If your consciousness is focused on what you are doing at this very moment, you are completely in the here and now. If it is busy with something else, you are not in the present.
What does it mean to live in the present? When this comes up, many people ask – what is it like to live in the present and be in the here and now? Let's start with this. Try a simple experiment. Right now, reading this article, do you feel your body? Or did they remember it when I suggested thinking about it?
What is “living in the moment”
One such meme is “living in the moment,” also known as “living here and now” and other variations of it. Few people remember where this meme came from, except that it was “something Eastern” brought to the West in the 70s, at the time of the beginning of its great love affair with Eastern spirituality. The spiritual teachers who grew up at the junction of two cultures at that time were legion. To understand what meme followers look like today, you can look at quite popular books on this topic.
The first is probably the most famous, “The Power of the NOW Moment,” written by spiritual speaker Eckhart Tolle. This sermon book, translated into 33 languages, was one of the New York Times best-selling books throughout the 2000s. The author encourages living in the moment and even tells what thoughts you need to think for this, how to approach life and what to do. In a nutshell: “Accept everything.”
The second is “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” A Message for an Age of Anxiety" by Alan Watts, British philosopher, writer and lecturer, translator and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. The book suggests simply accepting the fact that there is no reliability and permanence: relax, enjoy it - and live in the moment. That is, also “accept everything.” Which is completely impossible to do by reading just one book. Or even two.
The third book is “In Search of Flow. The Psychology of Engagement in Everyday Life” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It stands a little apart because it was written by a professor of psychology and former dean of the faculty at the University of Chicago, and not by some ordinary person who has seen the light and does not have the right to talk about the human psyche, backed by a scientific degree.
The book is notable for the fact that Mihai introduces his concept - “flow”, after which, with diagrams, tables and other scientific things, he convincingly “sells” to us that living in a flow is good, pleasant and healthy, you all probably know this state! Of course we do. But the bottom line is that Csikszentmihalyi has nothing left but “living in the flow means being as involved as possible; try to be as involved as possible to live in the flow.”
Three signs of “life here and now”
If you collect scattered, but surprisingly similar statements from teachers who bring Eastern wisdom to the West, you will get something like the following.
First.
Real life here. It exists only in a short moment called “now.” There is no future or past. There are memories (which are actually pictures in the head) and attempts to predict the future (also imaginary pictures).
Tolle writes: “Have you ever sensed, done, thought or felt anything outside the Now? Do you think you will ever be capable of this? Can anything happen or be outside of the Now? The answer is obvious, isn't it? Nothing happened in the past - everything happened in the Now. Nothing will happen in the future - everything will happen in the Now.
What you think of as the past is only a trace in the memory of your mind, a trace of the past moment of Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a trace in your memory - this is exactly what you are doing now. The future is an imagined present moment, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the present moment. When you think about the future, you do it now. The past and future obviously have no reality of their own, they can only reflect the light of the sun, and therefore the past and future are only a weak reflection of the light, power and reality of the eternal presence. Their reality is “borrowed” from the present moment.”
Second
. Western people think too much, while life should not be thought, but rather lived. Enough, they say, to think about music: you can listen to music; and why say “honey” when you can just eat it.
“What's more, the habit of rumination that our narcissistic society encourages can actually make things worse. Research using Sample Experience Studies shows that when people think about themselves, their mood tends to be negative. When a person begins to think without having special skills for this, the first thoughts that arise in his mind are usually depressive. If in a state of flow we forget about ourselves, then in a state of apathy, anxiety or boredom our “ego” usually comes to the fore. Therefore, unless we have mastered the skill of reflection, the activity of “ruminating on problems” usually makes the situation worse instead of making it better,” writes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Third
. Let's all live in the flow/moment, it will relieve all worries and sorrows.
Put down your gadgets
Seneca wrote that people are most protective of money and property, but are careless of the one thing they cannot get back: time.
“It’s not that we have too little time to live,” he said, “it’s just that we waste too much of it.” Can you imagine what he would say about people who spend an average of more than five hours a day on gadgets? That's 76 days a year, about 11 weeks, and a ton of unproductivity.
In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport explains that the designers of gadgets and social networks are not your friends, and you are not their client. You are the product they sell to advertisers, applications, and database owners.
The average user accesses their mobile device more than 2,600 times a day. What if instead, on at least a dozen occasions, we picked up a magazine, a book, got down to work, talked to a loved one? By spending these five hours productively, you can do much more useful things.
Why the idea of “living in the moment” seems absurd
All these amazingly spiritual guys (and one professor) are opposed by normal people with a very simple argument: “yes, these are all fucking hippies!” How do you mean “not caring about the future”? Then in ten years you might wake up somewhere under a fence. Here, for example, is an anonymous comment from the Internet to Tolle’s book, beautiful in its typicality: “A carbon copy of Dale Carnegie with a touch of “spirituality.” The essence of this book is to become a ciliate-slipper, do not remember the past, do not dream about the future, live in oblivion,” - indeed, where, one wonders, should one put the mind?
