Being in the now now

By Peter Townshend

"Be here now", we are told. "This moment is all that exists". "Be fully present in the now". These are modern spirituality's takes on ancient wisdom. And, as is so often the case with modern interpretation of ancient wisdom, the meaning gets altered to resonate with an audience not versed in the culture and times in which the thought emerged.

I look at this from a deeply personal ledge (which is, of course, a central problem). I'm not entirely convinced that the present actually exists. Or perhaps its existence isn't perceivable, as my "awareness" is truly activated only by memory – the moment I perform an action, it is already taking place in the past. What we are really being told when someone says, "be here now", is "be in the extremely near past, not the distant past". And, if the past is all we are, and all we have, then one could argue that we should embrace it, and a legitimate strategy to achieving bliss, is full absorption of that which was. But, and this is where the personal problem arises, this is written by someone who is far too attached to their sense of "I-ness". And I am. The greatest joys I have in life are in the moments experienced through the filter of memory. And the memory of connections that the "I" has made with other "I's". And this, I am told is a significant barrier to bliss

Ram Dass, who popularised the phrase, "Be here now", claims that the only place you ever actually are is now, and most of our suffering comes from the mind's compulsive habit of living everywhere else (in memory, anticipation, regret, fantasy) rather than in the simple, unmediated fact of this moment. However, surely the fleeting nature of the now makes this impossible? Also, the past is not only a place of suffering, but of joy. We shouldn’t avoid it, or ignore it. In fact, it’s all we really are. Besides, some of the greatest moments of joy that I have had came from being lost in the memory of past joy. That moment of recollection can be more blissful than the event as it happened.

These are not necessarily contradictions, but perspectives operating at different levels of reality – the psychological and the ontological.

Of course, the argument is that even in those moments of deep recollection, we concentrate on having them in the now – if your focus is on memory recall, then be there now with that focus, even if it is on the past. This is where the true ancient wisdom comes into play. Ram Dass’s “be here now” is really just a distillation that he received from his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, which was bhakti-inflected Hindu practice filtered through his own psychedelic and psychological background. Behind Ram Dass sit both Neem Karoli Baba as his guru, and the deeper philosophical lineage of Ramana Maharṣi and the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara, which is itself a systematic elaboration of the Upaniṣads. This is a significant philosophical lineage, whose messaging is largely forgotten by the time Ram Dass and those who followed, began using the idea of radical presence as a therapeutic tool – if you stay in the present, your worries about the past and future (which literally don't exist), will fade. But the Vedic/Upaniṣadic case for presence isn't therapeutic. It's ontological. It says the past and future have no ultimate reality – only Brahman is, and Brahman is always now.

This, of course, is deeply philosophical and somewhat unhelpful as a tool to heal a western world fed on a diet of intellectual junk and quick dopamine snacks. But, nonetheless, it is a philosophy that should be considered seriously as it helps us understand the more subtle aspects of radical awareness. The modern "be here now" is a practice. It’s an instruction. It is something we do, or perform. It's a way for us to find calm in the chaos.

The Vedic position is way more radical. "Be here now" makes no sense from a Vedic point of view – you cannot not be here now (which is the complete opposite to what I was saying in the opening of this essay), because there is no now, or, rather, there is only now. But this point is really just a philosophical sleight of hand, separating the "self" (which experiences) and the “true self” (which exists beyond time and space, and is both simultaneously always and never in the now).

The "me" who is typing this "now", who is drawing on memories to do so, who is periodically taking breaks and getting lost in other memories (beautiful memories), is himself an illusion; this is māyā, the superimposition of unreality onto the real. I am actually not, not in the now, hugging those I remember hugging, I only believe that I am, due to my ignorance. So, for Vedānta, the idea that I need to "be here now" is really just a continuation of the illusion from which I desperately need to be unshackled. Instead, I need to remove the veil that prevents me from recognising that "now" is an illusion.

Eckhart Tolle arguably made "being here now" even more popular, with his book, The Power of Now. Like Ram Dass, Tolle's primary philosophical debt is to Advaita Vedānta. The core move in The Power of Now – that you are not your thoughts, that there is a witnessing presence prior to mental content, that the "pain body" is a kind of accumulated false self – is straight Advaita dressed in contemporary language. And, despite how uncomfortable this is to the ego, I am wholly onboard.

