Be Here Now

Baba Ram Dass

Friend Xerxes has turned his thoughts to mysticism, if only to reject it. He writes, “Mystics of all kinds invite us to ‘live in the present.’ Quit grinding yourself down by rehashing the past or fearing the future, they say. Live in this moment. Live right now!”

Which he rejects as dangerous, for it implies living for the moment and no impulse control.

He is right that it is bad advice; but he is burdened here by a common misconception of mysticism we were all sold in the 1960s or 70s. This sounds like the title of Ram Dass’s 1971 book, Be Here Now.

 But Ram Dass was not a real mystic. He was a Harvard psychology professor, Richard Alpert, who had gotten into LSD and taken a trip to India. He was a New Age spiritual tourist.

I am aware of one Buddhist parable that seems to advocate this notion of living only in the present. But no more; I think it is an aberration.

The doctrine Xerxes takes from this, to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die,” to a true monastic, which is to say a Western mystic, would be the deadly sin of acedia. They are busy instead in meditation on “memento mori”: on the inevitable future.

“Be here now” works if and only if “here” is heaven and “now” is eternity. But that is quite a stretch, making the Alpert slogan seem deliberately subversive and misleading. Works for a modern hedonist. 

“Now” in common speech means the “present” world: and note the double meaning of that word, “present.” It means the sensory world around us. This is the opposite of the mystic goal. There is a reason why the monk in meditation closes his eyes. “Mystic” means “secret” or “hidden,” what is not visible. 

The Sanskrit word we translate as “mindfulness,” commonly used to refer to meditation on the Eastern or Buddhist model, is actually closer to “memory.” “Remember,” not “Be here now.” Plotinus, a if not the seminal figure in Western mysticism, the founder of Neoplatonism, seeks the eternal forms found in memory. Saint Theresa of Avila speaks of mystic prayer as “recollection.” 

Indeed, to be fair to Alpert, the full title of his 1970 book was “Remember: Be Here Now.” 

An utterly mixed message; perhaps so that anyone could take from it whatever they wanted. But that makes it useless as any kind of spiritual advice. Just a good hustle for a charlatan.

Mindfulness and Art

 

The creative writing text from which I am currently teaching advises that anyone who aspires to be a writer must develop “mindfulness”: meaning they must always be alert to exactly what is happening around them, mentally recording every sight and sound.

I think this is exactly wrong. And depressing. Real writers are incapable of doing this. Real writers are usually incapable of earning a driver’s license, because they cannot pay attention to what is happening around them. They live in their imagination.

The author gives an example to demonstrate her point, a “flash” essay chronicling a writer’s morning on her balcony watching a neighbour watering her plants. Only mildly interesting, not worth the time to read it: my primary impression as a reader is of self-indulgence. This is someone who thinks a thing is of immense importance simply because it happens to her.

“Realism” in art is a blind alley. 

Shakespeare is partially to blame for this misunderstanding. In Hamlet, he refers to art as “holding the mirror up to nature.” People assume this is a mandate for “realism,” for describing things just as they appear to our physical senses. Isn’t that what nature is? The physical world?

But of course, we do not need a mirror to see nature in this sense. We can look at it directly. Were this the point of art, there would be no point to art. 

Shakespeare here, as is clear in context, means “human nature.” Art holds the mirror up to our souls. “The play’s the thing/ With which to catch the conscience of a king.” Art shows truth, not mundane sense perceptions. Art should be unlike everyday life. Art is the escape from that. Art also should not be “self-expression”; it is the escape from self. 

Art should be vivid, not “realistic.” 

Consider Kafka’s short story, “Metamorphosis.” Has he ever had the opportunity to carefully observe what it would feel like to be a giant bug and to have many small legs that are difficult to control? Or crawling on the ceiling? Yet it is intensely vivid; we can imagine being Gregor Samsa ourselves. That is vividness, not realism. A thing is vivid if it appeals to the imagination.

Consider too fairy tales—the most enduring and popular of all literature. They never give authentic-sounding sensory detail. Some modern authors have tried to rewrite them in realistic terms—and the results are unreadable. One does not want to hear Cinderella contemplating a hangnail, or searching the prince’s palace for a toilet.

Sometimes verisimilitude to a common actual sensory experience helps make a passage vivid; usually not. Sometimes precise physical description is a means to this end; usually not. Certainly art should not editorialize or comment on the side; it should be visual, it should speak in images, not ideas: but that is not the same as sense perception. “Image” is the preserve of the imagination, not the senses. Art speaks through symbol and example, not discursively.

This is all also a misunderstanding of the originally Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Western materialists always reverse the meaning. This Western “mindfulness” is really emptying the mind of all thoughts--mindlessness. Anyone who aspires to be an arhat must learn to shut out what is going on in front of their eyes, and see instead with the mind’s eye. That’s why you sit still with your eyes closed. You shut out sensation, including the sensation of breathing or any ambient sounds, in order to ponder your memories and your imaginings; what Buddhism calls the “storehouse consciousness.”

Perhaps it is best to illustrate as a poem:

Mindfulness

The rain pings like loose change on the Chivas Regal sign across the street
Like the climax of a spaghetti Western
Heard through a drive-in speaker.
I do not know the dog sleeping mindfully at my feet
The karmic pinball machine has thrown us together for this moment
For reasons beyond comprehension.
The confused yellow butterflies of August 
Are grounded by the mild turbulence.
They do not tumble after one another.
The dog body wakes, raises his head
And stares at their absence.

Mindfulness

 

I came across an interesting passage in John Fowles’s book A Separate Peace. Gene, the protagonist, has deliberately but secretly made his best friend fall off a tree branch out of envy, shattering his leg. Now he is dealing with the guilt:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was.”

