Dogs do it. So do cats. And chickadees and red squirrels and whitetail deer and great horned owls. Little humans do it, too - but less often as they grow bigger.
All creatures on the planet share the universal trait of living entirely in the moment; all except one species - us.
Yes, you say, but that's because we're conscious, and the other creatures aren't.
Conscious of what? Surely the dog loves to romp in the woods or curl in a patch of sunshine. Clearly the cat is aware of pleasure, purring with joy as she nestles in your lap. A deer smells the hunter, not vice versa, and the hearing of the owl is estimated to exceed ours by a hundred times. In terms of sensory awareness, other critters make us look deaf, dull, and blind. To say they lack sentience is absurd.
No, you say, that's not the kind of consciousness I meant. Other life forms use their senses, and they use them very well. But they're not aware of past and future, and have no real ability to foresee consequences. Only humans can do that.
Now we're getting somewhere. Where? Into the heart of the human problem. For whether it is true or not that other species don't differentiate between yesterday and tomorrow, it is certainly clear that we humans do, with a vengeance. And the chief thing we gain by so doing is to make ourselves miserable.
As infants we live entirely in the moment. If we're hungry, we cry. If we're content, we gurgle. Watch a little child at play and you can't fail to be delighted. He or she lives with incredible intensity, fully engrossed in whatever's at hand. In those rare cases where a grown-up retains a childlike focus on the Now, we have the makings of a genius or a saint.
How do we go amuck? By setting up a mental construct known as time, and then arbitrarily dividing it into pieces: a second, a minute, a year, eternity. We commonly imagine eternity to be a very, very long time, an unending stretch of years, a million times a million forever. But the mystic sees things differently. From Lao Tzu to Buddha to Jesus, the message is the same: eternity is not an awareness of everlasting time, but rather an awareness which is itself totally without time. The eternal moment is a timeless moment, a moment which knows neither past nor future, before nor after, yesterday nor tomorrow, birth nor death.
We have all had experiences, peak events, which seemed to lie so far beyond time that the past and the future melted away into obscurity. Lost in a sunset, transfixed by the play of moonlight on water, floated out of time and space in the enraptured embrace of a loved one; in these instances, if we examine them closely, there is no time. Whenever we grow truly and fully alive, time disappears, for the present moment is a timeless moment, and a timeless moment is an eternal one.
Search as you will, you can't find, see, or feel a beginning to the Now. Nor will you ever discover its end, even when you die, since you won't be there to feel anything end. The outer forms of the present moment cascade by in bewildering succession, but the Now itself remains indestructible, untouched by what we have been taught to interpret as "time."
Erwin Schroedinger, the founder of quantum mechanics, put it this way: "Eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."
Ralph Waldo Emerson looked at his flowers and said, "These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time."
"In this moment," says a Hindu sutra, "there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth-and-death to be brought to an end. Thus the absolute peace in this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no boundary or limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight."
When Jesus was asked by his disciples who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, he called to him a child, and put him in the midst of them, and said: "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
In the Now of a child there is neither past nor future--there is no time. Said the Zen master Zeppo: "If you want to know what eternity means, it is no further than this very moment. If you fail to catch it in this present moment, you will not get it, however many times you are reborn in hundreds of thousands of years."
This Now is the peace which passes understanding, freely given to us all. This Now is eternal life. When we forget Now, our fears and regrets swarm in to darken our minds and trouble our hearts. When we "come to our senses" like other creatures do, we regain our rightful place in the universe, and our lives are flooded with joy.
Now is all we really have - and all we really need.
Copyright 2006 by Craig Nagel
