Living in the now

What if this is all that there is? This. Right here, right now. A succession of moments in the physical world. After we die: nothing. No more “this.”

As I so often repeat here at the Church of the Churchless, I don’t know. I sure hope there is life after death. As Woody Allen put it, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work I want to achieve it through not dying.”

But here’s another Woody Allen quote: “You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.”

Recently a friend, Randy, and I shared some thoughts via email about Eckhart Tolle and his “The Power of Now” philosophy. A while back I started to read the book but it didn’t grab me. With over 600 mostly positive Amazon reader reviews, obviously a lot of other people resonate with his message.

As they should. I fully agree with Tolle’s prescription for a happy, fulfilling, and enlightened life. It’s just the way he packaged his “be here now” advice that left me literarily listless.

I told Randy that the mystic spiritual path we both were initiated into many years ago has some failings. Like most other religions, it preaches withdrawal from this world in the hope of entry into a better one. I said:

Sant Mat seems to emphasize a "this world is shit, get out of it" mentality. That may be good advice, but the downside is that it encourages people who already are depressed, withdrawn, unsocial, etc. to embrace their dysfunction. I've come to think that it'd be a cruel joke if this world really is all that there is--no life after death--yet so many religious people end up trying to ignore it in the hope that heaven will be their reward for detachment.

It seems strange that God would choose to create our physical universe, and then desire above all that souls escape from it. In Islamic thought we are told, “God was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known.” Meaning, creation is the observable manifestation of hidden divinity.

So why not enjoy God’s gift? Fully. Enthusiastically. Passionately. Every day I sit for an hour or so in meditation with closed eyes and ears, trying to tune in to whatever may lie beyond the physical. But the rest of the time I seek to drink in the sights, sounds, and other perceptions of materiality.

Why ignore what is here now? This. If this is all that there is, then every earthly moment is infinitely precious, for there is no infinity to look forward to. Yet even if there will be life after our deaths, it still seems that each moment is to be richly savored, for it never will come again.

God may have other sorts of existences ready for us, but this present earthly one is the gift to be enjoyed now.

I don’t usually listen or agree with Dr. Laura. However, while station-surfing as I was driving around this afternoon I heard this radio psychotherapist advise a woman with a sexual problem: “You don’t want to die, looking back, at 102 and think of all the nights of passion you’ve missed.”

Today I spent a highly enjoyable hour watching belly dancers with evident joie de vivre and listening to Middle Eastern music at Salem’s World Beat Festival.

Yes, God certainly has given us lots of treasures. When you’re married, though, there’s a limit to what can be known about some of them.

[Tomorrow I'll probably post more belly dancing photos on my HinesSight weblog. Yesterday's post was about a less-joie de virvre'ly first day at the World Beat Festival.]

Comments

[Edward]

ja love

[Roger]

Brian;
I'm still single. Feel free to post as many Belly dancing photos as you like.

[Bob]

I like to think that there is no real gap between the physical and spiritual. In other words, within the physical lies the spiritual, so there is no need to die or go anywhere to get it..only the need to recognize what's already there.

Kinda like what Meister Eckhart says about the inherent divinity in all Life.

“All things are contained in the One, by virtue of the fact that it is one. For all multiplicity is one, and is one thing, and is in and through the One. . . The One is not distinct from all things. Therefore all things in the fullness of being are in the One by virtue of its indistinction and unity. [Sermon LW XXIX]

[Roger]

Dear Bob;
I liked your post. You stated that; "within the physical lies the spiritual", as well as; "only the need to recognize what's already there". How does one go about recognizing the Spiritual that lies within? Have you personally done this?
Is there some technique or method that you could share? Thanks for any non-ambiguous response.

[Brian]

Roger, glad to oblige. Here are some more belly dancing photos:
http://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2006/06/belly_dancing_o.html

[Edward]

This might be frightening. The first question that comes to the mind of the newly existentially present is: What if I am not present tomorrow? Do I lose? Have I missed?

What about dreams - if I remember them, are they now, or past? When I do something out of habit, am I there? Using the front entrance to my office building, I pass the giant red Calder installation, and touch it, like a mezuzah, because, well... I thought to, and now I just do. Is that in the now?

What about the drive to think about now? Is that present, or escapist? Those new to the now will wonder how to plan a wedding.

The amount of work you've done prepares you for the amount of work required to be so very now. It is a wonderful and awesome happiness. It is great to be flexible enough to swat the curious natterings, and still be available to thisness.

I agree with you on "The Power of Now". My friend is reading it because her therapist recommended it, and I wondered if the therapist said when she would be done scanning the text, so she could enjoy the scanner.

Once the spiritual experience occurs, it doesn't split into quanta. There is no "then" to say "that is when it happened, and that is when it stopped." In and out of daily life, the spiritual awakening into now is, oh, how to put it? Now.

[Brian]

Edward, you've got me thinking about "now." I feel like I'm genuinely thinking about now, now. So I guess this counts as a Living in the Now moment. Or rather, succession of moments.

So long as an experience is here now, it is. Here. Now. Trying to be in the now, now, strikes me as being in the now (BITN). Now, if I thought, "tomorrow I'll go to work on being in the now," I'd call that a second order BITN.

What I'm trying to get at, assuming there's anything to get, is the difference between being in touch with reality as a whole, vs. being in touch with reality as the part that is me.

Maybe this isn't a useful distinction. But I feel like I'm BITN when I'm aware of both what's inside and outside of me in essentially equal measure. There's a back and forth flow between the world out there and the world in here.

That keeps me more or less connected to what is happening, now. But I also have the ability to separate myself from the world and envision a completely separate reality.

"In an hour I need to take the dog for a walk around the lake." As a passing intention, there's no problem with this thought. However, if I stop focusing on writing this comment and give most of my attention to imagining what I'll be doing in an hour, that seems un-BITN.

I'm sitting on a chair in my office typing on my laptop. I'm not walking around the lake. Of course, often when I'm walking around the lake I'll be thinking of what I'm going to type on my laptop. More un-BITN, I'd say.

Some would say, quite reasonably, that everything is BITN, and that it isn't possible to not be in the now. Thus worrying about whether or now we are is senseless. Though such worrying also would be BITN.

Well, now I have no idea what is being in the now and what isn't. That's progress toward being in the now, I hope. Unless there's no such thing as progress in the now. Which means...I have no idea.

[Edward]

I think it took a while for me to negotiate the useful tricks we use in "public life" or "polite society". Growing past the protective ego takes doing. Past the parlance of the vox populi is peaceful.

Shifting perspective to where I see that the vast majority of my life is present... that takes away the dictum that I am bad-and-wrong for not being in some intellectual construct that is "the now".

My ego loves the game of "let's escape ego." The truth of the matter is that I am regularly present, enjoying all the faculties that go along with this organism: memory, forecasting, daydreaming, math.

"Everything is present" is sort of tautological. What would I be like if I weren't present? Nameable, but unimaginable.

[Matthew Cromer]

"Some would say, quite reasonably, that everything is BITN, and that it isn't possible to not be in the now. Thus worrying about whether or now we are is senseless. Though such worrying also would be BITN.

Well, now I have no idea what is being in the now and what isn't. That's progress toward being in the now, I hope. Unless there's no such thing as progress in the now. Which means...I have no idea."

I like the formulation from the Islamic Hadith:

"A servant is drawn to Me in prayer until I answer him ; and when I have answered him, I become the ear wherewith he heareth"

To me, that captures perfectly that we start out as "selves" on a spiritual journey and then it is seen that there is no personal, individual self and no journey, that it was all, always, just a story being experienced by "no one".

In the same way, there never was a moment of not being present.