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Let's put it this way: you can't change the past. Wishing for what used to be is not going to make you happy.
You can't predict the future. Being afraid of what might be is not going to make you happy.
Being a part of what is going on here and now means you will actually experience it, rather than missing out on it because you're so caught up in what has already happened or what might happen.
That is true. However, the following is also true:
Memories enrich to our present lives; they help us make meaningful narratives of who we are, and where we’ve been.
It’s true you can’t predict the future. But you can certainly plan for it. In fact, one of the biggest pleasures in life can be planning for the future. I am sorry that I can’t quote you the study, but there has been research showing that a large part of the pleasure of travel comes from planning and anticipation, not the actual travel itself.
We can say well this is evidence that humans are doing it “wrong.” If they learned to be more in the moment, they would spend less time thinking about their upcoming vacations and also be present more during their vacations. Or, you can just realize that this is simply the way humans tend to be and accept, even celebrate that.
Sometimes it makes sense to be in the moment. Let’s say you are driving in treacherous conditions. Certainly, being in the moment would be beneficial. But let’s say you’re sitting through a boring talk. Why not plan/draydream about your upcoming vacation?
Long story short: Life is complicated. Sometimes one way of being is good. Sometimes it’s not.
Interesting. I am an elderly person and I go out for walks in scrubby areas or low population areas of our town in the early a.m.
My experience doesn't seem to parallel yours. Usually the sounds of the birds, the rustling leaves, the scent of flowers, etc. impact my senses, the reaction is "melro" (a specific bird) and usually that's it...I don't think about why it trills. The connecting "thought" is the sensory recognition.
"Why is it trilling?" Would is me storytelling, not the melro. I very much enjoy the melro song, why would I have to story-tell to myself about it. I would lose the song. And be back to busybusybusybusybusybusybusy, which is how life is lived so often.....in the head, not with the experience.
"...without any connecting thought. I mean, seriously, what is the point of that?"
You are there it sounds like for your own "connecting thoughts" rather than the sound of the gnatcatcher. A very great deal of "connecting thought" is just the opposite - disconnecting thought, the usual self-engrossed interior babble that is unnecessary to an event this simple.
But you can have both. You can both experience and storytell. Experiencing is human. Story-telling is human. Neither is better than the other and we do both all the time.
Also, part of the original, historical intent of meditation was the destruction of the self. (This is why it dovetails so well with Western postmodern ideology.) Instead of focusing on dissolving the self and its storytelling, why not focus on storytelling in a healthy way? Create stories of caring and relatedness rather than celebrate the atomistic flashes of perception of the decentered self? Or valorize both. I mean, it’s not as if we can live well without perception of reality.
You say that it sounds like I am there for my own thoughts. I would say rather that with thought, I am there. However, if I only had perception, something would be there, but that something wouldn’t be me, it would be some relatively anonymous processor or sensations and perceptions.
That is true. However, the following is also true:
Memories enrich to our present lives; they help us make meaningful narratives of who we are, and where we’ve been.
It’s true you can’t predict the future. But you can certainly plan for it. In fact, one of the biggest pleasures in life can be planning for the future. I am sorry that I can’t quote you the study, but there has been research showing that a large part of the pleasure of travel comes from planning and anticipation, not the actual travel itself.
We can say well this is evidence that humans are doing it “wrong.” If they learned to be more in the moment, they would spend less time thinking about their upcoming vacations and also be present more during their vacations. Or, you can just realize that this is simply the way humans tend to be and accept, even celebrate that.
Sometimes it makes sense to be in the moment. Let’s say you are driving in treacherous conditions. Certainly, being in the moment would be beneficial. But let’s say you’re sitting through a boring talk. Why not plan/draydream about your upcoming vacation?
Long story short: Life is complicated. Sometimes one way of being is good. Sometimes it’s not.
But you can have both. You can both experience and storytell. Experiencing is human. Story-telling is human. Neither is better than the other and we do both all the time.
Certainly we can, and do, do both. I never said anything to the contrary.
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Also, part of the original, historical intent of meditation was the destruction of the self.
You have a tendency, as in the first post I responded to, to see things in terms of harsh contention. On this particular point you are into nuclear warfare. Do you understand anatta/not-self means that everyone is walking around like a robot or zombie, or should be, according to dhamma?
I would really suggest a trip back to some of the earliest sermons/suttas and modern commentaries on them. Most of these are pointing out what is not the self. This is considerably different from what you statement sounds like to me.
