32 - Be here then

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

- Thomas Hardy

The phrase “Be here now”, made famous by Ram Dass, has a lot of meaningful and profound connotations. It implies present-ness, mindfulness. It’s a comforting and easy to digest phrase. It’s also impossible. “Be here then” is more accurate but infinitely less inspiring. “Be here”, is the important element of the phrase. The temporal designation is largely irrelevant. To “Be here” is to be present, to be engaged with the action of being. And engagement with being can most usefully be defined by what it is not. Being is this experience that I am having right now. I am this thing. It’s sometimes difficult for me to realise that this thing that I am right now is not easily definable with language. I can attempt to symbolize it or construct some kind of internal representation of it and imagine that it is the thing itself. This experience is a thing that might use the instruments of language – (to be more accurate I suppose, I should say that this brain is the thing that uses the instruments of language – and to be even more accurate I should say that this brain is a thing that has the instruments of language woven through it) So that the experience that is the inevitable consequence of the intersection between this brain and some representation of the exterior world, cannot differentiate between itself and the instruments of language. It assumes these things that are so familiar to it can usefully refer back to it - but it exists outside of them. My engagement with being is the degree to which I am capable of experiencing this without the interference of those instruments and the habits and impulses that arise out of their persistence.

There is a well-known Taoist text called “the secret of the Golden flower”, which teaches a particular meditation style. It largely involves turning the senses back upon themselves and turning the energy of the senses inwards. Or at least, that is how it’s presented. But to my mind the literal interpretation of that idea is a largely nonsensical thought experiment. That isn’t to say that the thought experiment is without merit, just that the products of the imagination and the physics of being are more often than not incompatible. The value is not to be found in turning your energy inwards because it the use of direction, of in or out, or indeed the manipulation of energy usefully with the imagination, doesn't really have an application in this (or to my mind, any) context. Turning energy inwards is like some quasi-mystical instruction to “breathe into your centre”. I can imagine I am doing this and I can also imagine that I am doing myself some great service in this. But my breath itself and the functions it serves are unlikely to to engage in some miraculous activity inspired by the power of my imagination.

But what this kind of activity can usefully do is change the way I engage with my senses. By utilizing my sensory apparatus in a different and unusual way, I step outside of my usual patterns of mental engagement. In this way I can understand that the default style I have adopted is not the only means to perceive reality. And that's a pretty big deal the first time I realise this. It is the first impetus to stepping off the information superhighway that is human experience and learning how to observe it without being dominated by it. When we shift how we engage with these instruments that seem so intrinsic to us (because there is nothing more intrinsic – though the way we use them might well be less so), then we fundamentally change our relationship with them. And when we fundamentally change our relationship with our senses and habitual patterns that arise out of their activity, then we fundamentally change our relationship with the world itself. We start to examine objects and the experience of objects differently. We come to understand our relationship with them and their products in a whole new way. That can be a hell of a paradigm shift to experience. And it can take some time to assimilate.

For any given conscious event there is the object, the observer and the experience of the confluence between the two. If I were to usefully generalise then I might claim that the weight of experience, all the different facets of a humans’ interaction with a given moment converging within, tends to dominate the experience and therefore, the observer. This would be the case for most of us. The observer persists above and beyond experience to some extent, depending on the psychological make-up of the individual, but it shifts in and out of focus depending on the intensity of the experience. Observation is a part of experience but exerts little control over it. It might well exert significant control over behaviour, interpretation or response, but the moment itself is generally beyond its grasp.

But if we work to shift the balance of power in that relationship between the observer and its experience to strengthen the observers capacity to make itself different from experience, from within experience, then the observer is no longer apart from the observed because the object is no longer the focus of experience. Experience itself is. The relationship becomes much less reducible to a subject and object interaction. I am by no means suggesting that the observer should strive to dominate experience in some way - that would be to frame it in an adversarial light and therefore completely miss the point. It is rather to encourage a new synthesis between the observer and its environment which shifts the experience into a fuller engagement of and with it than is normally accessible via the default mode. Of course, when our focus shifts away from the awareness of this relationship, as it inevitably must, then habit and necessity impinge upon us and we inevitably take the world for granted once again. And the truth is that we do this because that is very often what reality requires of us.