It is impossible to completely reject the simple idea that there is a future and that you can take care of the future, and it will only get better from it! So far, any attempts to deny the future, even under the pretext “it’s just a human construct,” look unconvincing. Everything around is a human construct.
The bridge from existing in the present to thinking about the future is simple: even if we live in the moment, we are doomed to make choices and decisions on which the future depends.
In counseling books (and the professor too) there is an answer to this: when you live in the “flow”, decisions are made “as if by yourself”, without the participation of the mind. Virtuoso musicians or medal-winning athletes are cited as examples. However, musicians need tens of thousands of hours of practice to then relax and play intuitively. Give a simple person an instrument, ask him to be himself, and let his intuition tell him how to play - it’s clear what will happen.
If we take the idea of the consequences of choice to its logical conclusion, then a person has an infinitely valuable bet - his own future, which he absolutely does not want to risk for the sake of some “now”. The future is so long, but you can’t even grasp the “now”.
Don't delay happiness
Even in ancient times, people dreamed of relaxation. It was the idea of a future where they would get what they wanted and live the way they wanted. Seneca wrote:
“You'll hear a lot of people say, 'When I'm 50, I'll retire; When I’m 60, I’ll retire from public affairs.” But what guarantees that life will be long? Who will allow it to continue as usual? Aren't you ashamed to reserve only the end of life for yourself and devote only time to wisdom that cannot be spent on any business? It’s too late to start living when life should end!”
If you can't be happy with yourself now or with what you have, then it won't happen. What you want is achievable. More money, fame or power is not the goal. Live in the present. Working your whole life to buy a boat and a house by the lake in old age is crazy.
This doesn't mean you have to be careless or irresponsible. But don’t trade the present for the hope of tomorrow, which becomes more distant the more you pursue it.
How thinking about the future causes anxiety
Anxiety, common to all humans, is potentially endless. Particularly anxious people simply do not know when to stop and stop worrying. Their logic is absolutely correct: “we need to take care of the future” - this, in their opinion, is precisely what “fucking hippies” do not do. But anxiety is a feeling, and the feeling doesn’t just let go, hence the simple conclusion that we need to take even better care of the future - and then, perhaps, it will let go. The conclusion is incorrect. In extreme cases, an anxious person tries to foresee everything, to embrace the entire universe with his anxious mind. This is not only tedious, but also completely impossible.
In psychotherapy, I tell my anxious clients about the same rationalization: you can’t take care of everything, constant anxiety exhausts you so much that in the long run it brings the same negative consequences closer than it delays them, so let’s take breaks.
Let's call them “respite”: during these periods you can exhale, relax and live a little. In the moment.
There are, of course, less anxious people (perhaps Tolle is just one of the mutants with low anxiety). But is it possible to overcome anxiety about life in general? No.
Don't leave things hanging
The Duke of Wellington, winner of the Battle of Waterloo, had a rule of taking things day by day. He did not leave things hanging or half done, but finished what he started. He didn't have 13 projects of varying degrees of completion.
Knowing that you need to finish what you start helps you prioritize and focus on what's important. And then you can say, “If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right.”
Thanks to this rule, my to-do list is short. I include the ones that I like, and I get great pleasure when I tear up the completed list in the evening. This helps you work harder. For me, writing a book is not one big project, but a series of small tasks. Technically the book won't be finished tonight, but I will write a separate chapter or part. And this will be the best thing I could do today.
Why any anxiety is a fear of death
Any anxiety is anxiety about the future, and anxiety about the future is a well-disguised fear of death. After all, this is the worst thing that can happen in the future. Man is an imaginative animal. He is therefore able to simulate the future, and at the same time has some suspicions about his own mortality, which - along with suspicions - he tries in every possible way to avoid.
Canadian psychotherapist Jordan Peterson talks about it this way: a person is able to create artificial worlds in his head, populate them with his own avatars, acting in different ways, and see which of these avatars survives. In “The Denial of Death,” anthropologist Ernest Becker generally suggests that all human civilization and culture were created solely to mask or somehow soften this fear of death. There he writes that oriental guys are no exception. The Buddhists acted most cunningly of all, pretending that they did not want rebirth: in short, the goal of any self-respecting Buddhist is to get out of the “wheel of samsara” and stop being reborn. Pretending that you don't want what you want most is a great ploy!
In spiritual books about “life in the moment”, one way or another, the issues of death are touched upon, but only with the saying “there is no death, what are you saying.” This paradox was invented by Lucretius a couple of thousand years ago: “Where I am, there is no death, where there is death, there is no me. Therefore death is nothing to me." According to the European psychological tradition, this and similar moves are defense mechanisms with the help of which people persistently try to look away and not look there
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Don't try to be perfect
One of the things that creates problems in finishing or starting things is waiting for inspiration or setting a high bar. As Churchill said: “Perfection may also be called paralysis.”
