Not far from my house, in a strip mall on the corner, there is a yoga center which offers classes in meditation.  Whenever I walk by the center and see the class schedule on goldenrod paper taped to the front door, I stop and gaze at it with longing. 

More than anything else I can think of, at this point in my life, I want to sit and engage in the nothingness of meditation.  But the fact is, at this particular time in my life, I am already divided between five kids, two jobs, a marriage, a house, family and friends, and there’s simply nothing left of me to devote to another commitment.

I am not the only one to face this dilemma.  Most of us are terribly overextended in these days of too-much-to-do.  We find that it seems to be part and parcel of modern American life -– hurry, overload, stress.  We also find that as we work for more and more, we enjoy what we have earned less and less.  Here we are, showered with blessings, and drained empty by the upkeep.  But what is the cure?

The New Age tells us the problem is not that there are too many things competing for our attention, but that we simply don’t know how to focus our attention on one thing at a time.  The cure for our stress is not to narrow our lives down to better accommodate our scattered attention, but to narrow our attention down to our lives and what is happening right here, right now, in this moment. 

We begin by learning exactly what this moment really is.

The present moment

According to my clock, this one little moment barely exists.  Blink and its gone.  The next moment is gone just as quickly, and the next.  With so many moments disappearing so fast, it is no wonder that we feel we have to hurry, that we can never catch up.

But my clock has it backwards.  Time as my clock measures it simply doesn’t exist because this one little moment doesn’t disappear at all; it is always here.  It literally lasts forever.      

Time is an illusion we have created for our convenience.  It is a structure that we all use by general agreement, much in the same way that we have agreed that certain words represent certain objects.  Words aren’t real either; the word "hot" has no heat in it.  Yet these symbols of reality allow us to communicate with each other – and show up in the same place at the same time. 

Yes, we can remember moments which came before this one, but we are not remembering previous times so much as we are remembering previous events, or the previous motions of matter.  These events seem to be separated in time because we experience them in succession.  But as each event happens, it is now.  When any past event happened it was now.  When future events happen it will be now.  All events happen now because now is all that exists.

Our clocks perpetuate the illusion of time by adding another number with each sweep of the minute hand.  But we can't actually add to time because this moment has no beginning, and no end.  The ticking of a clock is nothing but matter in motion, as is the rotation and orbit of the planet by which we measure days and years.  Clocks do not measure time, after all, they merely measure movement.

As soon as we understand that now is all there is, we begin to gain some measure of freedom from preoccupation with past and future.  We understand there is no reason to defer our happiness for some magic future, when all will better.  There is no future, and no magic other than what we find here and now.  And there is no past, either.

The past does not exist?  This is a most difficult concept to grasp. After all, we build our identity upon the past.  We look at the person we are today as a result of what happened yesterday.  But if we understand that linear time is an illusion, we see that the people we are today is not a result of what we’ve done in the past, but of what we do today.

Alan Watts' analogy is that of a ship crossing the ocean.  The ship moves in the present while the wake fans out behind it, marking its past.  We wouldn’t say that the wake is propelling the ship; it only marks where the ship has been.  Likewise, we can’t say that the past propels us into the present.  It is the present that creates the past.  A ship may change directions at any time, and so may we.

Sitting

In order to learn to fully inhabit the present moment -– to “be here now” in the words of Ram Dass -- many a religion, teacher, and book will advise us to sit in meditation regularly each day.  Meditation is a vehicle designed to move us from the knowledge of truth on a theoretical level to the experience of truth on a practical level. 

Some consider it the only vehicle able to do the job.  Ken Wilber, for example, suggests that trying to bring about personal transformation through a change in philosophy without the practice of meditation is “like eating the menu instead of the meal.”  He considers some form of meditation necessary not only for individual growth, but for the collective growth of society as well. 

The primary reason that the philosophy of idealism didn’t live up to its promise to transform societies in the past, Wilber argues, is because it failed to “develop any truly contemplative practices…. To reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights and intuition of its founders.”

He echoes a number of others who have pointed out that there is a vast difference between having knowledge and living from that knowledge.  Emerson also lamented the “double-consciousness” of idealism which allowed him to “see” universal truths without giving him the daily means to live those truths. 

“When shall I die and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing a Universe which I do not use?  I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.”  Emerson wished to reconcile his “two lives,” the one of his understanding, the other of his soul. 