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(This is why it dovetails so well with Western postmodern ideology.) Instead of focusing on dissolving the self and its storytelling, why not focus on storytelling in a healthy way? Create stories of caring and relatedness rather than celebrate the atomistic flashes of perception of the decentered self? Or valorize both. I mean, it’s not as if we can live well without perception of reality.
Look, somewhere along the line: reading here, pop knowledge, etc. you have taken one very small aspect of the Dhamma and blown it up into the whole thing. Or just as likely been handed that as the whole thing. The path that was/is taught is eightfold, and it certainly involves telling stories, both supposed reports of factual events as well as ones indicated as metaphors, and these are about (to use English vocabulary) goodwill, compassion, refraining from violence, having emotional equilibrium, and so on. One of the eight aspects focuses on what I would say is a consideration of the physical world (including our body-mind) and how we think about it, experience it. The subject of this thread "being in the moment" is just one approach to this consideration.
You wrote above: "...create stories of caring and relatedness rather than celebrate the atomistic flashes of perception of the decentered self." First, it isn't in historical fact a matter of "rather". It isn't that Dhamma is one and not the other. The either/or thing is a fantasy of yours, or one you have had foisted off on you. Americans in my experience are often head over heels into meditation and considerations of what it is as the entirety of Dhamma, or the most important, so let's just take the expressway to the Big Stuff. But you can very easily investigate this yourself and see that it is a very gross misrepresentation of what earliest teaching appears to have been about, judging from present records. I would go so far as to say that the documented records of early teaching probably weigh more on the former than the later. And as for "atomistic flashes of perception of a decentered self"...Wow! "Decentered self"? Come, come, come. Someone has been feeding you their moonshine!
One facet of one point of the eightfold teaching has been seized and blown HUGELY out of proportion and represented as the whole.
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You say that it sounds like I am there for my own thoughts. I would say rather that with thought, I am there. However, if I only had perception, something would be there, but that something wouldn’t be me, it would be some relatively anonymous processor or sensations and perceptions.
Yes, you sound like it must be one way...........or, what? Why would you only be the anonymous processor of etc., why this bizarre emphasis that it is all one way or the other? And you pick stories.
What I underlined above from your posting suggests that what you are dealing with is Buddhism (or at least, the "in the moment" aspect in this thread) as an existential threat. Given what you have written, I can understand that it would certainly seem that way.
I look at the Dharma as advice, not as rules. To me it's a nudge to contemplate MY path.
I think this is why Westerners often don't "get" Buddhism. They are used to a prescribed path. It flusters them to realize Buddhists seek their own path.
....Let’s say you find yourself in some unpleasant situation (e.g. you are sick). Why is paying attention to your symptoms (I mean once you have a diagnosis and have done what you can for yourself) any better than using your imagination to take you away?
Hadn't read this before.
Perhaps with a bellyache imagination after Peptol Bismol isn't the worst route by any means.
I have no idea what your experience with serious, prolonged, painful and fatal illness has been. I spent seven years as a worker with people who had a diagnosis of terminal illness, most usually with ugly physical disfigurement and/or recurrent episodes of debilitation opportunistic infections and then death. (With one exception.)
Entertainment and imagination were certainly helpful to some degree for most, I'd say. But this can and does turn into flight, and flight is impossible even if distraction is relieving. Some people used techniques (derived largely, I believe, from Buddhist meditation techniques) to focus on the presence of their suffering. One person definitely was using similar techniques, but tailored to a Christian ethos.
Sometimes these people said they experienced some temporary relief of the physical intensity of their symptoms, whereas others, as I understood them, calmed their fears and apprehension, which built up as they sought to avoid the presence of their pain and illness with entertainment/imagination.
In my own case, not dead yet, but eight years ago I had spinal surgery that was a calamitous failure, an attempt to repair it a year later was a disaster, and a final attempt a year later was a simple failure. This medical adventure was exceedingly painful at times, periodically totally crippling, never anything but a painful level of "recovery" and finally the inability to walk outside without elbow crutches. About two years following the last surgery I began to develop osteoarthritis in the lower body, and in three years I had developed rheumatoid arthritis in all the joints in the upper with no exceptions.
I am quite able and used to entertaining myself with reading and listening to music, but physical activity painful or no was necessary, and drugs until the eventual judicious use of morphine. (This particular morphine is, in fact, intended for daily use and is made to last 24 hours.) I use it once a week or less out of choice.
