There was an opinion piece in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Actually, Let’s
Not Be in the Moment.” Its author, Ruth Whippman, is critical of the modern
mindfulness movement and suspicious of the fact that the practice of
bringing one’s attention to the present moment is being promoted as some sort of
miraculous cure-all, a remedy for all suffering, and that four billion dollars
is said to be spent each year on “mindfulness products.” She’s not the first to
regard the phenomenon with suspicion, and she rightly notes that mindfulness as
it’s often presented is “a philosophy likely more rewarding for those whose
lives contain more privileged moments than grinding, humiliating, or exhausting
ones.” I take her point.
Mindfulness, as even those who don’t mention the
fact mostly know, is a notion that comes from Buddhism. Right mindfulness (sammā-sati
in Sanskrit)
is the seventh element of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path and the first factor in the
Seven Factors of Enlightenment. It’s simply the practice of placing attention on
what is before one in the present moment. It’s simple to describe, but due to
our conditioning few of us can do it easily, and it’s a habit that’s developed
through practice. Buddhists often reasonably complain when
mindfulness gets taken out of the Buddha’s larger teaching to be presented as a
stand-alone self-help method, and they lament when it ends up presented as what
the Buddhist teaching is all about. By itself, it certainly isn’t.
That said, mindfulness is pretty wonderful, even
worthy of being called a miracle, per the title of the famous Thich Nhat Hahn
book. But the miracle is much bigger
than simply peace of mind or an improved golf game (two of the multitude of
benefits said to be a result of it). And
the miraculous aspect of mindfulness needs to be understood even when neither
peace of mind nor a hole-in-one is the result. The present moment is indeed the
only one in which one can honestly live, and ignoring this moment in order to daydream
of the past or project ourselves into a nonexistent future wastes something precious.
Discipline and practice are required to develop the habit of living in the present.
But to separate out mindfulness from all the other aspects of wisdom and to
give it precedence skews things, making something quite wonderful into
something less so. “Mindfulness alone” practice makes mindfulness into a magic
trick and the present moment into something very much like an idol. And an idol is always, it seems to me, a
concept set up to stand in for something that doesn’t really exist. It may be this
species of idolatry that causes Ms. Whippman’s bullshit detector to go off.
To cling to the present moment against
all other moments is to but on blinders. If you scorned all past moments
you’d also reject everything you learned from your birth on. You wouldn’t have the language skills even to
describe the present moment or to relate your experience of it to others. Let
alone to go to the bathroom by yourself if that’s what the present moment
required. Mindfulness of the present moment has nothing to do with dismissing past
or future moments as unimportant or nonexistent. To cling to the present moment
against all other moments can in fact be seen as a kind of sickness. This
sickness can be observed in extreme form in the mental illnesses called
narcissistic personality disorder--with which our president-elect can be
diagnosed--and borderline personality disorder--a condition with which I have
some personal experience and on which I’ve read a good deal of the popular
literature. People with these disorders can be said to live in the present moment
nearly exclusively while disregarding all other moments, and that makes the
present moment often quite horrible for them. Thus they can love you one second
and detest you the next based on whatever you do in a particular moment--for, as
the present moment is the only one they occupy, every difficulty or slight is
perceived as the end of the world. These folks, who suffer greatly, provide a
particularly powerful testimony to the fact that awakening isn’t accessed by
living in the present moment at the exclusion of other moments.
I believe there’s a temptation to replace
mindfulness of the moment with what might be called clinging to the moment, and that clinging solidifies the moment as
an idol, for the present moment as concept can’t withstand scrutiny: each
moment has the habit of disappearing into the next moment, and that process
continues eternally. And each moment itself
can be divided infinitely, it turns out, down to the nanosecond and then way
beyond. Where is it? It’s a moving
target. Those who blithely claim to be resting in the bliss of the present
moment are generally faking that I think.
But hold the moment lightly and you do begin to see
that this moment before us is the only one we’ve got in terms of living our
lives. It’s not that mindfulness makes all other moments cease to exist; rather
such mindfulness reveals the line between this moment and any other moment to
be insubstantial. And once it
becomes hard to locate a boundary between this moment and the ones immediately preceding
and following it, that lack of distinction turns out also to be true of this
moment in relation to the moment of the Earth’s creation as well as to the moment
of the Earth’s ultimate destruction in our sun’s red giant phase--and all
moments in between. Though that’s really only the beginning of the disappearing
boundaries. You might even be compelled say all moments coexist,
if you were compelled to say anything. But you would more likely be inclined to
remain silent.
And though mindfulness of this moment can indeed be
source of joy (or even, indeed, of an improved golf game), it can also be about
sadness and pain. When the present moment
you occupy comes to include someone who’s suffering, there turns out to be no
other choice than to share that suffering. Peaceful feeling or not. But if you’re
practicing mindfulness of the moment, you see that there’s still no better place
to be, for it’s the only place from which you can truly offer compassion.
Perhaps, concludes Ms. Whippman, “rather than
expending our energy struggling to stay in the Moment, we should simply be
grateful that our brains allow us to be elsewhere.” I take her point. The ability not to be in the moment can be a skill that helps us survive. There’s
something to agree with there, especially if one looks at mindfulness, as she
does, as “struggling” to stay in the moment
in hope of some reward. But if you touch
the moment lightly, not assigning this touching a particularly exalted status, not
expecting too much, not expecting anything really, the present moment is indeed
sometimes revealed as the best possible of all places to be. You might even sometimes
weep with gratitude.
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