What if the Now Doesn't Exist?

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.

                                                                           Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now

 Eckhart Tolle, ‘Mr. Now,’ is among many spiritual teachers who tell us that past is not real because it’s over and done with, the future is not real because it isn’t here yet, and so “the present moment is all you have.” But in what way is this true? Is it true like 3x4=12 or the sun is 93 million miles from the earth, or is it true as a consistent way of thinking about things, like it’s true that in Middle Earth hobbits are both brave and small? Is this primacy of the Now an absolute truth – reality with a capital R – or is it one way to think about things?

 You could easily flip the idea around and say that past and future are what exist and the Now is an illusion. Nothing is more real than the past, its artifacts are arrayed all around us, without it cause and effect can’t take place, and anyway, its events were here less than a blink of an eye ago. As for the future, it has been reliably chugging along for 13.8 billion years and shows no sign of letting up. There is nothing the least bit illusory about either of them. But the Now, like the line between land and sea at the beach, is a much more slippery concept. Just like you can never say where exactly sea and shore meet, you can never say quite when Now is. Does Now even have duration? If it does, is it a microsecond, a full-on second, or some other, yet to be determined span of time? By the time you finish saying, “Now!” it’s too late, it has gone away.

 You might reply that this is the wrong way of thinking, that the Now is an eternal present beyond time. Okay, but if the Now is eternal, how could I possibly be “in” it, in time? Does Now exist, like 4:00 in the afternoon exists? Or are we to give it some privileged status where Now is both in time and yet also outside of time? Should I really be making “the primary focus” of my life something so hard to pin down as this elusive Now?

 In this way, the Now is like matter. Matter seems solid enough, this chair I’m sitting on seems firmly here, but its atoms are mainly composed of vacuum, or they may in fact be waves, or part of a string, or an element in an energy field; in the same way, the more you look at the Now, the less tangible it becomes. If the Now is an ongoing slippage zone between past and future, if it has no definable duration, is it a place we can really inhabit at all? When we meditate and quietly scold ourselves for not being “in the Now,” have we in fact just given ourselves Mission Impossible? Time, as T.S. Eliot put it in the Four Quartets, is a more complicated business than we imagine: 

 Time past and time present

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstract

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might and been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus in your mind.                          

 Time present, past and future are not separate entities parading along in an orderly fashion under the command of a regularly ticking clock; they are an intermingled mishmash of influences, actions and memories that regularly intrude on one another, elongating and shortening time like Alice in Wonderland as she eats from different sides of the mushroom, while “what might have been” hovers over it all like a ghostly palimpsest. Later in the same poem Eliot adds:

 Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.

 Eliot’s Now seems very different from Tolle’s, as the future haunts the past and the echoes of the past ring into the future, eliminating the primacy of the Now because “all is always now.” A little later on Eliot says, “In my beginning is my end,” where you might say that germ of the massive oak tree is contained inside the acorn; and soon after that he also says, “in my end is my beginning,” which simultaneously suggests that the tiny acorn is still there in the mature oak, and also that future life resides in the DNA of the mature or dying tree. Time, including time present, is not the predictable progress we are told about by the comforting mythology of clocks or the rush of the daily rush hour.

 Just a few days ago I was reading a P.D. James novel and to my surprise this murder mystery contains a very thoughtful and poetic meditation on time and the “illusory present:”

 Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on mind and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown-ever-flowing Thames.

                                                                                          P.D. James: The Private Patient

 Unfortunately, the “her” in question turns out to be especially short on time, since she is the one who gets murdered in the story. But that aside, to James the “illusory present” only gets to be real when it is “caught and solidified in stone and brick.” The present finds its meaning in relation to past and future, as when a piece of music unfolds to our ears as a succession of notes connected to one another through memory and expectation. The notes in a measure just heard and the notes about to be anticipated have no resonance or special significance as isolated sounds; it is through the relationship between past and future – through escaping the tyranny of Now – that we detect melody. And as it is with music, so it is with consciousness. Shorn of past and future we would become a zombie, a meaningless shell, and that is the real result of literally being “in the Now.”

 Then is Tolle completely wrong in what he says? We the listeners bear much of the responsibility for the calcification of Now by reifying the ideas of our gurus instead of “playifying” – playing with – them. Adoring audiences, questing some kind of certainty in the flux of life, quietly pressure the gurus into stances of greater and greater dogmatic conviction, while play asks no more than “What if?” What if Now is the only thing I need? Or, on the other hand, what if it’s the only thing I don’t need? Or is it something else again? That is so different to “I must learn this teaching so I can enlighten myself.” We don’t want to make the pursuit of enlightenment a box to trap ourselves in. The escape route? Curiosity and the next What if? We might imitate our children and ask what if the cardboard boxes of life were a bus, or a submarine, or a rocket ship? Where would we go? What adventures lie there?

 When we take a psychedelic, we can become, as we say, more present. But this being present is not so much a matter of time as it is of attention. The drug shuts down our normally dispersed attention span and lets us concentrate in more focused ways than we could normally imagine. With that comes the ‘deeper’ experience we call visionary, where the pattern on a leaf or the pattern of a landscape declare themselves as resonant with meaning, or light isn’t just nice and shiny, but comes directly from the divinity. Our usual attention state is dispersed and alert, because that is how we survive, whether we are walking down the street, or on a train, at work, or walking through a forest a thousand years ago. The kind of focus psychedelics give us can go so deep that it is non-adaptive to survival, after all, the animal that stands around intently staring at the tulips will not last long, and so this stance goes against the habitual workings of the brain.

 What if we think about this state of presence as less about trying to squeeze ourselves between past and future into some hard to locate Now, and more about noticing the fine details of everything that is happening? Not so much lost in thought as being lost in sensation. Among the What ifs that are available, this one may have plenty of adventures for us to enjoy.