A couple of years ago I visited the British Museum in London, and came across a group of tourists who were filming the museum’s exhibits with mobile phones and video cameras. They weren’t actually looking at the ancient relics, just filming them. The museum was busy and some exhibits, such as the Rosetta Stone, were so popular that it was difficult for them to film without obstruction, so occasionally the tourists grew impatient with one another and started to jostle and push. (Of course, if they’d simply been content to look at the exhibits this wouldn’t have been such a problem.) As I was observing the tourists, it struck me that none of them are actually here now . Rather than looking at these amazing relics now, I thought, they’re only preparing to look at them in the future, when they get back home. In fact they’re not visiting this museum now, they’re visiting it in the future.
It seemed an absurd situation. Since they’re physically here now, wouldn’t it be easier for them to put the video cameras down and actually look at the exhibits now, rather than put if off until some future date? I thought. Wouldn’t the actual present experience of seeing the Rosetta Stone – the full sensory experience of being here and now – be much more fulfilling than the experience of watching it on DVD at a later date?
About a year ago I witnessed a similar scene at a family wedding. The bride spent hours getting ready in the morning. Her friend (who worked as a hairdresser) styled her hair and she hired a professional beautician to do her makeup and nails. The actual marriage ceremony was quite short, and filmed by several different people on mobile phones and digital cameras. Later that afternoon, at the reception, the bride and groom spent most of their time walking around the grounds of the hall being photographed. They stopped underneath trees, by flowerbeds, by the gates of the hall, posing by themselves and then with a variety of combinations of family members. The process seemed to last forever, and to be the main focus of the reception.
And it made me wonder: is this wedding really taking place now ? Had the bride spent so long getting ready because she wanted to look good for the ceremony, or because she wanted to look good in the future, when she watched the video of the ceremony and looked at the photos? As I watched them pose for photos, it struck me that the bride and groom weren’t actually here. They were in the future, looking at these photos five, ten or 15 years from now. They were more interested in recording the day for the future then actually experiencing it now, in the present.
Again, I thought, wouldn’t it be much better to forget about the future and give their full attention to the present experience of their wedding day, to live fully in the moment and take in the reality of what was happening in the now? Wouldn’t that make a much more fulfilling wedding day?
These are extreme examples, but they’re illustrations of one of the major effects of humania, although one that may not be immediately obvious: our inability to live in the present. As well as ‘the people who can’t do nothing,’ an indigenous anthropologist might call us ‘the people who can’t live in the present.’
Terms like ‘living in the present’ or ‘in the here and now’ have become so familiar that they’re almost clichés, but what do they actually mean?
Living in the present means being fully conscious of your experience, experiencing the is-ness of your surroundings, and of the sensations you’re having. It means living in the world – as opposed to living inside your head – while being aware of yourself, in your own mental space.
You can live in the present when you have a shower in the morning; rather than letting your attention be immersed in thoughts, bring your attention to the sensations you’re feeling right at this moment – the sensation of warm water splashing against your skin and running down your body. You can live in the present when you eat – instead of reading a newspaper or magazine or chatting to the person next to you while you eat, give your attention to the smell and taste of the food and the sensations of chewing and swallowing it. And you can live in the present while you’re walking down the street, if you give your attention to the sensation of your feet touching and leaving the pavement, and really look at the buildings and the trees you pass, and the clouds and the sun above you.
This sounds simple, but it’s something that most of us rarely do. Because of our ego-madness, we spend most of our lives in a state of absence, or ‘elsewhereness.’
Elsewhereness
There are a number of ways in which humania takes us away from the present. On the one hand, our thought-chatter takes us ‘elsewhere.’ We can’t experience the world directly through our senses, but only through a fog of mental impressions. Instead of being aware of the taste of your food, the sensation of water against your skin, or the buildings and other phenomena around you, you’re in the bar with your friends last night, or ten years ago when your children were babies, or a few days in the future at a pop concert, or a few weeks in the future at a job interview you’re dreading. This is what I sometimes call ‘internal elsewhereness’ – we’re absent because our attention is immersed inside us, in our thoughts.
We’re always aware of our surroundings to a degree, of course – if we weren’t, we’d bump into walls, get run over or miss our train stop. But we’re usually only aware of them in a rudimentary, automatic way. Every minute of the day is filled with different experiences – different sights and sensations, different feelings, tastes, smells and sounds – but we’re only conscious of these to a very small degree. We aren’t completely elsewhere, but we’re usually only present to a very small degree. We travel without being really aware of our surroundings, look without really seeing, eat without really tasting, breathe and move without being conscious of our bodies.
