The Present Moment

This moment is ours, each to dwell in separately, and sometimes to share. Or so it would be, if the moment were not hijacked; of which more anon.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events; and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

These words by are quoted in Music in the Castle of Heaven: a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, by John Eliot Gardiner, who adds:

The miracle of music is that it allows us to step aside momentarily from Kundera’s temporal evanescence. A musical work such as a Bach cantata is manifestly a journey from a beginning, through a middle, and to an end, and yet at that end the light it casts on the memory on all that has gone before creates the feeling that we are constantly in a state of arrival—leading to a sense of being aware of, and thus valuing, our own consciousness, both now and in what went before.

And I have been long wishing that this blog, soon to span eight years of one person’s life, could somehow be edited into a volume which might create in a reader that feeling, which Gardiner attempts to describe.

It’s a feeling conveyed in myriad ways by Fernando Pessoa in his Book of Disquiet, as in this excerpt chosen almost at random, where he has been describing a sunset:

“In this moment, when I’m bursting with feeling, I wish I had the gift of ruthless self-expression, the arbitrary whim of a style as my destiny. But no, this remote, lofty sky that’s disintegrating is everything right now, and the emotion I feel, which is many confused emotions bunched together, is merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me—a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves.

“So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel—to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions ….”

I’d been planning to write about the present moment, and looking for relevant quotes. There’s a book called Be Here Now, but I didn’t want to look up anything by Ram Dass. I had another book in mind but could not recall it. I realize it was Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now, which I don’t plan on reading any time soon. Instead my Google-quest cast up on its shore a short video from my former guru. I felt such revulsion at the sight of his face and the sound of his voice that it’s taken a fortnight to pluck up the courage to transcribe his discourse, and offer the following excerpts:

“You can’t live in the future…. You can’t live in the past…. You’re stuck! You’re stuck!—in this moment called Now!

(background: bright new age music, filling in significant pauses).

… And you have no clue—how to cope with that—do you? See, you have your diaries, and you have your cameras (grinning broadly at the absurdity)—and you have your memory for (almost winking complicitly)—the Past! You know how to cope with that! You may even be able to get a memento and put it on a cabinet and say ‘Oh I’ll remember!’ Little plaques you’ve created. Little notes (gesturing) you make in your diary. Little pictures you take of the different places. To remember (rises to a high tenor) the Past. And you also know very well how to cope—with the Future. You have your planners, and you have your reminders and you have your notes, and you have your promises, and you have your ideas, and you have your schedules, and you have your Calendars (pointless emphasis). Now you tell me. What do you have (gesturing) for this moment called Now? Nothing. Nothing! You have a watch. It gives you the current time. But you use that to plan the future. You look at your watch in the airplane to find out how long more this flight is going to last. ’Cause you have no idea. You can’t look at the time and say ‘Right now, this is the time…’ and not have any concept in (sic) the future or in the past. You can’t look at that second hand go ‘moment’ (smiles triumphantly, to audience laughter). Nothing. But I tell you (shot of adoring audience faces) I can give you a tool that can capture that moment—called Now (shot of audience faces intently capturing this very moment, as he speaks).

“Because what does it have in it? It has immense joy. It has in it immense clarity. It has in it immense understanding.”

Being manifestly a sales presentation for “a tool”, it fades out here, leaving voiceover and text offering websites and toll-free numbers to those who wish to “discover more”.

Amongst the drivel, which you may not find as nauseating as I do, is a grain of truth. But I found it for myself only after claiming back my own breath back from his meditation method, washing his influence out of my soul. I got bold enough to break a Faustian contract whose penalty clauses seemed so scary at the time. I’ll concede that there is immense joy and clarity in the moment. I never found it by turning the senses inwards—a deathly practice. I admit to a prejudice in this matter, for now I instinctively abhor all gurus, every prescribed practice; Nor will I offer advice to anyone: only to follow your uncorrupted heart.

I started by saying that the present moment is ours to dwell in, when it is not hijacked. And then I quoted Kundera, who said that “all the sadness of life lies in that fact [that the present moment is tangible, yet eludes us completely]”; and then John Eliot Gardiner, who referred to being “in a constant state of arrival” and “valuing our own consciousness”; and then Pessoa’s sense of anguish, his nostalgia for something he’d never known.

Perhaps we’ve all felt this way, though our language skills may be inadequate to express it. When we are hijacked, we are no longer captain of our own ship. And so we are prey to those who offer their own solutions. Someone—I shall call him Alastair—has mapped this territory enough to have labelled its prominent features: not as a guide but an amateur cartographer. He talks of being in the green zone: green for safety, red for danger. The red zone is when we dwell in a “semi-defended state”.  Joy and clarity can only flourish in the green zone. How to get there? That’s what we all want to know, except for those who set themselves up as teachers. I have my ideas, you have yours. The kind of stuff I’ve noted in this blog has to do with recognition that “I am an animal”. My ability to reason and be self-conscious is part of this animal’s survival mechanism. Alastair elaborates the same idea by speaking of a set of drives, the human equivalent of instincts. He counts sixteen of them, established for our evolutionary survival. They constrain our aspirations. We ignore them at our peril.

One way or another, we may learn somehow to embrace the moment, and be embraced by it.