If you want to live fully, you will have to accept the imperfections of the world. There will be no ideal. To progress, you need to go forward.
Productive writers know the four lousy pages a day rule: they sit down and write about anything, even if they think it's no good. This technique gives impetus and relieves work stupor, so just work regularly. Come up with a similar ritual for yourself.
Can human nature be corrected?
It's not just a matter of closing your eyes. It would be too sad to think that it is just some people who have found a way to fool themselves - and now they are pushing it on others under the guise of spiritual teachings. Although that may be true. But it could also be the exercise. Remember the musicians from the example above? There is another popular meme on this topic: “neuroplasticity” - a property of the human brain that consists in the ability to change under the influence of experience. If this concept did not exist, how could we express in other words the simple idea that a person is capable of learning and changing? I do not even know.
There are scientific studies in which serious meditators were put into an MRI machine and found that their brains worked differently. I smile every time I hear about these studies: can’t you see from the outside without an MRI that something is definitely wrong with Buddhists? They look too happy.
These people meditated for about 10,000 hours in their lives, which coincides with another meme: Andres Erikson's theory that you need to spend at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in order to become an expert at it. It turns out that in “just” ten years of meditation and other spiritual practices, you can change your brain so much that you become, as it were, not quite a person - and your worries will go away. Ten years of mind retraining!
“Living in the moment” is unimaginably difficult; it is, to some extent, an opus contra naturam - working against nature. This idea can be found, for example, in the course Buddhism and Modern Psychology by Robert Wright, an American science journalist and writer. He correlates modern scientific theories about the structure of the brain (modular theory of mind) with Buddhist ideas and finds out that over the past thousand years, scientists have finally caught up with the Buddhists. Science comes to the conclusion that there really is no “I” - as Buddhists say - but there are relatively independent modules, and each is responsible for something different (for example, for the desire to leave offspring). These modules pop up at random and create a creepy zoo (from the Buddhist point of view, these are “thoughts thinking themselves”). You can bring relative order to it with the help of attention training - the same meditations. In parallel, the author admires the tenacity of Buddhists with which they try to correct human nature
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In the rather dark science fiction novels “False Blindness” and “Echopraxia” by Peter Watts, under the guise of describing the future of humanity, the same question is raised: “how scary it is to be human!”, It’s just that the further into the future, the more terrible. And all the gadgets, implants and other miracles of technology do not help at all, but only make it worse. For example, in the novel there are “bicamerals” - monk-scientists who, with the help of controlled brain cancer, so-so corrected everything inside that they became superhumans, capable of merging into a single collective superintelligence. Among all the unnecessary things, they had to cut out the part of the brain that gave an idea of their own mortality - otherwise it still wouldn’t work.
“Oh my God, this is a parody of Buddhists, very clever!” - I immediately said and found out that in the afterword to his own novel the author writes the same thing: look what a parody of Buddhists I wrote, very clever!
Then these “not quite people” from the height of their bell tower begin to agitate “complete people” to join them. As if it were so simple! If you change a lot, then another fear arises, the fear of losing yourself: “If I am an anxious neurotic, and I cease to be an anxious neurotic, then where am I?” But no, wait, it’s still the same fear of death. They surrounded it on all sides.
The same idea, but in a more optimistic vein: perhaps all these conditional “Buddhists” are not a perversion of human nature and not at all a cowardly flight from existential problems, but the next stage of evolution, or at least a good vector of it. Maybe.
How psychotherapy addresses the issue of “living in the moment”
Psychotherapy, to some extent, also teaches us to live in the moment, although it does not call it that and does not present it as a solution to all illnesses. As an anecdotal example, we can take the Gestalt technique of asking the client: “What do you feel now?” With this question, they take a person out of thoughts and place him in sensations that occur here-and-now. The example is anecdotal, because the method is extremely well-worn.
“Living in the moment” itself does not at all save you from anxiety about the future. Escape, for example, saves - it’s good that people come up with more and more ways to escape. You know Louis C.K.’s joke that it’s scary to go to the toilet without a phone, because you’ll have time to think and existential horror will come over you? So this is not a joke.
In the meditative tradition, you have to go through many hours of meditation and the “dark night of the soul,” which is also a meeting with the most terrible thing imaginable - but this topic is not very popular, they don’t write about it in propaganda. In order to live firmly in the current moment, you must first deal with your existential anxiety, and for this you need to meet with it - you can do it together with a therapist, if we take the therapeutic tradition. But there are no fools to do this just like that, of course.
Calls to “just live in the moment” are quite rightly perceived aggressively by many. Telling a person that they shouldn’t worry about life is like telling a depressed person, “Well, don’t be sad!”
Living in the moment is presented by popular psychologists as a panacea for anxiety, but in reality the opposite is true.
If enormous, incredible work, not everyone’s strength, manages to somehow deal with existential anxiety, including by changing oneself, then this very life itself will come. Join the club