And if we’re not absent internally in this way, we’re usually absent externally, by giving our attention to distractions and activities. At the same time as taking us out of ourselves, activities and distractions take us out of the present. To a greater or lesser extent – depending on how absorbed we become – when we watch TV, play computer games, or do our jobs, we narrow our attention down to one focus, and exclude the rest of our surroundings from our awareness, and also lose awareness of ourselves. Rather than being here, we’re immersed in the alternate reality of TV shows or computer games, or in the abstract worlds of information we take in from magazines, newspapers or the Internet. This is what you might call ‘external elsewhereness.’
In the modern world, ‘external elsewhereness’ is becoming easier and easier to access. A few years ago, there were some situations where it was hard to find – in waiting situations (e.g. at the bus stop, in the doctor’s waiting room, or stuck in traffic), traveling on a train or a bus, or walking from one place to another. You could always read while you were waiting or traveling, but often the magazine or newspaper might not be interesting enough to hold your attention, so that it was easy to drift into ‘internal elsewhereness’ instead. Or you might even experience a touch of ‘hereness’ – or presence – and pay real attention to your surroundings, the people around you, the buildings you were passing, and the sky above you. But with the advent of gadgets like Blackberries, eBook readers, iPads, smart phones and iPods, there is instant, easy access to external elsewhereness in every situation. There’s always an entertaining alternative to being aware of your surroundings and your experience. In many people’s lives, reality is just an occasional presence, an incidental background to the endless parade of entertainment passing before their eyes. It’s never been as easy to escape the present, and people have never been as alienated from it.
We often go through the whole day switching from internal to external elsewhereness, with our attention bouncing from one distraction or activity to the next, with short periods of thought-chatter in-between. It’s quite rare that our attention becomes fully focused on the real physical world around us or on the sensations we’re experiencing. It’s quite rare that our attention withdraws into our own being, so that we really feel our presence in the world.
A lot of the time we aren’t even present to the people we meet throughout the day. Often we don’t give our full attention to our partners, friends, and family or to strangers when we talk to them. We might look at them and nod our heads every few seconds, but at the same time we’re thinking about the e-mails we’re going to write, or the new CD we’re going to listen to later. This causes problems in our relationships, since it makes our partners, work colleagues and friends feel devalued. We’re effectively saying to them, ‘You’re not worthy of my attention.’
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with letting yourself be taken out of the present sometimes. We can’t give our attention to our surroundings and our experience all the time. We need to narrow our attention to one focus a lot of the time to deal with the demands of everyday life, in order to concentrate and absorb information. The problem is that we spend almost no time in the present, or that we’re only ever in the present to a very limited extent.
But hold on, you might object, what about when you think about the present?
But you can never think about the present, only experience it. When you drink a cup of tea, you can only experience it, not think about it. When you look at a beautiful landscape, you can only experience it, not think about it. If you do start thinking about it – for example, if you start comparing it to another landscape or wondering about the animals that might live there – you’ve already moved out of the present; you are no longer experiencing it fully. Thinking is never about the present, but always about the future or past. Your thought-chatter consists of replayed past experiences, anticipated future experiences, and more chaotically, random impressions and bits of information you’ve processed at some point in the past, or imaginary scenarios and situations that aren’t part of the past, future or present, because they’re unreal.
In a normal state of mind, you might ask yourself: what’s the point in paying attention to my surroundings? I’ve seen trees, flowers, buildings, and everything else thousands of times before and there’s nothing special about them. They’re just ordinary and dreary.
But when you are truly present, you realize that you were never really seeing these things. The world becomes a completely different place, a much more beautiful, meaningful, and harmonious one, which we intuitively know is closer to the reality than our normal vision. The world around us comes to life, as if a new dimension has been added to it. The night sky outside your window seems to radiate benevolence, the trees sway with a beautiful serenity, and harmony pervades the air. It seems somehow magnificently right to be alive in the world. In this state of presence, you experience yourself in a completely different way too, with a new relationship to the cosmos, other people and to yourself. You feel a deep-rooted sense of inner wellbeing, a sense of inner fullness and stillness, together with a sense of connectedness to the world.
Looking forward
Another way in which we escape the present is by ‘looking forward.’ Because we often feel dissatisfied in the present, we turn our attention away from it, and take refuge in the future.
When I was at university, I suffered from depression. In the last year of my course, I lived alone in a single room and cut myself off from other people. I stopped going to lectures (I only went to two in the whole year) and only attended the bare minimum of seminars each week. I had one friend who I saw every week or two, but the rest of the time I was alone. I lost confidence in social situations, and felt as though I didn’t know how to communicate anymore. I even found it difficult just to go into shops to buy food or cigarettes. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning, and usually got up around lunchtime.
