An Argument for Right Now
Sorry I missed my update Wednesday. I get tired of regurgitating polyphasic "news", such as it is, tiny articles on naps here and there and the occasional interesting question that can't be answered without real research; it's not that it isn't interesting, but for me it's part of my routine now, and it gets a little tiring as a topic. Plus I've been busy as eff and all the busyness has been better suited to being reported in other places than here. Anyway, apologies.
So maybe it's time to break the stride here with another bit of Better Thinking, or as they've now been called, my "Oh yeah and by the way I'm a monk" moments. I can see why people who know me would call them that, too; I've been a areligious philosopher for a long darn time, and having me suddenly spouting off with, "You know, I totally get why the Zen tradition says…" now and again, with all the geeked-out connotations of a religious insider, has got to be weird for people.
So. Zen — the Japanese and better-known word for Chan Buddhism, which includes the Shaolin Order — has a really interesting theory about the meaning of life that I thought I'd share here.
I like it because it is, in my opinion, utterly rational — it's the only "meaning of life" construction I can recall seeing in all of philosophy that doesn't rely on some huge assumption, of god or goodness or order or intelligent design or something; and yet which isn't at all nihilistic or insistent on randomness, either. It's an answer to "what is the meaning of life?" that neither depends on nor destroys god(s), which works whether the Universe is ordered or kind or not, and which makes basic logical sense with the facts we have.
Not surprising that I'm impressed, is it?
Here's what the Chan/Zen Buddhists (and Taoists; they generally agree on this point) say the meaning of life is: THE PURPOSE OF LIVING IS TO PAY ATTENTION TO IT.
Note that it doesn't say "to ponder it", "to study it", "to write about it", or "to develop a system for enjoying / improving it". All of those things may also happen, but the central point — the hingepin of whether you're Doing It Right or not — is paying attention as an active verb. Paying attention is something that can only be done in each moment — it's like praying that way — but it's also something that takes work and practice* and effort to do well.
Why is paying attention a good "meaning of life"? Because it relies on only this justification: You are here. Somehow you were put here, now, in this exact place and time, and somehow you were given the tools to experience it.
Whether you view being here as an incredible gift or a terrible curse or neither; whether you think it's a gift from God or an inevitable accident of physics; whether you think you'll be gone forever when you die, or come back here again, or go to another place — no matter what of those is true, it's undeniable that the best way to do this right is to hone and aim your facility for conscious experience at the moments you're experiencing.
You're a conscious being, and you're here, amid all this, with all these decisions to make. You'll get some right, and you'll get some wrong, and you'll pass on like everything else. What determines whether or not you did a good job, lived a good life, took proper advantage of whatever gift/accident/luck/cycle that put this exact you in this exact now?
Right. The degree to which you paid attention to it. You are here, and you are conscious; those are the two basic foundations of the question of "what's the meaning of life"? What's the meaning of being here, and being conscious? To be conscious of being here.
The perfect answer, I think.
Have a great week, or not, but whatever you do…don't miss it. ;)
-PD
.
*How do you practice paying attention? Well, meditation, for one thing, which is a pure concentration exercise; and that's why it's primary in this type of study. Secondarily, you pick at least one "kungfu" — yes, martial arts works, but not exclusively — one thing that you try to learn perfectly, so that your mental concentration and your physical body can line up, and you can get the hang of paying-attention-while-acting. Thirdly, you work at paying more and better attention every moment of your daily life, while brushing your teeth, while typing, while pooping, while walking, while everything. There's a Hindu saying that everything in life, no matter how seemingly small or unpleasant, was put in front of you by "god" (in this case Krishna) for a reason — that's a metaphor the Zen folks would like. You'll never know the reason if you don't pay attention, though.
Awesometastic Creative-Commons licensed images by MAMJODH — Wow, thank you!
12 comments
Great post. One thing I like to do is pay attention to the space between my thoughts. It cuts off the constant jabbering in my head pretty quickly somehow. Also, ever read any Wei Wu Wei? I've read two of his books and got a lot out of them. He expresses these concepts very well, almost poetically, but also understandably. This is one of my favorites by him:
when the beetle sees, it is I that am looking,
When the nightingale sings, it is I that am singing, When the lion roars, it is I that am roaring.
But when I look for myself, I can see nothing—for no thing is there to be seen.
