The Weirdness of Being Human
Is the Present Moment the Whole of One’s Reality?
No doubt the phrase, ‘The weirdness of being human’ has been used many times and in many contexts. I came across it recently in a book by the writer (novelist and philosopher) Iris Murdoch. Here is what she wrote-
‘One returns to the most obvious and most mysterious notion of all, that this present moment is the whole of one’s reality, and that this is unavoidable’. (The weirdness of being human).’
She goes on to talk about the ‘the moment-to-moment reality of consciousness, and how this is, after all, where we live.’ How that moment ‘contains the whole chronicle of our existence…’, and how consciousness-
concerns what it is to be human, the enigma at the centre. If we are a whole is this not its core? If this escapes us what are we? (These quotations are from Chapter 8 of Murdoch’s book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
Consciousness is nowadays being studied at various different levels. Cognitive scientists are looking for the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’- what exactly happens in the brain when we are in the waking or dreaming state. Who knows, they may well find them one day. After all, if everything is physical there must be such correlates. But artists and philosophers (and ordinary mortals like me, and possibly you) often complain that finding such correlates would not really add anything to what consciousness feels like from the inside. Nor add much to what it means in the context of our shared humanity.
Being aware is weird. Imagine an intelligent creature who does not have it and try explaining it to her/him/it. Try explaining that everything that we human beings are conscious of happens in precisely this moment and not in a future or past moment. Sure, we can think about the past and the future, but we can only do it in the present. And anyway, there is so much more to life than thinking- there is feeling, sensation and action.
I sometimes think that one of the weirdest things about all human beings (me included) is that we are not permanently astounded, astonished, rendered speechless and helpless by the eternal presence of the present moment. It must lie at the core of what we are but it defies description or analysis. It escapes us. How can we go about our daily routine without at least occasionally being brought to a complete stop by the thought ‘what exactly is it that is happening now?’
We sometimes attempt an explanation by describing what arises in the present moment as our ‘experience’. This conveys the sense of ‘active experience’, something in which we are participators. But we can only have this kind of knowledge about our experience by looking back on it after it has arisen. As Coleridge said, experience is ‘like the stern light of a ship, which illumines only the track it has passed.’ The concept of experience does not come close to capturing the uniqueness of the present moment.
Of course, it is perhaps a good thing that we are not in practice paralysed by the ‘problem’ of explaining what it is that is arising in the present moment. If we were our daily lives would be fraught with difficulty. We are designed by nature to get on with the task in hand, to survive, to allow each moment to pass more-or-less unheeded.
But our fascination with consciousness has nonetheless endured for millennia, originally in the east and and more recently in the west. In the east it has taken a number of different guises. The Taoist sage was often described as ‘the mirror of heaven and earth’; his or her moment-to-moment stillness lay exactly in this constant process of reflecting what appeared. In Vedanta, on the other hand, Brahman, the origin of everything, was conceived of as consciousness itself. Consciousness came first and everything else followed from it.
Yet the Buddha, wary of such abstruse speculation, claimed only that the truth (your truth) is your everyday mind, a mind in which everything experienced is constructed moment by moment. Some nine centuries after the death of the Buddha, Bodhidharma travelled from India to China and announced that Zen Buddhism lay outside words and sutras, but pointed directly to one’s mind, to one’s own true nature. Conceptual thought or mere words could never capture it.
It may well be that it is better to celebrate awareness than try to analyse it. Better to free it from the tiresome demands of a needy self that is always looking at the next moment, at the next opportunity. Better to enjoy each present, passing moment as it arises and falls away. Moments that we can never have again. After all, memory is a poor substitute for what is happening now.
Yet memory may not be entirely unhelpful. If you can recall, however imperfectly, what it felt like to witness a sunset, marvel at a child’s presence in play, or hold the hand of another human being, you may perhaps know everything that can be known conceptually about the nature of consciousness. But consciousness, our present moment, is not really a concept that can be analysed successfully. Rather, we are submerged in it or enveloped within it. Rather, it is what we are.