There is a point where imagination, even when hyped with morphine, fails....there is, of course, louder music, higher and more frequent morphine trips to suppress pain and fuel the imagination. I have seen this route in others, and I have done it in the distant past myself for different medical reasons.
Focusing on where I/one is brings you back to the reality. Can be painful, but hardly more so than when the music is turned off, the opiates wear off and you are back at that point anyway. And when patients reach this point, it often drops people into the abyss called Oh-F*ck-No-No-No. You can, after all the flights of escape, you can get to know the bogeyman you are running from. And with that can come less anxiety, less need for more and more flight, an ability to live with and perhaps increase the amount of living beyond just alive, even less pain sensation.
Three of the people I was matched with insisted on dying in their apartments. One lived in a bit of a rundown old bldg, but with adequate furnishings, etc. He was on IV nutrition, but he was still defecating some small amounts of bizarre solids as I cleaned him. He had been blinded by CMV and it was now shredding the lining of his intestines which were being evacuated. Two others who insisted on staying in their apartments, lived in awful tenements in slum neighborhoods. All three could have died in the hospital, real hospices were rare at the time. By making this choice they had access no medical treatment beyond the drugs at hand and no assistance other than myself (not medically certified in any way) or a similar person or a friend. One of these two was in his late thirties, not too long out of prison with an off-the-books janitor job, and had one room with a used wooden table, two wooden chairs, a nailboard on the wall for a closet and a mattress on the floor. His last night, he lay on half the mattress and I sat on the other. He was in episodes of strong pain, diminishment, dozing and he talked about his passing in a very peaceful way through the night, and died about dawn.
None of these did any Buddhist or illness meditations that I knew of. However, these three died more composed and collected by far than any of the other seven or so who died in a hospital with full service medical end of life facilities to draw upon. What they had in common with Buddhist and medical meditative practice was that all three spent little time that I was aware of with flight and distraction activities. They were very, very focused on the fact that they were sick, dying men doing whatever was in front of them with (to me) amazingly little journeying into the past.
I look at the Dharma as advice, not as rules. To me it's a nudge to contemplate MY path.
I think this is why Westerners often don't "get" Buddhism. They are used to a prescribed path. It flusters them to realize Buddhists seek their own path.
It certainly is a definite path, but then it is suggested you give it a try rather than a do-it-dammit approach. I guess this is obvious from the Buddha talking with the Kalamas.
Perhaps with a bellyache imagination after Peptol Bismol isn't the worst route by any means.
I have no idea what your experience with serious, prolonged, painful and fatal illness has been. I spent seven years as a worker with people who had a diagnosis of terminal illness, most usually with ugly physical disfigurement and/or recurrent episodes of debilitation opportunistic infections and then death. (With one exception.)
Entertainment and imagination were certainly helpful to some degree for most, I'd say. But this can and does turn into flight, and flight is impossible even if distraction is relieving. Some people used techniques (derived largely, I believe, from Buddhist meditation techniques) to focus on the presence of their suffering. One person definitely was using similar techniques, but tailored to a Christian ethos.
Sometimes these people said they experienced some temporary relief of the physical intensity of their symptoms, whereas others, as I understood them, calmed their fears and apprehension, which built up as they sought to avoid the presence of their pain and illness with entertainment/imagination.
In my own case, not dead yet, but eight years ago I had spinal surgery that was a calamitous failure, an attempt to repair it a year later was a disaster, and a final attempt a year later was a simple failure. This medical adventure was exceedingly painful at times, periodically totally crippling, never anything but a painful level of "recovery" and finally the inability to walk outside without elbow crutches. About two years following the last surgery I began to develop osteoarthritis in the lower body, and in three years I had developed rheumatoid arthritis in all the joints in the upper with no exceptions.
I am quite able and used to entertaining myself with reading and listening to music, but physical activity painful or no was necessary, and drugs until the eventual judicious use of morphine. (This particular morphine is, in fact, intended for daily use and is made to last 24 hours.) I use it once a week or less out of choice.
There is a point where imagination, even when hyped with morphine, fails....there is, of course, louder music, higher and more frequent morphine trips to suppress pain and fuel the imagination. I have seen this route in others, and I have done it in the distant past myself for different medical reasons.
