Is Living in the Moment the Cure?
This spectacular world waits for no one.
I want to convey what I mean by “living in the moment”, since it is a cliched idea and has been poorly explained by pseudointellectual people.
I believe it means “living without passive attachment”.
We are carried from place to place, obligation to obligation, person to person, and there is a particular feeling of “life happening”.
But because life poses many challenges, living in the moment becomes synonymous with ignorance, escapism, and a denial of real things.
It is challenging to be present, involved, and even happy while life throws all this stuff at us. It is a test of character and a sign of strength.
Most of us are working jobs from morning to night, trying to keep up friendships and relationships, loosely holding our health together.
Sometimes I am able to flow with the moment quite easily. Other times, it feels like I’m in mental hell, even if I don’t partake in negative thoughts.
Circumstances provoke a whiplash of back-and-forth, up-and-down, and yet I can still be strong in the face of hardship and disenchantment.
Lately, God has shown me the error of my ways and helped me cultivate some peace of mind. This happened because I admitted my arrogance and overcame the mentality of “I can do everything by myself, I am the source of my power, blah blah blah”. Does this talk help us cultivate anything but more ego? The same can be said for our frustration “in the moment”, for it is not a frustration with the moment, but a frustration with ourselves.
Furthermore, the moment is not something which can be predicted, calculated, solved for, or even made sense of. It is CONSTANTLY changing! And so are we, if we realize the multitude of things we think about, react to, feel, become, or even associate with on a second-to-second basis.
It is disastrous to think that we can hold our lives together like Atlas holds up the world. We can only hold our virtue and mental health together.
There cannot be self-denial or self-aggrandizement in the moment. Both are a clear way to disaster. Lying to oneself and having untrue self-assessments makes it impossible to realize what we are in the moment, for it means that we always superimpose our own “moment”. This is the subjective mistake of being ourselves in a fairly objective and irrefutable world.
I think there are many bad assumptions we cling onto, whether it is about political and religious matters, matters of friendships and relationships, what is good and what is evil, stuff like this. I would say that many of us live in a world which is simply not real, but a mere construction held up by our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The true world is elsewhere, and all we can do is hope to figure out what it is and find solace in it before we die.
I used to think very little of Christianity or Jesus Christ. I was an atheist throughout most of high school, then a spiritual person who found himself immersed in Buddhism, Zen, and some forms of mysticism. I had no patience for being judged, for having to repent for sins, for a seemingly intangible being who sought to teach us all a lesson.
At the same time, I was highly naïve, and thought little of faith because I clung onto the god of Reason. It is a shame, then, that I have come to discover my faith too little too late at the ripe old age of 27.
We will all have to acknowledge our place in this holy moment.
When I say “live in the moment”, I do not mean “do whatever you want and be self-indulgent”, because that is the demonic moment. “The moment” as described by pseudointellectual and pseudospiritual people will have you believe that there is no thinking to be done, no reflection to be made, no sinner to overcome. It is a deception of the highest order!
The moment often gives us a chance to do better.
Growth comes from the grandeur of overcoming ourselves.
It is not bad to repent. It is not bad to reflect on things. It is certainly not bad to try and figure out what this life is all about!
The true moment never does anything but reveal itself. If we are to judge it, we will surely fall into some territory where we make mistakes.
The presumption of self, coupled with another presumption of self, breeds nothing more than two selves conflicting in the same space.
This is why humility always wins. Any presumption of self is a presumption of knowing better than the reality we are intrinsically part of.
How can we know better than the highest high?
The path is marked with a serene glow, and we must be able to use it to carve the way forward. If we neglect God, we lose our synch with reality… the glow will begin to dissipate and darkness will overtake us.
Those charlatans who believe living in the moment is whatever you want it to be don’t seem to understand that there is only ONE unified moment.
It is constantly happening.
I pray that we can all find our own alignment with it, for it is a blessing to be in harmony with a chaotic world. We cannot lose faith in better things.
We are meant to understand what the moment carries within it, for it is the everlasting gift of life itself. And here we are, trying to flow with it.
Thank you.
