'Be here now' but when?!

Brilliant explanation of the Eternal Now

(Soul Continuum) MELBOURNE, Australia. Who is this genius with an Alan Watts' level of ability to explain transcendental and transpersonal, more Eastern than Western concepts like this? And is he being interviewed by a child? "Out of the mouths of babes" is the famous saying.

Commentary

Time is an illusion. This was said. What was meant? For one thing, time is relative to location. On other planes of existence (and there are at least 31major ones the Buddha talked about), time is different.

Things tend to last much longer there in those worlds. One can see that on the animal plane, life is even more brief than on the human plane. But the average lifespan on the human plane varies, contracting down to a few decades (Decadent Age or Kali Yuga), expanding to 80,000 years (Golden Age or Satya Yuga).

At this time in the repeating cycle (samsara), time is very short. When it was 80K years long, it was very short. So it is possible, not likely but possible, to notice the radical impermanence of all things.

That's the funny thing about time, both to be an illusion and something that contracts and expands. When is now?

We can speak of an "eternal now," not "eternal" in the sense of everlasting. It is eternal in the sense of being ever-present.

Time does not move, as the speaker shows, going from the past to the present to the future. That is how the mind is ordering it, making sense of it. (There's causality, with everything arising from sets of causes and conditions. And when science detects retrocausality, what are we to make of that? How can anything that happens now or in the future ever affect the past? It can. It does. It always has.

• This may sound abstract even though scientists have evidence for it, so to make it more tangible and relatable, we ask: Could you imagine being a retrosexual? (What the heck's that? It's a person who only dates people s/he has dated before, in other words, somebody who from now on only redates). Hey, they exist! Some are trans. Anyway, apart from the retrocausality in quantum physics, there is social retrocausality we see all the time if we ever bothered to notice. Everyday practically something that happens today changes the meaning of something that happened in the past. In the past, things were like this. Now they're like this. What we do a lot today changes what it means when it was done in the past. In the past it meant something, but since the "past" really only exists in our heads, that's what changing. What we're thinking changes. Past, future, they're not even real in an ultimate sense. In a conventional sense, they're very real. Better pay attention. We have to consider them, but what are we considering other than changing illusions?

The order of events may be that way, but actually it is always "NOW." We abandon the now to ruminate about the past or to worry about the future, losing the safety and potential of the ever-present.

Semi-Buddhist Eckhart Tolle, who became famous as the author of The Power of Now and through his business partner Oprah, was often asked: "How many nows are there?"

His mind would loop in disbelief about this question because of its astonishingly wrong assumptions. There aren't many "nows." There's only this now. Now is all the time. This is all there has ever been.

We can imagine a future (but when can we imagine it?) We can daydream about a better past. (But when can we do that?) There's only one answer to when anything happens or can happen.

Where and when do we have power? Where and when can we ever make a choice? When do we suffer or find bliss?

We'll lay it out, space it out, after the fact, for sure, but as we live it, when is it?

What was American guru and former Harvard professor Ram Dass (Dr. Richard Alpert) talking about when he named his classic book, condensing his Indian love-guru (Neem Karoli Baba) and other gurus' message? He distilled all of their messages down to one and the same message: "Be here now."

Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Zen, being heavily influenced by Taoism, is all about being rather than doing (karma, action). But where to be?  When should we be mindful, when should we be present?

What? Be. Where? Here. When? Natch. Naturally, that is now.

• Soul Continuum, YouTube.com, 1/2/24; Dhr. Seven to Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly