Many spiritual texts encourage us to enter the moment and be with what is, but this often fails to relieve suffering.  Why?

Ram Dass wrote, “Be Here Now.”  Like Eckhart Tolle and other spiritual teachers, he noted that our rumination about the past and contemplation of the future prevent us from seeing what is in front of us and experiencing reality directly. 

Taking their advice, we sit in this present moment and look for peace.  However, if your concepts of the past and future remain, you’re still living in a mental world.

Timelessness

Concepts of past, present, and future do not necessarily take the form of words.  They may take the form of visual imagery.  Sometimes, even visual imagery is absent, and they take the form of somatic imagery.  We feel the past behind us and the future in front of us, feel it on our skin and in our muscles, and feel ourselves moving through time from one event to another.  It feels real, but it’s our imagination.

Somatic imagery can create sensations in the body.  If you watch a video of someone lightly touching the skin on someone’s shoulder, you may feel a light touch on your shoulder.  Researchers attribute this phenomenon to mirror neurons, but it can arise in many other ways.  Much of what we experience in the body is not sensation at all but sensory memory.

Even abstract concepts like time and self take life as sensory memories that fill the body.  We are simulating what is ostensibly “out there,” yet we think we are perceiving.  Even if our simulation is accurate, it is still a simulation.

To “be here now” is to realize the illusion of conceptual time, which transcends the concept of “now.”  Franlklin Merrill-Wolff wrote, “To realize Timelessness is to attain Nirvana.”

What You Think Is, Is Not

Trying to find peace and bliss in the present moment when you think the present moment is this crevice between the vast past and the vast future into which you have been jammed is like trying to squeeze blood from an turnip.  You won’t find it.

Anytime you try to find peace and bliss in WHAT IS when you have a mistaken perception of WHAT IS, you just sit in the puddle of suffering getting cold.  Our perception of WHAT IS is almost always clouded by our internally created conceptual reality.  Instead of sitting with WHAT IS, we end up sitting with our conceptual reality, or our conceptions of WHAT IS.  You’re not going to find anything.  You may have surrendered and let go, but if you have a mistaken perception of what exists, what is it to which you have surrendered?  You’ve surrendered to living in illusion.

So what is?  There is a difference between WHAT IS and WHAT YOU THINK IS, and that difference is fundamental, simple, straightforward; that is it.  Don’t be with what you think is.  Be with what is.  In other words, don’t be with thinking.  Don’t think ABOUT IT at all.  Stop simulating, or see simulations as simulations.  That’s the only thing that needs to change.

Be There Later

When you are suffering, be there later.  Don’t sit with THIS!  Don’t try to be with what is before you know what is.  First, understand the conceptual illusion.  First, understand that what you THINK IS is different than WHAT IS.  In Zen Buddhism, this is called great doubt.

“Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening;
small doubt, small awakening,
no doubt, no awakening.”
~ Zen saying

Our usual way of knowing the world is through transcription of it into concepts, and concepts arise again and again in thought as simulations of bits and pieces of prior experience (see research by cognitive psychologist, Lawrence Barsalou).  If this is knowing, then awakening requires the most profound unknowing.

Part of that unknowing may involve doing the opposite of what spiritual teachers tell us.  Rather than jamming yourself into the crevice of “now,” open up to all of time.  Once, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was asked to explain precognition.  In response, he said, “It is all happening now.  Now, now, now!”  Thus, when you open up to all of time, ironically, you may finally enter the real now.

Use a Carrot

Zen masters are fond of using a stick to whack their students back into direct reality.  While I’m sure a whack with the stick meets with some success, I think the lure of a carrot would be even more effective.  Rather than running from illusion, fall in love with the real.  Rumi wrote, “Love is all that exists… be drunk on love.”

Rather than trying to heal suffering by removing illusion, add the real.  Add love, and let illusion dissolve by itself.  Often, only by adding love do we remove illusion, because attempts to remove illusion are usually made within the context of illusion.  I am fond of saying, “You can’t argue with samsara.”  Suffering is suffering, but turn your eyes to love, and suffering dissolves.

“There’s no cure, except the retreat into love,
For the suffering of subtly afflicted hearts.
See the Friend directly, or burn in longing for Him–
What does the whole world matter, apart from that?
To arrive, at last, at the vision of the Friend,
Keep your soul prostrate before the image you have of Him.
Stay standing before Him like the foot of a lamp;
A thousand graces are poured out to the noble.
In this contingent universe, you are powerless;
When will you find the origin of time?
When physical vision has transcended space,
Another sky opens to the eyes of the soul.”
~ Rumi

We have an instinctive pull to experience or be the light which forms us, which is everything.  It’s a calling of the heart.  Follow it even if it feels, for a moment, that you are going against WHAT IS and trading the present moment for the hope of something better.  According to many spiritual texts, this is entirely the wrong approach.  But maybe you are doing just the right thing.  Maybe what you are moving against is not WHAT IS but WHAT YOU THINK IS, in which case, you’ve got it.

You have a postcard from heaven, and it says, “Wish you were HERE.”  But not your concepts of here.  The real here.  The real here, if you drop all your thoughts ABOUT it, is inexplicable, ineffable love and bliss.  All of it.