It would be extremely difficult and highly undesirable to spend ones life wafting about the place twittering on about the bliss of non-subjective experience or such. Little useful could be achieved with that particular strategy. But if I persist in working to engage with experience in a more authentic and structured way whenever I can remember to, then over time the more subtle synthesis between my observation and the experience I am observing becomes more and more familiar to me, and has therefore a better and better shot at becoming the default setting. It becomes a habit of mind.

But if there is no such perspective shift, then there is little significant pay-off likely from experience. I live the unexamined life. I am in it but I don’t quite know what “it” is. This limited palette of experience and response delimits my experience, and all subsequent interpretation is made in the light of this understanding. In other words I will tend to interpret the whole of reality according to the tiny slice of it I am capable of apprehending. And moreover this limitation determines what is more or less possible for me to experience in the light of this stunted potential. This in itself is a tragedy, since there is nothing more certain than the relative nature of the habits of mind I develop to engage with the world. They are a consequence of my formative interface with the objects of my specific culture. They are only true in the light of that culture and they are only profound to the degree that culture permits. And because I tend to be oblivious in my day to day experience then I often correlate the moment I am having with the whole of reality. By this, I mean potentially, both the literal moment I am having at any given time, and the “moment” of life I am having, my general circumstances at that time. I have a house, a family, the work I do, what do I do for leisure. All these contribute to my moment and that moment is assumed as reality. Moreover, that reality is attributed far more heft than the simple notion of what my life is like right now. It takes no account of how different that life might have been in the recent past or how different it might be in the future. This is reality right now and what I bring to it determines my assumptions relating to it.

It is certainly possible that I might achieve some greater insight armed with only this equipment and only this way of using it. But it is significantly less likely than if I make the attempt to push my equipment and stretch my capacity to use it, to test myself in the realm of experience and find out where the border lines are drawn. Of course, while I write this with some authority, I cannot know it for certain. I can only judge (insofar as I can judge at all) based on my own experience. I cannot know the limits of another’s internal reality. I can make an educated guess. This, depending on my education and capacity for insight, can turn out to be more or less true, but I can never reliably know the degree or depth of its truth. I can proceed according to those assumptions and measure the results of my actions and their consequences. Sometimes we just have to be comfortable with winging it. The key is to just try to wing it as skilfully as possible.

And of course, who is to say that striving to evolve and refine my experience is the best way to be in the world? It's certainly not for everyone since everyone is, self-evidently, not for it. I can take that as a fairly assured slice of fact since the numbers bear it out. People, understandable, generally tend to try and find the easiest and most natural way to be in the world as it presents itself to them. Moreover, the world as it has arisen from human nature and the structures it inspires don’t tend to serve the notion of wilfully flying in the face of accepted wisdom. There is large body of evidence to suggest that challenging accepted wisdom might not be the best move since accepted wisdom often stops us from walking into traffic or off tall cliffs. There are many for whom the notion of the kind of risky application, difficulty of method and elongated time frame required to gather anything resembling insight, would seem the height of tediousness, and the end result as slightly less entertaining than an evening spent cementing your head to garden paving. And sincerely, the best of luck to them. Whatever works is good for whoever finds themselves working it. But there is a significant merit in the notion that often people fall into the unexamined life without the skills or the temperament to be able to negotiate it well. I think most humans when they have a little cogitate of their own experience might well agree with that statement. Alternatively, it can frequently be that those who have never engaged in the deeply curious and sceptical exploration of the ideas underlying human culture, might experience some breed of misfortune and find a previously assumed certainty thoroughly undermined, and subsequently find that they cannot easily regain their footing in life. In the absence of Philosophical engagement and general interest in the experience of being and its different properties, and without any powerful drive to be wholly in the world, despair and negation can easily fill the gap left behind in the death of a point of view. Or depression, or persistent anxiety, or malignant self indulgence, or sticking with the devil you know, or benign self indulgence or any other permutation. Of course engagement with being alone is not the answer to those powerful questions that are often asked of us at such difficult times, but it certainly can be a significant part of negotiating them and can be a powerful drive to seek out the rest of what we need to shift experience from something that is generally unpleasant or uninspiring, into something more potentially delightful, sustainable and interesting. And really what’s the alternative? Being disengaged? Nihilistic? Cool? That sounds like a big bucket of chuckles.