Stop. Draw your attention inward, and remove everything from your mind. Focus your awareness exclusively on your being there, on being present. If you can remove your attentive consciousness from the causal flow of daily life, then congratulations! You have instituted what has been coined by a Totally Famous German Idealist the phenomenological epoché, or the suspension of the natural attitude. This curious eidetic state is one in which the strings of our lives are temporarily severed; only the consciousness of being remains. But forget all these fancy shmancy words. What you are really experiencing is actually quite simple and fundamental – you are living in a moment. Well, you are always living in a moment, and moment can mean many things. But taken at its core, you are living from increment to increment when suspending the natural attitude, and you are aware of it. So, other than fucking with you via website, what is the purpose of this exercise? Well, today I would like to talk about the moment, and what it means to you and me.
The first thing to understand about moments is that they are no different from any other sensory construct. We see things, we smell things, and we attend to moment-things. Moments are informed by more basic sensory experiences, but they are discreet entities within human perception. To better exemplify this, it might make more sense to approach the question from a different angle. If moment is part of sensation, what is the unit of moment? We have a limit to the resolution we can see, the decibels we can hear, so there should also be some parameters defining moments we can experience. Another, smarter, dude came up with the answer to this question. This time a different, slightly less famous German Idealist decided that we can reduce all of our perceived sensory input to signs. For the moment, the smallest unit is the moment-sign. The moment-sign is multi-dimensional. It is comprised of the sum of all senses and the smallest unit of time for them to occur within- a brief (eidetic) flash of existence. Mr. Science tells us that we cannot tell increments of time shorter than around 1 ms or so. So a moment-sign would have to endure for some span of time thereafter. Think of the smallest element of an experience – a picture in your mind’s eye of everything that happened at a split second in a given event. This approximates the moment-sign.
As I said, the moment-sign is not just time, a moment also has content. It doesn’t seem likely (or meaningful) that people have a substantially varied perception of seconds. They are arbitrarily and objectively defined, and whether someone can sense a hair’s breadth more of a millisecond doesn’t seem to affect much. However, consider what would happen if someone could jam more content into an individual moment. They could essentially live more “life”, that is they would have more experience per given unit of time. This is something where people can differ in a more meaningful way. For reasons of biology and mystery, some people are more sensitive to the world, and they can receive more information in a given instant. These people can live “fuller” moments. Think of it this way – if you could only see in black and white, you would immediately receive less information than someone who can see color when looking at certain images. It has nothing to do with the mental processing; it is simply what is presented to the mind. For similar, yet unknown reasons, there is a limit of total content which can be fit into a single moment-sign. How exactly this is made manifest is uncertain, but I like to think that this is the reason some people are more detail-oriented than others. Some people have a Sherlock –like quality where they just intuitively notice more about the world. There’s no legitimate way of knowing this for sure, though, but it is fun to think about!!!
So a moment-sign is the enduring of content as presented to the senses. These time-images are then played out, one after another, in the perception. They go through a whole series of faculties and processing, memory and consideration, and are chained together. This series of moments, played out over longer time scales, is what we call the experience. It is the experience that I think most people refer to when they are considering moments. To take a brief aside, it is worth mentioning that it wasn’t my idea to write this. I actually received a request (yes a request!) to talk about moments and specifically to address what it means to live life in the moment. It is a very interesting question, and only in part because of the linguistic confusions. Living life in the moment consists in, prima facie, nothing new. By having experiences, constituted by moment-signs, I am living in the moment. It is tautological and redundant to say so. Luckily, I am not a robot man, and I do not struggle for understanding nuance in language. So what does it mean to live in the moment, if it doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with the strict concept of moment?
To live in the moment is nothing less than a repetition of the steps above, with an additional flavoring of psychological concerns. To live in the moment sounds an awful lot like the suspension of the natural attitude. My understanding of this phrase is that if we are living in the moment we are:
1) not carrying our past baggage into a current experience
2) attentive to the external world at the exclusion of most internal concerns
3) not dwelling on the potentialities of the future
In short, our attention is turned away from the conceptual considerations of the world, and instead to the experiences in themselves. Unlike the phenomenological epoché, this is done in a non-rigorous way. We live, we laugh, we eat, we pray, we love. This is living in the moment. It is nice to escape from the oppression of daily life, and the worrying it entails. However, living in this way strikes me as disingenuous to what it means to be a person. Let’s return to the constituent parts of living in the moment. They are all temporally oriented towards past, present, and future.
- Past – ignore your past. This is impossible. All experience, once processed, is informed with your past experiences from memory. You can only laugh at or enjoy a given experience because you have an understanding of conceptuality, language, and a basis upon which to compare the current situation. Instead, what I believe this means is to live in a way that is genuine to your needs/desires/goals, disregarding past experiences that were negative. It has nothing to do with the moment, and everything to do with your attitude.
- Focus on the now – You do this all the time every day. Even when in deepest thought, you are still processing information provided by the senses. As long as you are awake, you are oriented externally to some extent. Again, this seems to have more to do with a psychological concern. By saying focus on the situation, what you are really saying is block out other thoughts and influences. Ignore the nagging and naysaying inside. Having a good attitude and a willingness to acknowledge and then put away concerns fulfills this criterion.
- What future? – By now the pattern appears obvious. The moment has nothing to do with the future. The future is in you, bogging down your good time as you wonder about what will come next. This is a classic expression of anxiety about the future. The moment itself does not bear this out. Only the mind does.
These points all come together in the notion of anxiety. The burden we all experience in the world that seems to color our experiences. Living in the moment really has nothing to do with moments. It has everything to do with the very human desire to escape from our problems. To say to someone Live In the Moment, what we are really saying to them is to Deal with your Problems (later) and Enjoy this. Living in the moment is an expression of Yes-Saying, of accepting and disregarding old concerns for the vibrancy and joy that new experience can bring. Living in the moment, however, cannot alleviate our problems.
Just because it is a function of our internal anxieties, does not mean that living in the moment should be discarded. It just needs to be tweaked. Before I said that it is disingenuous to what it means to be a human person. By that I meant that unlike all other animals, we are uniquely equipped to deal with our problems. We can plan elaborately, reflect deeply, and act in the most complicated ways. To confront problems head on is profoundly human. To go with the flow, is decidedly more instinctual, more animalistic. Or worse, it becomes a safe harbor for denial and evasion. Someone who lives in the moment all the time is simply denying their problems. There is no safety there. Yet, someone who is constantly scheming and worrying is denying the joy and pleasure of a life lived. So, I vote to change the phrase entirely. Instead, it should be live moment to moment. That is, live with an awareness of the life experience in which you are placed, but contextualized within the larger continuity that is the abstract life we assemble for ourselves in our mental actions. So Aristotle was right. Cool and good. *drops mic*