Meditation gets you firmly fixed in the now. Only the present is real. We can only act, only be, now, in the present. Yet the past weighs heavily on us. We carry it into the present ‘now’. If only I had said… If only I had not done… If only… We are constrained by what we have done, or left undone, by regrets, by guilt. The past no longer exists; it is over, finished, it cannot be changed yet its power to affect the present still lives on.
That was very badly put. It treats the past as though it was some external force, some extrinsic agency which shaped and determined us. But this is not the case. The past does not exist. Only ‘now’ exists and in this ‘now’ are memories. What you are now is the result of what you thought and did in previous ‘nows’. I can understand now why many Buddhists understand reincarnation, not as a succession of lives, but as being born continually into the present. We are born anew into this moment, this present ‘now’. We emerge from the womb of past ‘nows’, shaped and determined by them. If we do nothing the impetus they generated will carry us into this present moment, passively accepting that shaping and determination. We will continue to act and react as we have done previously. Our freedom to change, to remake ourselves now is constricted by the inertia of memory. We may talk about fate, or say, ‘I am what I am,’ or, ‘What will be will be.’ These are either excuses for our inability to take charge of the now, or they are an inference to cover up our lack of understanding of what it means to be a human person.
In meditation, as I focus all my attention on my breathing and on being aware simply of this present now, I realise that I am not my mind, no more than I am my body. Like a butterfly constantly fluttering about, my mind is rarely still. Quite independently of my will, which is trying to remain focused on my breathing, it keeps up a constant inner dialogue with itself, delving into memories, embarking on voyages of fantasy, flittering from one topic to the next. One moment it is anxious, the next fearful, then dreamily nostalgic. It is quite another world this inner world of the mind and it has very little to do with this real world of the present now – unless, of course, I allow it.
Mead and Watsuji say that the social self is an achievement. What we have achieved has depended on how much control we took of the present moments. How much control we can take depends on the influence of the past and the social context of the present. For some these can be liberating, for others they can be oppressive. It also depends on our vision of what it means to be human. It is tragic that there are so many people who have been damaged by their past and present experiences and who have little hope of being able to change because they have no other vision than that of their present context.
Meditation is not easy. It takes great effort to maintain concentration. Eventually, however, comes mindfulness and the acute awareness that only the present now is real; that the past can influence this now only if it is allowed to; that what I am is what I make myself to be in this moment. Memories, moods and feelings can all be ignored, relegated to another time and place. Only now is real and now I can be…? What I can be depends on what I understand and on what I believe.
The psychologist T. S. Lebra sees the structure of the person as having three dimensions : the interactional self, the inner self and the boundless self. The interactional, or social, self is an ongoing event, the result of the developmental process of education (especially language) and moral socialisation. The inner self is the ongoing dialectic between the I and the me constantly bringing forth new syntheses. It is a world of feelings and fantasies, moods and imagination. The boundless self – that is the most interesting one of all. It is the self we all need to discover.