The self-inquiry Tolle recommends (who is the one experiencing this?) is lifted from the Advaita tradition's neti, neti method and Ramana's central question: Ko'ham? (Who am I?). Now, there is no criticism here. Tolle does exactly what I argued was necessary earlier – he creates a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between east and west, philosophical and practical, ontological and emotional. But in doing so (and I wonder whether this is unavoidable), he takes the Upaniṣadic insight and flattens it in order for it to fit within a therapeutic framework, and something is lost.

In the Upaniṣads, the recognition that only the present is real arrives through jñāna, or sustained philosophical inquiry, that dismantles false identification layer by layer (somebody today asked me how I stopped my analysis paralysis and my answer was exactly this: self-study). It's the self-study that reveals our ajñāna (our ignorance). It's rigorous, uncomfortable, and invariably changes your metaphysical understanding of what you are.

In Tolle, it is, perhaps, not that profound. It's a subtle acceptance of what is, a calm settling into the now to temporarily bypass all else, a dropping of resistance. The feeling overtakes the thinking. But I have yet to meet someone who has found anything but temporary relief this way. Why? Well, the Vedic tradition would say this approach is fine as a starting point, but without the discriminative understanding (viveka) it won't hold. You'll have glimpses and then the mind reasserts itself, and you won't know why, because you never actually understood the mechanism. You need your buddhi to discern that which is real from that which is not.

But it could be argued that this approach is exactly what is needed for the modern, Western audience, who struggle to take the conceptual and make it practical. Because most of us are stuck in māyā, happily, and we need the tools of the Vedas to operate within a framework that works towards the radical ideology of the Vedas in a manner that transports us over a swamp of philosophical inquiry. So Tolle's description of how the mind uses past and future to maintain the ahaṅkāra (the ego's sense of continuity) is more granular and clinically useful than most classical Vedāntic writing, which tends to treat the problem more abstractly.

Modern thinking has also been influenced by other traditions, for example, the North American traditions of the Lakota, Ojibwe, Cherokee, and others, all of which have different cosmologies, ceremonial structures, and philosophical emphases. Most of these traditions share a cosmological orientation that is radically present-tense, but not in the introspective, witness-consciousness way of Vedānta. It's more relational and ecological, or so my understanding of it shows, anyway.

The Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ (usually translated "all my relations") is spoken as a present-tense acknowledgment of interconnection. Not a belief about the past or a hope for the future. A recognition of what is, right now, in this moment of relation. Every ceremony begins with it. It's a presence practice embedded in language.

My limited experience of these traditions has taught me that presence is not arrived at through inward withdrawal from the world, or from recognition of "oneness", but rather from unity within separation, and connection to that which lies outside us, but is linked to us. Presence is achieved through deeper immersion in relation to land, to ancestors, to community, to the more-than-human world. This feels more liveable, more available to someone embedded in relationship and community.

Where Vedānta says go inward until you find what doesn't move, the Native American traditions tend to say go outward into right relation until the separation between you and the world dissolves. It's the same dissolution, different direction.

But, to close the loop, I still maintain that it's the absorption of the ontological into the experiential where the confusion arises. I do see the usefulness of bringing the mind to a point of stillness in the "now" where we cease our worries about past and future. This is ideological thought in practice. I see the value of arriving, in the now, into something bigger than me. But I can also see the philosophical degradation of this idea, or rather the remarkable removal from its ancient origin – that there is only Brahman, and hence there is no now, or only now, but not to those lost in their māyā selves.

So, I will continue to practice mindfulness and presence, while holding the uncomfortable knowledge that these practices are, at best, sophisticated tools for navigating māyā – not escaping it. There seems to be an agreement across traditions that this sense of self we cling to, that experiences joy in memory, that grieves what is gone, that reaches toward connection – that self is not ultimately real. But, goodness, it is all we know. All we have to interact with this world with. All we really know how to be… and that, is exactly the point. The moment simultaneously exists only in the past, and not at all. And here I am, anyway.