I felt so unhappy that I decided I was going to leave university, even though it was only a few months before I finished my degree. I decided that I was going to go abroad. I told myself that in May, after saving up some money, I would go to Paris. I’d heard there was a bookshop there with lots of small rooms where you could live for free if you were a writer. Apparently all you had to do was turn up and hand over a piece of writing to the owner – if he was impressed he would let you stay above the shop. I’d written some poetry and had started a novel, and had a romantic image of myself as a novelist in Paris, like Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. It would mean leaving university without a degree, but what did that matter?
That was one idea. Another was that I was going to live as a busker in Amsterdam. I occasionally went busking in the town center, playing guitar and singing, even though I never made very much money. But I’d heard that Amsterdam was a busker’s paradise, and that you could sleep on canal boats for a cheap price.
Looking back, there was no way on Earth I was going to carry out either of these plans. At that time I wouldn’t have been brave enough to travel abroad on my own – I was too insecure and naive. I wouldn’t have been foolish enough to leave university either, just before the end of the course, after three years. But in my mind it was clear. I remember telling someone about my plans and he looked at me doubtfully and said, ‘You’re one of those people who makes plans but doesn’t go through with them, aren’t you?’ I was hurt and puzzled. I didn’t understand what he meant. To me, there was no doubt that in a few months I’d be living off a couple of hours’ singing a day and sleeping on a canal in Amsterdam, or writing short stories in the Parisian cafés.
And of course, I didn’t do anything. I sat out the final months of my course, somehow scraped through my exams, and returned to my hometown to try to rebuild my personality and my life.
Eventually it occurred to me that I’d been using these pipedreams as a strategy to cope with my unhappiness. In a different environment, I might have tried to escape from my psychological discord by taking drugs or drinking. But instead I used imaginary futures to make my present seem more endurable.
The Iceman Cometh by the American playwright Eugene O’Neill expresses how vital pipedreams can be for human beings. The play is set in a rundown bar; the characters are tramps and alcoholics who cope with the hopelessness of their predicament by deluding themselves. One of them, Joe, once owned a casino and keeps saying that he’s going to reopen it soon; Cecil ‘The Captain’ Lewis claims that any moment now he’s going back to England to live; Pat McGloin, a former police lieutenant, tells the others that he’s waiting for the right time to appeal against the charges that saw him kicked out of the force; ‘Jimmy Tomorrow’ is a former journalist who keeps saying that ‘tomorrow’ he’s going to get a new job, and so on. But tomorrow never comes, of course, and they all exist in limbo, anticipating a reality that never comes into being.
Another character, a salesman called Hickey, appears at the bar once a year, on his return from his sales trips. He’s recently stopped drinking and feels like a new man, free and contented. He tries to persuade the characters to stop dreaming and try to achieve their goals. ‘Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrows,’ he tells them. The next day all the men dress up in their best clothes, and head out into the city, planning to look up old contacts and find jobs.
None of them have any success, of course, and they all come back to the bar that evening in a state of despair. After trying to achieve them, they realize how unfeasible their hopes were, and can’t use them to help keep them sane anymore. They can’t even find solace in drink now, and curse Hickey for showing them the truth. But then, after a few hours, the survival mechanism of ‘looking forward’ kicks in again. They go back to their drunken delusions, keeping faith in a tomorrow that never comes. The moral of O’Neill’s play is that human beings need pipedreams for the same reason that Pascal believed we need diversions: to stop us facing up to the awful reality of our predicament.
Again, these are extreme examples, but it’s a strategy that we all use frequently. It can happen so subtly that you may not consciously be aware of the process. You might be at work on a Wednesday afternoon, feeling a little bored, or watching TV on your own in the evening, feeling a little lonely. You react to these negative feelings by looking into the future and scanning for any upcoming events or arrangements you think you’re going to enjoy. You instinctively need to ‘latch on’ to something in the future. At work, you might look forward to a drink or meal in the evening to get you through the day. Or during the week, you might look forward to a night out with friends at the weekend. You picture yourself there, enjoying the meal or chatting and laughing with your friends, and straightaway your mood perks up, and the time doesn’t seem to weigh so heavily on your hands.
Or, if you can’t find anything to latch on to in the future, you create something. You phone a friend and ask her if she wants to go out for a meal, you book a ticket for a concert or ask your partner if he fancies going away for the weekend next month. And so you do have something to look forward to, and there is some future happiness to distract you from your present discontent.
