A Moment Can Mean the World
Reflections on Sharing Timelessness
Can mindfully focusing on the timeless moment solve the world’s problems? No. But I invite you to join me in some reflections on time, how time divides us, and how focusing on the following questions can bring value to our lives.
What can you do now that your future self will thank you for?
Another way of asking this is:
What has your past self done that you are grateful for now?
As I sit in this moment and gaze forward from the present, I contemplate the value of my life thus far.
So intense are my feelings about the needless suffering of homeless, factory-farmed animals, youth in existential crisis, and other victims of prejudice, I’ve considered starving myself. But instead, I write.
I notice my stomach gurgling. An arch forms like an umbrella to contain the near-future self who cooks and the farther-future self who eats. Present-self decides to cook my lunch.
But before my body rises, my present-self anticipates my future-self thanking my past-self for planning to feed me. I move closer and closer to actually eating and project thankfulness to my future-self for the act of arising to meet my needs as they present themselves.
Another arch forms to contain the mental projection that awaits the arrival of my near-past body in the projected appetizing moment. To survive, like youth express their discontented appetite for a more palatable future, I project my mind from my past youth into a future that includes care for this body and for this planet.
But sometimes things go wrong
There are factors at play outside my various time-selves. It’s a mystery that my body ever arrives. It starves, or gets seriously injured, even dies before it gets to the kitchen. Or the projection of self into the future could simply skip over lunch and keep writing (or playing a computer game) until dinnertime. It could lose its appetite. If quantum mechanics has its way, each scenario is an example of the way things go in other worlds. Science aside for now, I ask myself many questions.
Will my future self will ever be totally satisfied? Is my life an imagined existence, a mere wisp at the whim of a projector called future? Even larger, are the planet’s many problems a huge con job, tugging our heart-strings, making us think we are responsible for its demise?
I think not.
What’s Actually Happening?
As far as this body is concerned, every breath we take and every move we make every moment unifies our experiences with our abilities in each infinitesimal moment. This is where we live. Problem is, we never feel capable of doing as much as much as we are told. Yes, we try. But we never quite get there.
No matter how much we try to escape this reality into dreamland, our capacity to care for an unfathomable timeless self is housed in continually being pulled back to our present moment on this beleaguered planet. How ever small we may feel, we belong here! Wait, we have to look after the whole world too? No wonder self-care is such a challenge!
Physicists theorize the expanding universe grew from a point smaller than we could ever imagine. My point is we likewise grow outward while we look inward. We stake our bets on fathoming the unfathomable depth of our lives. We figured it out before. Why not this time? And our past selves convince our future selves that we acted just in time.
But what is time?
Our entire past, including all our ancestors; our entire present, including all our experiences; our entire future, including all our descendants. Our insides, our outsides, the societies and world we live in. All of this is our living and our dying, from conception to death and possibly beyond.
“And all you create and all you destroy, And all that you eat, And everyone you meet…And all that is now, And all that is gone, And all that’s to come, And everything under the sun is in tune, But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”
—Roger Waters
No matter what we are doing, whether writing, cooking, eating, sitting, or going, if we look authentically — and focus on as many aspects of our being as we can, all these experiences are happening now. No wonder self-care is such a challenge! Not to be narcissistic, but our Selves are really, really big!
Thankfully, we forget this is what’s actually happening or we would be utterly overwhelmed and dysfunctional 100% of every moment of our lives. Wait! Does this sound familiar?
Of course, given the limits of our brains, we never have absolutely everything in mind all at once. (Only narcissists would think they have a monopoly on the truth!)
Even if we think we remember planning something we really wanted to do ages ago, often, by the time our bodies get to the point of remembering the memories of our younger selves, our lives have already changed. At that point, we have to fight hard to stay alive to accomplish the plans we made way back then.
Problem is, we didn’t realize how many things had to happen to get us where we would feel ready to do what the plan laid out for us. Or what kind of resistance we might feel against putting ourselves out there. Or the choices we made that felt right at the time.
Here’s a reality check
There is a part of our bodies that does the projecting. Memories and plans are never exact and are only a projection, an approximate representation presented to us by our brains each and every moment.
