FSB Author Article
Where Do You Go When You Leave The NOW?
By Richard Moss, MD
Author of The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of
Awareness
Recently, I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a 50 foot boat with five other men. For 19 days we were out of sight of land. There was no getting off that boat.
When you are way out at sea, you soon learn that the ocean is a true wilderness; it can never be tamed. A modern sailboat is designed to harness wind and remain stable in ever-changing waters; it can withstand a great deal. But no sailboat can conquer the ocean. And because you can't get off, to be an intelligent person means to learn to stay present, let each moment fill you, act appropriately to the demands of the situation, keep learning, and do what you can to make the journey safe and fulfilling for your companions. Sailing is a wonderful metaphor for our most essential journey: learning to live in the Now.
In our lives the Now is our on-going wilderness. Our vessel for sailing the uncertain seas of Now is our awareness, our power to be attentive and the quality with which we give our attention to every moment of our experience. Like the ocean and wind, the present moment cannot ever really be controlled; what we will be faced with even in the next moment, we cannot know ahead of time. Whatever it is, we can live it with gracefulness and wisdom, or thrash about in fear, reaction and defensiveness. Truth is, for most of us, if the Now becomes too rough, too threatening or painful and we do not have the power to stay present with what life is asking us to receive, feel, or do, we will likely flee. When we do leave it turns out that there are only four places we can go: into the past, the future, stories about ourselves, or stories about others. When we understand the practical wisdom of recognizing these four places, we will have simultaneously learned how to consistently return to the Now. Then we become master sailors of life.
As children we flee the Now; we have no choice. We are too vulnerable to remain fully present for our parents' fears, anger, arguments, and their painful misjudgments of our behaviors, impulses and needs. We are too young to know how to use the power of our awareness to understand and perhaps forgive them, or to turn our attention toward any feeling or strong sensation and receive it without reaction and defense. Few of us ever learn this, but it makes the difference between living as victims in our lives, or as loving, authentic, joyful, and grateful people.
All of us understand the bounty of living in the Now. Whether we are engaged in athletic pursuits, yoga, meditation, love-making, parenting, solving a challenging problem or in any creative activity, we are most alive and effective when we are most present. On the other hand, when our minds carry us away from the Now, we are likely to be polluted by confused or conflicting thoughts and negative emotions. The most important thing we can ever learn is how to live in the present. But to do so one of the first things we have to understand is where we go when we leave.
The four directions: past, future, me, and you can be understood as the result of two dynamics that are fundamental to our experience of ordinary consciousness. The first is the brain's manner of perceiving time as a movement from past to future. The second is the dualistic, subject-object, nature of our basic consciousness. Subject-object means that as soon as there is self there is other, the observer and the observed. The subject is what we mean when we say "I" or "me." The object can be anything we think about: a person, money, our job, God. Once our minds leave the present we become the victims of delusion. The delusions are self-made; they are built from the ways that we identify with our stories about ourselves, others, the past, or the future.
I use the word ‘story' to indicate that our thinking about ourselves, others, the past, or the future is always an opinion, a judgment, or a belief. It is not something we can ultimately know to be true. We can accept a simple observation such as, "it is raining" to be true if, in fact, it is raining. But when we proclaim, "What a miserable rainy day" this is a story; it is a negative judgment. Our stories become true for us because we believe them and become identified with them. Then each story generates some emotion or feeling in us not intrinsic to the actual moment itself. We become depressed or self-important, angry or hurt, fearful or hopeful, guilty, regretful, blaming, or nostalgic. This ceaseless pollution of our now is the principle source of the conflict, distrust and emotional suffering in our lives and in human affairs. If we can understand how we poison ourselves with our thinking and learn to remain in the Now, we heal and transform ourselves, and what we do for ourselves, we ultimately do for everyone.
In The Mandala of Being, I use a simple mandala to represent Past, Future, Subject, and Object arranged around a circle like 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock, with Now as the central point. A mandala, which means "circle" in Sanskrit, is a symbolic representation of the Self in Hindu and Buddhist thought. My simple mandala forms the basis for a practice that shows us how our emotional reality is actually the consequence of which of these directions our minds primarily go when we leave the Now.
When we go into the future we worry about virtually anything: our health, our finances, our children's futures. Alternately, we hope for virtually anything: getting the promotion, winning the lottery, meeting the perfect partner. The result of our future stories is to fill our Now with fear or hope. We suffer fear and prefer hope. But hope is also a problem, because when we tell ourselves stories that conjure positive feelings it is precisely because we do not know how to connect with and accept what we are actually feeling.
When we leave the Now and go into the past we can feel guilt, nostalgia, or regret. We blame ourselves or others for what happened a moment ago or decades past. We tell ourselves that everything would be better if only we, or they, had acted differently. We burden the present with what we have chosen consciously or unconsciously to believe about the past, rather than discover who we really are in the Now. This is exactly the kind of self-avoidance most of us do a lot of the time. Living in the past gives us no foundation, no true self, to stand on. We can never really know if our past stories are true. But even if they are, why should this new moment, filled with infinite possibility, have to become the victim of recycled misery, or be held up in comparison with some long lost success or joy? Until this moment fills us and is enough, we can never know our own fullness.
When our minds carry us into me (subject) stories we create grandiose or depressive beliefs about ourselves. By identifying with them, we lose contact with our larger awareness that can allow us to simply see these stories and not become possessed by them. Our me stories are never gentle with us. Grandiosity leads us to discount others, which ruins our relationships. Depressive beliefs create loneliness and insecurity. Until we can learn to move our attention into the Now, we cannot really love ourselves, or invite love into our relationships.
Finally, when we move into you (object) stories we become angry, jealous, envious, hurt, or make another so special we give our power away. We don't see people as they really are and can't feel true empathy or compassion for them.
The alternative to living in past, future, me, or you, is to learn to rest in the Now. Without stories poisoning our Now, we discover that we are sufficient just as we are. Life is good. We realize that we are already who we have been trying to become. We understand that others are victims of their stories, as we have been, and spontaneously feel empathy and compassion for them instead of judgment. To become conscious of who we really are, moment by moment, releases us from so much unnecessary suffering. We feel connectedness, gratitude, and happiness. Learning to live more consistently in the Now, we make peace within ourselves. This is how we make peace in our world.
Copyright © 2007
Richard Moss, MD
Based on the book The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness © 2007 by Richard Moss. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.d.
Author Bio
Dr. Richard Moss
is an internationally respected spiritual teacher and visionary
thinker. He is the author of
The Mandala of Being: Discovering the Power of Awareness and
four other books on conscious living and inner transformation. For
thirty years he has guided people of diverse backgrounds in the use of
the power of awareness to realize their intrinsic wholeness and reclaim
the wisdom of their true self. His work integrates spiritual practice,
psychological self-inquiry, and body awareness. You can visit him
online at
http://www.richardmoss.com.