I contemplate a tree . . . I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground . . . I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance . . . I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law . . . I can dissovle it into a number . . . But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. (Buber, 1970, pp. 57-58)
But this idea of a moment to which you become attuned…into which you may step… that governs how you are going to be…to the point of superceding all of your best laid, preconceived plans…is so important that I wanted to reflect upon the meaning of this idea of a "Moment".
What does it mean to be "in" the moment?" One thought that comes to mind is the Gestalt moto; "I and thou, here and now." …here and now. You hear the reference to time coming through, don’t you? In fact, when you think of the word "moment" don't you generally think about time? There is a kind of implicit understanding here. And you experience this sense that you understand something here – even though, when you look deeper, may not be entirely sure what it is that you understand. And that’s quite often the way it is with understanding. Heidegger once said (more or less) that the more important the understanding, the less able we are to define precisely what it is that we understand.
So we understand this idea of a "moment" initially as having something to do with time. And if you look at how we generally think about time, you may notice that we think of it as having a kind of directional arrow attached to it. This is the way we usually imagin time…as a sort of one-way street… cobblestones of "now moments" laid out in a line, one next to another… where the past is over there, and the future is over there, and the movement is directionally from the past, and toward the future. We move from what has happened toward what will happen.
You may not be immediately aware of it, but once we divide these "Now" moments of time into the three extases of past, the present and the future, we tend to grant a special prestige to the now-moment of the present. Sometimes this special place for the "now" moment excludes from "reality" altogether (and reality is in quotes here) the past and future now-moments. The future is thought of as a now moment that has not yet come into existence quite yet. The past is composed of all those now moments that have slipped away from the really real. The past and the future become part of the realm of the imaginal – and the imaginal is a second-class citizen in the world of the really real…funny colors on a PET scan.
Sometimes known as "public" or "calculated" time, what I’ve been describing here isn’t really time as much as how we measure time -- and that is very different from our experience of time, even though these two generally have their wires crossed.
The way we experience time phenomenologically is really quite complex. Right now, I have a sense of myself, for instance, currently experiencing a certain degree of nervousness and anxiety in anticipation that I’m going to make a fool of myself by posting this commentary…and I feel very much as I did as a child, when I also anticipated making a fool of myself…and I can’t help comparing this memory…now… of how I anticipated making a fool of myself then, and how this panned out then, with my anticipation of how things might turn out now…which is to say, in the future…after I finish making a fool of myself now. Out of this…it is really somwhat difficult to know precisely what came first, what started it all – the past as remembered, or the future as anticipated. This the difference between the experience of time…where the extases are entwined…inseperable… and how we think about, or calculate time…as a line of now moments with an arrow pointing to from past to future.
So, where is this Present Moment that is so important? How are we to think about it?
I would like to invite you to think about this word "Moment," not as representing a "now: moment in time, but as a moment of presence…with the emphasis on presence. The present here then refers not to the present now moment of calculated time, but to that which presences itself. To be in the moment of the present would by this count mean to be open to that which presents itself – that which presences.
Now to do this…to maintain…to work with an openness to that which presences itself in the moment of the present, can be quite difficult. It takes a special kind of effort for most of us – what late Heidegger called Gellasenheit – which means… a kind of openness to a possible change in our understanding of being. But this isn’t our usual tendency. Our usual way of being in the world doesn’t foster this sort of openness. Our tendency lies in other directions. It takes a special effort to maintain the openness to the moment of presence. But without this openness, the phenomena of the world are locked out.
Michael Staples