Sile cannot see me either, for when she tries to see me it is I who am looking: she can do nothing—for only I can do anything.
The beetle can say that also, and Sile, for we are not three, nor two, nor one.
I am the sea too, and the stars, the wind and the rain, I am everything that has form—for form is my seeing of it.
I am every sound—for sound is my hearing of it, I am all flavours, each perfume, whatever can be touched,
For that which is perceptible is my perceiving of it, And all sentience is mine.
They have no other existence, and neither have I—for what they are I am, and what I am they are.
What the universe is I am, and what I am the universe
is.
And there is no other at all, nor anyone whatsoever.
Gāte, gāte, paragāte, parasamgāte, Bodhi! Svāhā!
Beautifully expressed.
Ever read any wei wu wei? I recommend it.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13033759/Open-Secret-Wei-Wu-Wei
As a fellow polyphasic religious philosopher I concur.
That is really funny because in the last year or so I have been telling my friends/anyone that would listen than my personal "philosophy of the year" is that life is defined by our experience. If I live 6 months going to school/work/sleep and have no notable memory at the end, it's like I never lived those months. However if I spend 4 hours with a friend at the river with a campfire under the stars, I very well may live more in those 4 hours than I could dream of living in the other 6 months. In my world, life can be defined by the memories you can reflect on down the road, not the stuff you have, the things you do, the money you make, just the memories. There's more to my thought process, but I'll save that for another time.
:-)
Hi Again Puredoxyk,
Thank you for this excellent post :). For some reason, what you wrote seemed quite new to me, in the life-concept-quadrant-gist.
I can't remember encountering a philosophy-description like "the purpose of life is to pay attention to it". All the times I read about Zen, Taoism, etc.,… well, maybe I wasn't doing a good job paying attention, and I missed it ;).
I have a highly relevant experience to this topic. In a former life I won a couple of World Othello Championships. Othello is an abstract strategy board game with no luck, so it's similar to Chess, Go, Shogi, etc.
Eventually, my strategy basically amounted to "building awareness". It seemed to me that investing energy in thinking about what I saw was generally of limited value. It seemed better to simply build up my awareness of the position as much as possible, and then my awareness usually made it clear what the good and bad moves were.
Usually, I didn't even need to look very many moves ahead, either, because everything that could follow from the present position was implicitly contained within it. Looking ahead was mostly just useful for revealing previously unseen possibilities of the original position.
Of course, my awareness and ultimate judgements were heavily influenced by all my memories- the game rules and all my experiences, experiments, dreams, etc., which I'd had related to Othello. But, that represented a very real kind of awareness, too. "X usually means Z, A usually means B…"
I sometimes told people to play Othello like they were driving a car. You should do a kind of regular scan for different kinds of information. In driving terms, this would be scanning for vehicles around you, their speeds, their signals, signs by the road, road conditions, etc. If you see all those things, and your prior experience tells you "it's much more pleasant to not collide with heavy objects" and "following the law keeps you out of trouble", you're probably going to drive well.
So it was that I had my own kind of board-scanning routine; a habit that was good at giving me a really good awareness, given the time I had to build it. And I kicked ass, and it usually felt pretty effortless :).
….
I also like the way my mother once put it, with regards to childrearing. She hadn't done much to tell my brother and I how to behave and how to view life, and her explanation was that she figured if something was true, then life would naturally teach us the truth. I may be biased, but I think her approach worked quite well, and it was also so very easy :).
We're still such limited creatures, and there is a real challenge in becoming aware of the relatively-optimal ways to build the relatively-useful awarenesses for each moment, and so I like your basic life applications for this practice. Classic mindfulness and physical disciplines definitely seem to be very helpful.
Although I had never before considered the awareness-building aspect of physical disciplines, it's obvious now. And as to why I wouldn't make the connection between my Othello approach and life… well, minds like to compartmentalize, and life is a really really big game :).
I do think that concepts and "do's and don'ts" can serve to build awareness, by getting us to try new things (creating new awarenesses), and by giving us new tools for attentiveness within the moment. In Othello, I used some staple concepts which efficiently helped me to cover a lot of ground quickly.
To try to be almost completely aware is overstimulating and nonfunctional in the real world; it works for babies but not for a typical modern adult.