Focusing on where I/one is brings you back to the reality. Can be painful, but hardly more so than when the music is turned off, the opiates wear off and you are back at that point anyway. And when patients reach this point, it often drops people into the abyss called Oh-F*ck-No-No-No. You can, after all the flights of escape, you can get to know the bogeyman you are running from. And with that can come less anxiety, less need for more and more flight, an ability to live with and perhaps increase the amount of living beyond just alive, even less pain sensation.
Three of the people I was matched with insisted on dying in their apartments. One lived in a bit of a rundown old bldg, but with adequate furnishings, etc. He was on IV nutrition, but he was still defecating some small amounts of bizarre solids as I cleaned him. He had been blinded by CMV and it was now shredding the lining of his intestines which were being evacuated. Two others who insisted on staying in their apartments, lived in awful tenements in slum neighborhoods. All three could have died in the hospital, real hospices were rare at the time. By making this choice they had access no medical treatment beyond the drugs at hand and no assistance other than myself (not medically certified in any way) or a similar person or a friend. One of these two was in his late thirties, not too long out of prison with an off-the-books janitor job, and had one room with a used wooden table, two wooden chairs, a nailboard on the wall for a closet and a mattress on the floor. His last night, he lay on half the mattress and I sat on the other. He was in episodes of strong pain, diminishment, dozing and he talked about his passing in a very peaceful way through the night, and died about dawn.
None of these did any Buddhist or illness meditations that I knew of. However, these three died more composed and collected by far than any of the other seven or so who died in a hospital with full service medical end of life facilities to draw upon. What they had in common with Buddhist and medical meditative practice was that all three spent little time that I was aware of with flight and distraction activities. They were very, very focused on the fact that they were sick, dying men doing whatever was in front of them with (to me) amazingly little journeying into the past.
I am so incredibly sorry to hear about your experience with spinal surgery. I can imagine how accepting that you can’t escape the pain, when you truly cannot escape the pain can indeed be an adaptive strategy.
You have a tendency, as in the first post I responded to, to see things in terms of harsh contention.
Sometimes you should see things in harsh contention. Sometimes you shouldn’t. Life is complicated. I wrote an entire dissertation about not seeing things in harsh contention, so I suspect my tendency to see things that way is not exaggerated. Unless we are talking about reaction formation.
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On this particular point you are into nuclear warfare. Do you understand anatta/not-self means that everyone is walking around like a robot or zombie, or should be, according to dhamma?
I know there is an awful lot of talk about the “non-self” out there in Buddhist internet land without a whole lot of balanced commentary on how the self can be positive.
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I would really suggest a trip back to some of the earliest sermons/suttas and modern commentaries on them. Most of these are pointing out what is not the self. This is considerably different from what you statement sounds like to me.
If I still read religious texts, I would prefer to read something that was written in my historical and cultural context. Wisdom doesn’t happen in a void. What was adaptive for someone thousands of years ago is not necessarily adaptive for someone today (although much wisdom does stand the test of time). However, I am personally pretty much done reading religious texts of any kind. I was a seeker for many years of my life and have finally come to a place that works for me and those around me. So, good enough.
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Look, somewhere along the line: reading here, pop knowledge, etc. you have taken one very small aspect of the Dhamma and blown it up into the whole thing. Or just as likely been handed that as the whole thing. The path that was/is taught is eightfold, and it certainly involves telling stories, both supposed reports of factual events as well as ones indicated as metaphors, and these are about (to use English vocabulary) goodwill, compassion, refraining from violence, having emotional equilibrium, and so on. One of the eight aspects focuses on what I would say is a consideration of the physical world (including our body-mind) and how we think about it, experience it. The subject of this thread "being in the moment" is just one approach to this consideration.
OK, fair enough.
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What I underlined above from your posting suggests that what you are dealing with is Buddhism (or at least, the "in the moment" aspect in this thread) as an existential threat. Given what you have written, I can understand that it would certainly seem that way.
The reason I started this thread is because I was sharing the perfectly adequate and effective coping strategies I had used to keep me sane during concurrent chemoradiation and a friend of mine chastised me for not “being in the moment.”
I say you ARE in the moment as you're thinking of the past or the future...at that moment that IS
what you're doing. Did you happen to ask for advice? Then, in that moment she does this again,you
can tell her, in the future, to keep her ideas to herself - you're doing just fine, thank you.
It's like if it's not a Tolle devotee, it's a Christian saying as a selling point - "You can have eternal life?"
What's so great about that?
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Did you happen to ask for advice? Then, in that moment she does this again,you 
