we alone have killed and devote our efforts to resurrecting the dead.
A Taoist man was walking on a mountain when all of a sudden he heard a growl from behind him. He turned around to see a jaguar about 50 yards behind and approaching fast. The Taoist high-tailed it and was stopped short by the cliff’s edge. He glanced below and saw a family of jaguars looking up at him, hoping he would fall and become their supper. “Mother fucker!” said the Taoist, glad he wasn’t a Mormon and forbidden to express the only words that most accurately described his current situation.
The Jaguar behind the man was now only ten yards away and so the Taoist, seeing no other way to avoid it, jumped. On the way down, he managed to grab onto a vine poking out from the mountain’s side and stop his plunge into the family of hungry leopards. As he started to calm down a little, he saw an otter starting to gnaw at the vine. “Mother fucker!” said the Taoist, encapsulating the state of affairs beautifully.
Just then he saw some wild strawberries growing out of the side of the mountain. He reached for the biggest, reddest, and juiciest looking one and plucked it. He put it in his mouth and took a bite. “Delicious,” said the Taoist.
REFLECTION:
Think about anything you are worried about. Does it contain the word “if” in it, such as, “If this car doesn’t start, I’ll never make it to work on time!” or “If I don’t get laid tonight, I’ll have a serious case of blue balls!” The word “if” surrounding a thought or action is a clear indicator of not being in the moment.
Do you multi-task? Of course you do—you’re probably listening to music and eating a meal while reading this very line! While conceivably you may be doing all your seven tasks “in the moment,” overloading like this never allows you to really delve fully into any of the tasks. “Jock of all trades, master of none” can be adapted to be, “Multi-tasker of all jobs, delver of none.” But ask yourself, “Why am I doing all these things at the same time?”
After you’re done with the pat and shallow “efficiency” answer, you will see that you have a belief that life is about getting things done and that most of the reason you are doing anything—be it eating or reading—is to “finish” the task at hand instead of enjoying it. We don’t see a movie looking forward to it being over, do we? But when we shove down a meal because we are in a rush to get it done, we are doing just that. Better to miss the meal and sit down and take your time to enjoy it fully when you have the time.
Believe me, you won’t starve from missing one meal. If you find that you cannot function when you miss a single meal, know that this is the result of your body being so out of wack from years of abuse, such as the conditioning you need to eat three solid meals a day. If you never have time to sit and relax and eat, this is the result of your life being out of wack as well.
MEDITATION:
What are you doing in this very moment? Move beyond the action, be it reading or eating or watching television and think about the underlying fact that you are breathing and living. That doesn’t change no matter what’s going on around you, well, as long as your alive that is. Think about something you have to do that has a deadline. Notice how your mind starts to run off on its own and how it is probably not thinking slowly and calmly but in a rapid-fire manner. Notice the state of your body in the moment. Has it changed based on your mental projections?
Place yourself in a calm and comfortable place. Notice the joy of this moment. Now think about if you received a call—or more likely an email with today’s deficiency of real communication—that you had lost your job, or your girlfriend or boyfriend or a loved one had transitioned, i.e. died. Rather than succumb to fear and anxiety, calmly breathe and realize that even if you don’t have a job to go to tomorrow, right now you weren’t doing, going to, or thinking about work. If you decide to think about it, does that change your job situation?
If you don’t have a girlfriend or boyfriend, right now you weren’t with them anyway and were probably even glad about the separation! And if you honestly reflect on it, you will see that your relationship ended long before the official “announcement” arrived anyway. So the relationship was dead even though you had it in a hospital bed hooked up to an I.C.U. Your feelings of hurt and anger are probably mostly based on the past, “I treated him like gold and this is what he does to me—in an email no less??” or the future, “I wanted to walk down the aisle with her and now I can’t.” If you took your mind off thoughts of the past and the future, you might go right back to the episode of “South Park” you paused in order to read his email.
Imagine receiving an email that your significant other has dumped you. You weren’t with your significant other in this moment anyway. Let all thoughts of “Now what?” pass through your head and realize that your current situation is effectively unchanged. Granted tomorrow you will be cruising craigslist to find your next boyfriend and dresser drawers but for now—nothing’s really different.
If you just found out a loved one has transitioned, how does that affect your present moment? Besides feelings that may well up based on memories of your past together and desires to be with them in the future that will now go unfilled, unless you were making them a birthday card at that very moment and realize, “Uh, I guess this is no longer necessary,” nothing has really changed in your present.
Imagine you find out that a loved one is dead. Allow any thoughts of what you wanted to say or do with them while they were alive and now won’t be able to pass right through you. You probably weren’t going to call them today anyway. Forget the moment sometime in the future where you would want to call or hold them—in this very moment essentially nothing is different. On some level, isn’t everyone who is not present with you in this very moment effectively dead to you in this moment?
Let all future planning pass right through you for now and realize that the very moment has not changed in the least.
I heard there is one native tribe that doesn’t have in their language words to describe “the past,” “the present” and “the future.” They would only describe someone as either being present or not present, as a concept like, “They will be coming sometime in the future,” was not in their expression of understanding.
It is a principle of quantum physics that when you are looking for an atom it is there and when you are not looking for it, it is not there. If you are looking for suffering and sadness, it will be there. If you are not, it won’t.
“The Snooze Meditation”: Set your alarm clock in the morning a little early and when it goes off, hit the snooze button. Can you fully immerse yourself in rest or sleep for the next 5-minutes or are you constantly thinking, “I have to get up soon”? Keep hitting the snooze button until you can totally go back to sleep with no forethought about what “needs to be done.” Of course, by this time it will probably be way too late to get to where you were supposed to be and you will have probably lost your job or your girlfriend or boyfriend will be totally pissed at you screwing up their plans—but at least you would have gained a better understanding of being in the moment.
“This is my vision…that affirmation of life and nature should be the cornerstone of human civilization if it wants to be healthy and holistic. Such a civilization will be dedicated to the moment, to bliss and to celebration.”
—Osho from Krishna: The Man And His Philosophy (p. 802)