The Ever Passing Present Moment

"When you recognize that the present moment is always already the case and therefore inevitable, you can bring an uncompromising inner "yes" to it and so not only create no further unhappiness, but with inner resistance gone, find yourself empowered by Life itself."

-- Eckhart Tolle --

("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose") 

The empowering nature of the present moment - the "Power of Now" as Tolle calls it - is by no means a "New Age" revelation. Philosophers and spiritual teachers in all ages and traditions have recognized the unique and sacred nature of the present. The Roman Emperor and Stoic philospher, Marcus Aurelius. declared that the present moment is all that a man has "to live and lose." In the Christian tradition, Jesus always addressed the power of our divine nature in the present moment. For him, Heaven was not something far off; rather, he stressed that the "Kingdom of God is within you," (Luke 17:21).

Indeed, in his "Sermon on the Mount" (below) he directly questioned why we always seem to be living for and worrying about some future moment rather than living the fullness of the present moment.

"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on," he urged. "Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?"   

"Which of you by taking thought," he asked, "can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

"Wherefore," he continued to query, "if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."

(Matthew 6:25-329

The present moment is, as Tolle observes, "already the case," and just to the extent that we spend it worrying about some future time do we miss it. Most of Jesus audience were probably oblivious to the flowers growing in the fields around him, or the birds circling overhead. Rather, intent on hearing his words they missed the message until it these marvels were pointed out to them.

With so many distractions, diversions and deadlines today, how many of us miss the present moment? Or worse, how many of us are so resistant to what is happening around us that we have a wholly fallacious notion of what is already transpiring in our lives? Indeed, as Aurelius noted, all we have to live and lose is this ever passing present moment. And it is always in danger of slipping by unnoticed, unheralded, and therefore, unreverenced. But sadly, we will only ever find true awe in this moment.

Krishnamurti and Tolle: "Don't Mind What Happens"

In his best-selling book, "A New Earth," Eckhart Tolle recounts a singular moment in a lecture given by the great enlightened thinker, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Stopping his lecture momentarily, Krishnamurti asked his audience if they wanted to know his "secret" The lecture hall reportedly went silent as the audience waited to hear the pith of Krishnamurti's teaching, the kernel at the heart of the often obscure wisdom that Krishnamurti sought to convey. "This is my secret," he is purported to have said, "I do not mind what happens."

Tolle utilizes this story to emphasize the importance of being "in alignment with what happens." "To be in alignment with what is," he points out, "means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad, but to let it be."

This is undoubtedly part of Krishnamurti's "secret," after all sources as diverse as Shakespeare and the Ashtavakra Gita point out the truth that "nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so." And, on that level, Krishnamurti is surely pointing out that he does not make a judgment on whether what is happening at any moment is good or bad, positive or negative. However, contemplating on this singular event in Krishnamurti's teaching, I find additional (although related) meanings in this "secret."

Krushnamurti must, as set out above, have meant at one level that he does not "mind what happens" by judging its aspects as being positive or negative, good or bad. What happens, happens. It is what it is. And, Krishnamurti apparently took a position of neutrality and non-resistance to whatever happened as Tolle discusses.

At a second level, I suspect that Krishnamruti meant he does not "mind what happens" in the sense that at a deep level he does not take responsibility for what happens externally. Take, for example, the shopkeeper who leaves his store in the care of a clerk while he steps out to do the banking. "Mind the store while I'm gone," he might say. In this sense, I suspect that Krishnamurti knew that there is no one individual who can "mind what happens" collectively, although he undoubtedly recognized that most of us cannot resist trying vainly to shape and manage life's circumstances. The vast majority of us are heavily invested in things turning out the way that we think that they should. We seize responsibility to assure these outcomes, and thus "mind what happens."

"To pursue the unattainable is insanity," Marcus Aurelius observed, "yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so." How many of us seek to attain control of, and manage what happens all around us? The vast, vast majority I would guess. Thus, arises the insanity of "minding" what happens.

At a third level - and this may be the most basic level - I suspect that Krishnamurti meant he did not "mind what happens" in an active sense, with "mind" being the active verb. Krishnamurti, undoubtedly did not "mind what happens" by mechanically turning it over and over in his mind, by chewing on it figuratively, or by letting thoughts of what happens preoccupy his psyche. He did not mentally "mind what happens," or mentate upon it.

To not "mind what happens" in these three senses implies that one has acquired a radical acceptance of what is - neither judging, manipulating, or ruminating on what occurs in one's life. It is, as Krishnamurti notes, a "secret" that we do not have to come to grasps with reality in such manners, but need only accept what happens as it is on its face, as an isolated moment in our lives.

A Morning and Evening Meditation

"Where, then, can men find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing, and one alone: Philosophy. To be a philosopher is to keep unsullied and unscathed the divine spirit within him, so that it may transcend all pleasure and all pain."

-- Marcus Aurelius --

Sages have always touted the benefits of one's morning meditation, presumably because upon rising we have a clean slate, a tabula rosa unaffected by the trials and difficulties that are bound to arise if one is not spiritually centered.

The great stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, was well aware of the necessity of morning meditation. In his Meditations, which were largely written, it seems, for his own benefit, he recommended the following meditation before one sets out to meet life's vicissitudes:

"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness - all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of these things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man's two hands, feet, or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against nature's law - and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction"

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," Book II, Verse I.]