This is very much how I feel as I stand in front of the yoga center, longing for time to meditate.  I also keenly feel the difference between knowing truth and living truth, and I know that meditation would help me more fully live from my knowledge.  Yet it is meditation teachers themselves who nudge me away from looking upon meditation as a “solution.”

These teachers tell me that if I decide the answer to my problems is to meditate, then I will remain frozen there on the sidewalk in front of the strip mall, full of longing without end.  They tell me that if I am going to move beyond knowledge that is theoretical to knowledge that is personal and direct, then I have to accept my life as it is today in all its crowded, noisy, too-much-to-do splendor.

It is all workable

Trungpa also noted the disparity between knowledge and our ability to live that knowledge and advised us to avoid judging one state as better than the other.  He advised us to proclaim fearlessly that any state of mind, from stillness to chaos, is acceptable.  If we can sit in calm silence, that is good and we are lucky.  But if there is no room for calm or silence in our lives, that is also good, and we are still lucky. 

“Chaotic situations must not be rejected,” he wrote.  “Nor must we regard them as regressive, as a return to confusion.  We must respect whatever happens to our state of mind…any state of mind must be regarded as a workable situation.”  We are each already where we are supposed to be.

Wilber is surely correct when he says that spiritual growth is the result of practice and not the result of philosophy.  He is also correct when he says it does us no good to change our maps of reality unless we also bring about a change in the mapmaker.  But I think it is also correct to say that in our efforts to put our beliefs into practice, that practice is not necessarily the practice of meditation. 

There are no specific means or special practices that can bring one closer to reality, says Alan Watts, "for every such device is artfulness... There is no way to where we are, and whoever seeks one finds only a slick wall of granite without passage or foothold.  Yogas, prayers, therapies and spiritual exercises are at root only elaborate postponements of the recognition that there is nothing to be grasped and no way to grasp it."

When all is said and done, the most important form of spiritual practice is daily living.  And while meditation practice may be the most effective way to silence the noisy ego long enough to "hear" the truth within us, it does not follow that we can't hear any truth without it.  Intuition of truth has a way of slipping through the cracks in even the thickest walls of thought.  And a shift in perspective is all it takes to open a crack.

Minding the now

To be here now, to truly live in the moment, sounds like it should be easy.  It’s not.  It is one of those paradoxes so common to spiritual endeavors that the effort to live in the moment is what separates us from the moment. 

When we chase after the moment, we only end up chasing it away.  Or as one Zen master put it, looking for the enlightenment of this moment “is like riding an ox to find an ox.”  It is only by remaining open to what is happening now that we are able to notice the moment rising up from beneath us, where it has been all along.

Granted, without the regular practice of meditation, this opening to the moment might not happen very often.  I know that in my own life, I go for days distracted by the density of my thoughts and reactions, and the moment remains completely lost to me. 

But there are many other days -- when I remember to slow down and take a breath – and the moment unexpectedly opens wide beneath me.  While sitting in my backyard with a hot wind ripping at the palms, or while walking up the rocky slope of the desert foothills, or while watching my kids dance along to the radio, I find myself completely present, empty of all but what is here-now. 

"Sometimes," wrote Thoreau, "as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be."

From Thoreau’s writings, it is clear that these random moments were enough for him.  He knew that trying to have more of them, trying to live from them all the time, was the one sure way of preventing them. 

Meditation teaches you this through a process of elimination.  Eventually you learn there is nothing special to learn, nothing special you can do.  You wake up, you eat, you work, you sleep, that is all.

Still, as we go from one to the next to the next, if we hold fast to truth, to knowledge, we will find that it does slowly sink into us, and it does become the level from which we live.  It may take years, decades, even lifetimes.  But that’s okay, everything is workable.  There should be no rush to it, no telling yourself that you aren’t doing it “right.” 

Each of us is already where we are supposed to be, and by waking up each morning as who we are, we fulfill our purpose.

Perhaps we cannot help but long for a fast enlightenment, or a permanent peace.  But in the end, I like to think the purpose of the spiritual quest is not to liberate us, but to teach us how to live more fully in the intriguing land of illusion.  I like to think we are meant to learn not how to escape, but how to engage more fully in what Trungpa call lalita, the dance with apparent phenomena, however it rises in this moment.  I like to think that true liberation happens only when we no longer desire to be liberated at all.

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