This moment now is a phrase that captures the three indivisible facets of authentic experience. Three things, always these, never one without the others.
The popularity of “mindfulness” has put now in the spotlight. Life in consumer civilization renders now of its substance, squeezes it hollow, makes it into just another empty passing point along a continuous array of empty passing points, one thin line in a queue of identical thin lines etched into the face of a clock. The call for mindfulness is an appeal to re-embrace now in its infinite richness, in its astonishing density.
Or it should be that. More often it becomes just another palliative, just another form of self-absorption, just another strategy for distraction and disengagement.
The immersive experience of “flow” is in some sense the inverse of mindfulness. Flow is a word for what happens when you inhabit moment as it expresses itself; flow occurs when you allow your conscious experience to unfold along its own temporal creases. When entering a flow state, moment broadens its shadow, and its artificial borders disintegrate, allowing it to stretch outside of the sharp temporal structuring mandated by systematized routine. Flow is analgesic. When moment is temporarily dislodged from its mechanical moorings and allowed to drift with the currents and eddies of thought, there is an anodyne tranquility that follows re-immersion into the civilized world of coerced commitment and bureaucratic obligation.
Popular psychology has yet to acknowledge the remaining facet, however, failed entirely to notice the third face of the sacred trinity. There is no trendy quasi-sophisticated word for this. But this is indispensable, elemental. The content of now is entirely unique; this has never been before and will never be again. And it is not just any moment; it is this moment.
This is what the civilized are missing most of all.