This may explain the common misconstrual of the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness” to mean emptying your mind of any thoughts, concentrating only on immediate sense perceptions. 

It is a form of escapism, that might take the place of alcohol or other drugs.

But it is accordingly not a way to confront your problems or to solve them. It is certainly not a way to deepen your spiritual life or improve your mental health.

A pre-raphaelite take on the Greek goddess of memory.

The actual Buddhist term we translate "mindfulness" is related to the word “remembering.” As we might say "keep in mind." It is filling your mind with thoughts. It is carefully examining the past.

We all need to do this. The guilty will resist it mightily, but they need to do it more than anyone.

The Third Commandment

God creating the universe; from a 13th century English psalter.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. You shall labor six days, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. You shall not do any work in it, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your livestock, nor your stranger who is within your gates; for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day, and made it holy.”

The Sabbath is a gift to man, as Jesus elsewhere asserts, rather than something that might go against our natural inclinations: who does not want a holiday? It seems odd, therefore, that it is in the Ten Commandments, as a moral imperative.

The commandment does go on to demand not only rest for ourselves, but for anyone in our employ, or under our direction. This may require self-sacrifice; it often seemed to under Ontario’s old “blue laws.”

But this does not explain why the commandment not only includes but leads with the need to rest ourselves.

It is perhaps therefore significant that unlike almost all the other commandments, it does not begin with the words “Thou shalt,” or “Thou shalt not.”

It begins with the word “remember.”

It is perhaps a call to what Buddhists call “mindfulness.” Although often misunderstood to mean attention to the immediately sensed, the original word translated “mindfulness” is actually closer to this English word: “remember.”

The Sabbath many be set aside for remembering. The sense of the first four words of the commandment may really be, “Remember on the Sabbath day, in order to keep it holy.”

Here in Exodus, in context of citing the commandment, we are reminded of the creation of the cosmos by God. When the commandment is reiterated in Deuteronomy, reference is made to the Passover and the escape from bondage in Egypt. We are called to remember these things.

“Remembering” here does not only mean our personal memories. It does not in Buddhist “mindfulness,” for to Buddhists each soul has memories of past lives in many realms of existence. And it demonstrably does not here—we do not personally remember either the creation or the exodus.

Limiting the memory to the personal is a modern convention, that Plato would have scorned as much as Jung. Memory in this Platonic sense assumes a vast store of innate knowledge. We are born, as Blake said, like a garden fully planted, programmed by the Creator.

But we need not go that far. Memory obviously includes not just personal sense experience, but all that we have read, or been taught, or even dreamt. It includes the stories that form us: the vast literary landscape of the Bible, the Odyssey, the Ramayana, Aesop’s fables, the legends, the fairy tales.

Smile or Die

"Mother told me to always smile."

You often hear the advice that you ought to have a positive attitude.

Advice to face the world with optimism is often, in small matters, no doubt good advice. We should meet anyone new with a smile, assuming their good intentions. To do otherwise is prejudice. But that is not the whole truth. Ronald Reagan used to say, “trust, but verify.” Former US Defense Secretary Mattis went further. “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody that you meet.”

This “positive attitude” business easily segues into the current postmodern idea that truth is subjective: talk of “narratives” and “my truth,” and the idea that you can create your own reality.
It goes further back than that, of course—“the power of positive thinking,” beloved by so many salesmen. “Think and grow rich.”

But being unrealistically optimistic is as harmful as being unrealistically pessimistic. The goal should not be optimism or pessimism, but realism.

An example from modern history: the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain was the determined optimist, and insisted on assuming good intentions.

Chamberlain’s approach was wildly popular, and Churchill’s was not. Churchill was dismissed as a warmonger.

This suggests that unrealistic optimism may be a more common human problem than unrealistic pessimism. People naturally WANT to be optimistic, and to believe good things will happen. Nobody WANTS to be pessimistic. And so this is the side on which we are more likely to err.

This is why we need to streetproof children, for example. The instinct is to be too trusting.

Other examples of unrealistic optimism leading to disaster can be easily found in history. The story of the Titanic is that same story. The story of Austria-Hungary starting the First World War by invading Serbia. The story of Japan bombing Pearl Harbor. Both were obviously over-optimistic about their own abilities. So was Germany in invading the USSR in WWII. Or Napoleon in invading Russia the previous century. So was the US in going in to Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. Probably every economic collapse ever has been caused by a preceding period of unreasonable investor optimism.

Canadian history? Laurier promised to solve the Manitoba Schools question with “sunny ways.” Everybody bought it at the time. The actual result: no more French or Catholic schools in Manitoba.

Unrealistic optimism is a recurring theme in the Old Testament: a prophet appears and warns of disaster to come, unless the government’s direction changes. And he is ignored as an annoying pessimist. And disaster comes. You’d think we’d been told this often enough to have learned the lesson.

The same theme is in the Greek: Cassandra and Laocoon in the Iliad. Nobody wants to hear anything upsetting.

Unrealistic optimism would seem to be the greater human danger, not unrealistic pessimism. But the real danger is unrealism. Realism is the proper goal.

The notion that we can critically affect by our own attitude whether good or bad befalls us, also has the awful side effect of ending up in blaming the sufferer or victim whenever someone does encounter trouble. It must be their own fault; they had the wrong attitude. If a woman is raped, she must by her attitude have deserved it. And the Jews must have provoked Hitler somehow.

Pushed a little, believing that we can control our own destinies with the right attitude also amounts to assuming godlike powers.

Which is close to Eve’s fatal error—“you will become as Gods.” Or Lucifer’s.

I say not “smile,” but “pay attention.” Look, listen, discern, and decide. This, use an often misused Buddhist term, is the true “mindfulness.”