Most of us try to make sure that there’s at least one pleasant future event at the back of our minds to which to turn our attention. It could be a favorite TV show, your football team’s next home game, or your next vacation. Or, perhaps slightly less commonly, we give ourselves much more long-term aims to look forward to – a plan to give up your humdrum job in a couple of years and start your own business or go traveling around the world, or pipedreams of ‘making it’ as an actor or pop star – so that we can anticipate and imagine the lifestyles we’ll have then.
However, one of the problems with the future is that at some point it always becomes the present – and it usually doesn’t live up to our expectations. The night out or weekend away might be very pleasant, but somehow the reality wasn’t quite as exhilarating as the anticipation. Often this is because when we arrive in the future, we always take our psychological discord with us. What you didn’t include in your image of your weekend away was that you’d be carrying around exactly the same background anxiety in your mind as at home.
But in a way this doesn’t matter, because as soon as one event passes, we replace it with another. Even if the TV show or football was disappointing, you can always look forward to tomorrow night or next Saturday. The whole point of ‘looking forward’ isn’t to actually enjoy the event you anticipate, but to take you away from the present.
Many people ‘wish away’ their whole lives like this, switching their attention from one future event to the next. Almost as soon as they get back from one vacation, they book another and start telling their friends, ‘I can’t wait till I go to Peru – it’ll be the best two weeks of my life.’
This is one of the ways that the teacher I knew – who I mentioned in Chapter 1 – dealt with her unhappiness. Since she had lots of time off school, she booked as many vacations and weekends away as she could afford. She would talk excitedly about the trips for weeks beforehand, spending hours shopping for new clothes. For some reason though, the trips always seemed to go wrong. The accommodation or the food would be terrible, she’d fall out with her partner, get irritated by her companions, or have an accident. But none of these experiences deterred her from looking forward to the next one as much as the last.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with looking forward to the future to a degree. If we know there are pleasant events in front of us, why shouldn’t we anticipate them and feel happy about them? But the point is that for many of us ‘looking forward’ becomes a strategy of escaping from the present. If we were happy in the present – in other words, if we felt comfortable within our own mental space – we would be much less focused on the future.
Rushing away from the present
Look out on to a busy city street – you see masses people hurrying by, staring straight ahead with furrowed brows, zigzagging in and out of each other’s way. They’re rushing to get to meetings, to get home early, to get to the shops before they close, or just to get away from the stress of the city itself – but the destination they’re really heading toward is the future. They’re rushing away from the present, and into the future. When you rush, your mind is already in the future, and the present is just an inconvenience that stops you getting there.
Of course, a lot of the time we rush because we have no choice. Our lives are so hectic that we often struggle to keep up with our deadlines and appointments or to accomplish our daily tasks, and so we have to hurry to keep ourselves on track. But we often rush even though we don’t need to, as another way of escaping from the present. We often find ourselves walking quickly even when there’s time to spare, or rushing to eat a meal, to do the shopping in the supermarket or do the household chores even when there’s no real time pressure on us at all. In these cases, rushing is a reaction to psychological discord. It’s a sign that you feel dissatisfied, bored or frustrated. We reject the present because we feel uncomfortable in it.
Like the need for distraction, both the degree to which you need to rush and to look forward to the future are signs of how much discord there is inside you. If you observe yourself, you’ll find that in moments when you’re not disturbed by too much discord – when your mind is fairly quiet and you feel some contentment – you don’t need to rush at all. You don’t mind if your train is ten minutes late, or if you get stuck in traffic on the way home. In these moments the future has little relevance to you either. You may have all kinds of pleasant events coming up over the next few weeks, but you don’t need to look forward to them. But when you feel most unhappy, you feel most impatient. You’re desperate to escape the present, and any slight obstacle or delay increases your frustration and anger.
Hoping to live, but not living
As a very perceptive observer of human nature, Blaise Pascal was well aware of human beings’ inability to live in the present. As he wrote,
We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is… Thus we never actually live, but hope to live. 1
Our lives consist of 80 or more years of constant flowing present-ness – if we’re lucky – but for almost all the time we aren’t in that flow. We swim against it, jump backward into the past, forward into the future or across into alternate realities. We live for 80 or more years, but in a sense we don’t really live, because we are not in the world, or in our own being. Our lives only consist of the present, so if we’re not in the present we aren’t really living. And if we spend all our lives outside the present, we spend our whole lives not living.
However, the state of harmony and presence – where life is revealed as a beautiful and meaningful adventure, and the universe is revealed as a radiant and benevolent place – is our natural state, our birthright as human beings. Later, in Part II, we’ll see how we can regain it.