Everyone who struggles has a way to face pain, or a way to adapt to pain. But here we are, at this given moment: Now. Now is the moment when we are the sum of all that went before. New Scientist Magazine, in a recent book entitled, “How Long is Now,” says Now lasts about two or three seconds. That is, this is the time in which you can form a conscious awareness of what is happening. But that’s not exactly what I meant.
Now is the moment in which we are suspended between past and future, where it seems our agency lies — we can think back on the past, plan for the future, or concentrate on our breathing and try not to be pre-occupied with either one. This moment of determination is bright. Even if it is an outgrowth of what has come before — “it is inevitable,” says Sadhguru — we have the ability, now, to make something different from it.
Even if the past and the future don’t really exist sequentially in the way we think they do (physics hints at this) our own ability to make decisions is at the root of our tasks here in life. And how do we make decisions? Of course, on the ground of the sum total of our experience and our knowledge thus far.
Clearly, a lesson learned may be forgotten, or may not ‘take’ the first time. If you’re a surfer you slip off the board, or your fumbling attempts to pick up Hungarian may need a lot of patient study and repetition. But learning does take place, if we work at it. We improve.
Now comes the interesting part: can the regressions, where learning falters or is partial, still be a kind of progress? Like the mathematical concept of the absolute value — in which a negative number is a positive quantity — does any move we make represent progress?
The idea is that falling short can also be seen as a necessary detour which brings us back to the point where we can try again — a necessary detour, again, that had to be, to make the learning stick. Any digression, any failing, any cycle of giving up and starting again, had to be. So any movement, backwards or forwards, starts in the now, and enriches the now. Any new grain of experience, learned through effort or through laziness, becomes part of who we are and adds to our ability to become stronger and spread the light of awareness, knowledge, and wisdom.
So in the sense that I mean this, there can be no going back, and no loss. Whatever happened is adding to the sum of what I am in this now moment. To choose how we interpret experience is a mental act, it has to do with the will and that in turn shapes our emotions. And here it’s important to discuss an assumption with which the reader may part company.
I assumed that the idea that we can be annihilated is an illusion. It is an illusion that pain can annihilate us. If this common belief is challenged, we find ourselves in a much more benign world.
It’s hard not to get back to what Socrates believed — that the life of the philosopher would be immeasurably easier if we didn’t have to cope with our body and its physical demands. But we do. And to add to physical pain, there’s also emotional pain and spiritual pain.
If these pains can’t annihilate us, however, our task becomes clearer. It is to realize that these pains are positive. We can meet them without dying. We can use them as tools to learn and keep moving. We can realize that they are not negative, that they are part of building our experience so that we can move forward.
The dance that we are experiencing — and I use this term for the blissful experience of living, that we feel, on some level, even if we do not admit it — is the amazing integrity of all that we are: a remarkable organism on the physical level, matched by mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities that are awesome. That dance exists right now — it is in the now. What we can make of it in the next moment — not to mention the future — is our choice, and the choice is clear:
First, let’s do what we can to maintain and strengthen physical health, then use our knowledge and understanding of principles to discover and understand the roots and techniques of emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
Anything we do, going forward, will add to our greatness, even if it seems to take us backward. For some of us, the road will be very windy and twisty. For others, more of a straight path up a hill with a wide vista at the top. But everyone will get there. We have all accomplished so much — that is the solemn truth. Let’s clear the way to accomplish more by getting rid of our fear, by challenging it.