Thinking out loud here, with some seemingly fresh insight about my past experiences: I think the best concepts tend to be iterative; i.e., they quickly give you an overview which breaks down the big picture into manageable and informative chunks, and then within each unclear area of the overview the concept helps you to break that section down again into "manageable and informative chunks" (which also inform the overview), and you just keep doing that until you have a highly granular and accurate big picture.
There might be something useful to do with looking at things in a fractal way, too, but that's a little hazy in my mind :). I might play around with it…
Thanks again for your enthusiastic wisdom-sharing and the useful and timely concept you've given me. Also, thank you for the many other lovely things you've written. I've greatly enjoyed many recent posts of yours (and I think I should have said so at the time), and I'm glad you have rolled through your recent challenges so well. Keep on rocking, Marie :).
I adored this! I'm currently putting together a philosophy based on the way depressed people see the world and the death of secrets, and this is one of the pieces of the truth I'm uncovering in the process. It is simple and beautiful. Thank you!
Oh this so just made my morning :)
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1914-2008) has been credited with saying, "The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness," but I always assumed he got that out of the Vedas somewhere since Chopra also drops it occasionally.
It's a nice little chunk of ponderation because it doesn't tangle with any of the sticky creation/deity stuff you mention, and I like it because it contains such an intrinsic joyfulness.
And it pretty much means the same thing, IMO, as The purpose of living is to pay attention to it, it just expresses it differently: it seems likely that you would have both if you mastered either.
I can't help but wonder if the purpose of life necessarily equals the meaning of life? Semantics question, I suspect.
Sorry for the multiple posts….the comment box crapped out after my longish one and I assumed it didn't get posted.
[...] first thing I want to say: Wow, were there some great comments on my recent "An Argument for Right Now" post! That argument is one of the cores of my personal philosophy and one of the main [...]
While this is a rather seductive argument, I end up with the feeling that it is too seductive, and that, in addition to serving as a philosophy of the meaning of life, it gives those who feel underwhelmed or disappointed with their own abilities and accomplishments a pass. You're doing it right by just existing, basically. And from a perspective that attempts to be outside of any culture, there is no "doing it wrong," so that is acceptable. But from the viewpoint of just about any culture, it looks like a pass for intellectual laziness. To be a good person, you must be doing something for the collective, and if you're happy with just experiencing the now, you may be less likely to be productive. You may find yourself being okay with your failures and lack of accomplishments, which is wrong, from the viewpoint of collective culture. For your failures to matter, they have to really hurt. However, if you subscribe to all these stressful cultural viewpoints, and you use something like "be content with experiencing the now" as a way to help yourself cope with stress–which it very well may–you're missing something about the underlying philosophy. Simply put, it's not meant to be a tool to help one with stress created by a particular culture; it's meant to be its own way of looking at things that is outside of all the concerns of daily life. Using it to help you get through daily life is somehow missing the point. So the seeming simplicity of this philosophy is deceptive, when I look at it. :)
Anonymous — I think you’re right, but I think you’re addressing something slightly different than what I was talking about: You’re referring to THINKING about experiencing each moment, whereas I’m referring to actually doing it. You’re right that using “experiencing the moment is the only thing I need to worry about” as a platitude/principle/excuse will indeed probably result in shuffling off the less pleasant of our real-world responsibilities, since by mental logic they “make the now suck”.
But the critical component you’re missing is that *actually* experiencing moments, and focusing on the experience of moments, involves a change in thinking all by itself. By re-focusing your attention so that what matters is your being, here/now, because you were put here, you actually end up doing a lot of things for others that you wouldn’t normally. I have seen some of this in myself…when I use “right now” as my focus, I’m less likely to avoid helping others; their needs *in the now*, in my face at this moment, where I’m forcing myself to pay attention, are far more compelling than when I’m mentally talking myself into or out of whatever I’d subconsciously prefer to do (which is what a lot of thinking about the past and future really boils down to). Being where you are, doing what’s put in front of you, often means taking on more responsibility, doing more work, and standing up for what’s right more often. You don’t have the built-in mechanism for ducking your head and walking by, going on with your daily grind, anymore — doing the right thing *in each moment* becomes the primary thing, and so unsurprisingly you end up doing the right thing more often than when you were ignoring most moments and living by past-and-future-based principles.
I’m sorry if that was a little muddled or pulled too much outside terminology; thank you for your comment!