Paramahamsa Yogananda
(1893-1952)

Similarly, sages have also touted the benefit of closing one's day with a period of reflection and meditation. One of India's great modern sages, Paramahamsa Yogananda recommended the following evening meditation for the close of one's day:

"Each worldly person, moralist, spiritual aspirant and yogi - like a devotee - should every night before retiring ask his intuition whether his spiritual faculties or his physical inclination of temptation won the day's battles between good and bad habit; between temperance and greed; between self-control and lust; between honest desire for necessary money and inordinate craving for gold; between forgiveness and anger; between joy and grief; between moroseness and pleasantness; between kindness and cruelty; between selfishness and unselfishness; between understanding and jealousy; between bravery and cowardice; between confidence and fear; between faith and doubt; between humbleness and pride; between desire to commune with God in meditation and the restless urge for worldly activities; between spiritual and material desires; between divine ecstasy and sensory perceptions; between soul consciousness and egoity."

[Paramahamsa Yogananda, "God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita." p. 48.]

Aurelius' morning meditation prepares us for the inevitable battle which we have with the smaller "self" of our egoic mind, while Yogananda's evening contemplation examines how we fared in the day's battle.

The Philosophic Life: Ancient and Modern Views

Philosophy, like salt strewn on the floor of the temple, may have lost its savour. In modern times, philosophy (linguistically speaking, 'the love of knowledge') seems to be the purview of long-winded arguments and arcane proofs of the highest order questions, while in more ancient times, and in other cultures, one either lived as a philosopher, or one did not. It was, and in some rare instances still is, a way of life rather than an academic discipline.

One such modern 'philosopher,' in the truest sense of the word, was the late Paul Brunton. Having adopted philosophy as his station in life rather than as a mere vocation, Brunton was a spiritual seeker of profound breadth and depth. On philosophy and the life-long pursuit of spiritual knowledge as a way of life, he wrote the following:

"Everyone wants to live. Few want to know how to live. If people permit work to take up so much of their time that they have none left for their devotional prayer or mystical meditation or metaphysical study, they will be as culpable for this wastage of life as they will be if they permit transient pleasures to do so."

"Those," Brunton observes, "who have no higher ideal than to chase after amusement and to seek after pleasure may look upon religious devotion as senseless, metaphysical studies as boring, mystical meditation as time-wasting, moral disciplines as repulsive. Those who have no such inner life of prayer and meditation, study and reflection will necessarily pay, in emergencies or crises, the high price of their hopeless extroversion."

"The needs of external life are entitled to be satisfied in their place," Brunton notes, "but they are not entitled to dominate a man's whole attention. The neglected and unnoticed needs of internal life must also receive their due."

[Brunton, "Notebooks of Paul Brunton," Vol. 1, pp. 28-29.]

For his part, Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, a man who came as close to living Plato's ideal of a philosopher-king as any other Western leader, ancient or modern, had the following self-effacing comments on his attempts to live the philosophic life:

"It will tend to avert complacency if you remember that any claim to have lived as a philosopher all your life, or even since reaching manhood, is now out of the question; indeed, it is as evident to many others as it is to yourself that even today philosophy is still far beyond you. Consequently your mind remains in a state of confusion, and it grows no easier to earn the title of philosopher; also, your station in life militates constantly against it."

"Once all this is seen in its true light," he observes, "you should banish all thoughts of how you appear to others, and rest content if you can make the remainder of your life what nature would have it to be. Learn to understand her will, and let nothing else distract you."

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," Book VIII, para. 1.]

Paul Brunton
(1898-1981)

On reconciling the material life with a life of philosophy, Brunton observed: "It is quite true that if a fortunate fate has not relieved him of the necessity, he must work, trade, scheme, or gamble to get the money for (material) things. But all this is insufficient grounds for him to pass through life with no other thoughts in his head than those of bodily needs or strivings. There is still room there for another kind of thought, for those concerning the mysterious elusive and subtle thing that is the divine soul. The years are passing and he cannot afford such a wastage of time, cannot afford the luxury of being so extroverted at the cost of having lost touch with the inner life."

For his part, Aurelius was well aware that the pressing concerns for the 'needs' of everyday living were every bit as much an obstacle in ancient Rome as they remain in our own modern, consumer society. His quest, like Brunton's was how to live a philosophic life in the midst of the pressures and demands of the mundane life.

"Up to now," he reflects in his Meditations, "all your wanderings in search of the good life have been unsuccessful; it was not to be found in the casuistries of logic, nor in wealth, celebrity, worldly pleasures, or anything else."

"Where, then," Aurelius asks, "lies the secret? In doing what man's nature seeks. How so? by adopting strict principles for the regulation of impulse and action. Such as? Principles regarding what is good or bad for us: thus for example, that nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just, self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad unless it has the contrary effect."

Non-Duality in Western Civilization

The West has always been influenced by the East. Even the West's principal religious tradition, Christianity, arose in Palestine, and has as its at root a fundamental non-dualistic perspective. See, for example, the following biblical passages: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD thy God is One." (Deut. 6:4); "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." (John 14:11); "I and the Father are one." (John 4:24).

This non-duality is no mere coincidence of wording, says philosopher and best-selling author, Peter Kingsley. The sense of 'One-ness' was already there at the birth of pre-Christian Western civilization and was then merged into the arising Eastern Christian tradition.

"Its fine what's going on in terms of coming together, and bringing different traditions, together, and this idea of a new global 'One-ness' (or) global harmony. But to me it's very important actually to be able to say, "Well that's been there since the beginning, and we here are looking towards bringing a greater reality or sense of 'One-ness' into these tatters of Western civilization."

"To me,"" Kingsley notes, it is very very important to say, "Yes, but that sense of 'One-ness,' not only did it happen to be there when Western civilization was born, but that it was out of that sense of 'One-ness' that Western civilization was very deliberately created."

While strains of the non-duality from the East permeates both the Old and New Testament, and indeed all of Greek thought, perhaps the great neo-Platonist Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it best in the second book of his famous "Meditations," when he observed:

"This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part."