November 4th, 2022
Operate in the present.
Be here now.
Remain in the moment.
Be where your feet are.
Don’t get ahead of yourself.
Be present.
These phrases refer to what? The now. This moment.
The human brain processes roughly 100 billion operations per second. Basically an unfathomable number, really. The mind is a supercomputer unlike anything else. Despite studying it since the dawn of time, it’s still baffling scientists the world over.
Here’s the thing about the mind, though: it has a tendency to remain one thought away from pure experience. The mind points to an experience with words, thoughts, memories and via the senses. It seems that pure experience emerges when your mind isn’t busy pulling levers and pushing buttons. The mind thus resides just outside of the real action. Maybe it’s helpful to think of it as a filter….or a set of goggles you wear when interpreting something. Let’s say you venture to the Grand Canyon to immerse yourself in the ineffable beauty. While you’re peering over the rim, you decide to take a picture. In the moment you’re snapping that picture, you are filtered from the actual experience of the canyon. At that moment, you’re having the not so terrible experience of snapping a picture of the Grand Canyon; however, in that moment, you are also slightly removed from the native experience. Does that make sense? The mind works in this way – it’s the grand daddy of all filters. It’s usually getting the next piece of the puzzle ready to place instead of experiencing the placing of the one currently in hand.
Okay, so what? Good question! Here comes one of my favorite words: happiness. One of the ways that is seems the state of happiness arrives is when the mind isn’t running away and chronologically defining the upcoming path. Another way of putting that is that happiness is more available when you’re in the now.
As a father of three girls, a husband, a home caretaker and owner, a son, a coach, and an employee (to name only a few), I have a bag of identities….hats that I put on at different times, if you will. We all have myriad roles. Sometimes I’m several steps away from the present in my mind and it’s interesting to witness it consciously. After I finish breakfast, I’ll flip the laundry. After that, I’ll take out the trash. While I’m in in the basement doing that, I can feed the cat and grab some more paper towels. On and on….after this, I’ll do that. After that, I’ll do this. The moments of experience within all this ‘doing’ end up getting paved over by the mind, which is avidly setting up the future.
So how do you remove the goggles? How do you remove all the extra dressing in order to reveal the now? Perhaps continually trying to realize it while it’s happening can help? There’s even a catch to that though: the realizing, as well as the remembering, thinking, and being, are all concepts of the mind as well, no? Even pausing to consciously say ‘I am really having a direct experience right now’ is changing it out of a direct experience by labeling it, or pointing to it with words. Who came up with this impossible game? Wait, I did? What was I thinking? Oh, there’s my first problem…I was thinking again.
Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows!
Peace and love to all beings,
Jesse Kells