We live in the present moment, where everything occurs. We break it down, but those pieces are not the real thing. They are only models and, as such, are misunderstandings of beliefs, interpretations, thoughts, images, feelings, and how we should live in a world filled with other people and other lifeforms. Based on our culture and our chemistry, the brain is the maker of models we believe about EVERYTHING.
Problem is, the brain is severely biased towards our own survival. And to maintain that bias, every other life is at risk. Our tendency is to think every other culture and every other collection of DNA, besides the one we come from, has it wrong. We eat it, we take it apart, analyze it, kill it, and throw it out as if it meant nothing. We keep repeating this destructive pattern.
No wonder depression rates are climbing.
According to a Gallup Poll in 2023, 29.0% of Americans reported having been diagnosed with depression in their lifetime. While 17.8% (about one of every six people) reported currently having depression, as compared with only 1 out of every 10 people surveyed in 2015.
And why — you may ask — are more than 10% of pregnant women and women who have just given birth experiencing depression? Instead of celebrating the wonder of new life, the future they project looks hopeless.
The brain continually diverts some experience into the here and now — the moment that takes no time at all. Other experiences get diverted into storage and still more experiences wind up as projections onto our future.
But the brain is NOT the ultimate source of experience, nor is it to blame for the depressing state of the world. It merely files and models predictions based on past experience. Meanwhile, it selects some projections for the present moment, while the rest flies away and feels lost.
Yes, we can forget, and the value of the past can feel regrettable. Likewise, there are things we never follow through on, plans we never carry out. And, if you recycle, the value of the future can feel returnable. The forgotten and the incomplete are part of the present too. Clearly, there is grief embedded in our society.
Now I must go and have something to eat, to gather the energy to continue longing for a fulfillment I fear may never come. Will I ever be able to quench this incessant ache?
From a personal spiritual perspective
I will only be gone for a moment. But I am never really gone. I am always present and valued somewhere, to someone, even if only to myself, my partner, and perhaps a reader or two. That is a gift!
I believe I am a vast collection of life experiences projected onto myself. But no one else can have these experiences because they belong only to me. Here and now, beginning within, I can connect with an essential Selfhood whose source is not me but has information, teachings, and wisdom that are meant — first and foremost — only for me.
This feels empowering but it can be a difficult decision whether and how best to share such insights with others.
I believe each of us is special in this way. We are all the same in being able to perceive a set of experiences meant only for ourselves. While this commonality is a source of unity, it is also tragically inescapable. As Pema Chödrön says, there is no escape from being who we are. Nor from the present moment, however expanded that moment becomes.
Yet some part of ourselves still yearns to find a way out of this temporary existence, to make our way home to our everlasting soul, through oneness with the cosmos.
This yearning may be felt most by those with a terminal illness. How ever long the inextricable moment may be, the discrete perspectives we occupy are surely unique, projected from our source — from where we originate. From our unique point of origin in geological time, like so many other lifeforms, we are conceived by our parents and somehow we grow and learn, until the gift of this physical life comes to an end.
May we experience from the unique point of view of our age, our family, our culture, our planetary home, our inner sensations, our feelings, beliefs, insights, our ability to move in different directions as we dance our way through life, and whatever may lie beyond. May we recognize the difficulty encompassing all these factors impinging on us in every moment, including the likelihood of error and uncertainty. All things are natural, forgivable, and worthy of compassion, no matter how we may suffer and feel undeserving.
We might as well lay claim right now to the visible minority each of us truly is, with our own unique version of diverse abilities and superpowers we possess!
While our perceptions may change from moment to moment, the Present is the unchanging connective tissue binding all things. When we expand that Present to include our past selves and the promise of a brighter future yet to come, we allow ourselves a freedom beyond time in the form of a deeply compassionate and fulfilling Gift.
Full Circle
Now to answer the two questions that began this essay:
What has your past self done that you are grateful for now?
With deep appreciation, I thank our past selves for pointing us to the present moment of sharing some writing with you. As complicated as life might feel sometimes, the most meaningful gift is being here and now with you, dear Reader.
What can you do now that your future self will thank you for?
I hope our future selves will feel grateful for the creative acts of reading and writing we have engaged in together this day.
Now I must depart, as I am starved for sleep. Perchance to dream of dining once again with you, Dear One, though no other time could ever be as delicious.
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https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx
