Some of the most effortless and straightforward phrases in the spiritual world like “mindfulness”, “being present in the moment” or “now” ironically also happen to be the most inflated and hard-to-accomplish ones that are easier to learn about as a concept rather than practice as a sustaining reality.
Cognitive scientists chalk up this paradox to the workings of the king puppeteer upstairs, because for the brain, “the present moment” is evolutionarily nonexistent. The brain sees time as an unidirectional, unbroken progression where “now” is a just-missed rendezvous point. Unlike animals that use reflexes and instincts to keep them alive, the human brain ensures our survival by constantly simulating future possibilities. To that end, the brain uses the “now” as a perception-based data generator to sift through information, retouch memories, and create predictions for the impending future.
When left to its own devices, the mind is capable of wandering from one scenario to another, past or future, without any conscious effort on our part. An increasing number of scientists and scholars agree that this ability of the brain to do cognition-based time travel is what makes us wiser, setting us apart from other species. Our civilization progressed in terms of agriculture to retirement planning and everything else in between because of our ability to contemplate the future.
But for all that wisdom and foresight bestowed by evolution, our brain can also overstretch its anticipatory prowess to a debilitating degree. Our future self is a complete stranger to us, yet we presume to know what is best for that stranger in the unforeseeable tomorrow based on our past experiences and present emotions. We see our future through the filter of now and overprize what would make us happy or underestimate our abilities to rise up should there be a challenge. We are happier when we look forward to something joyous in the future than when we are in the actual experience. We feel weak in this moment not by the misfortunes of our past, but by our bleak view of the future.
So thanks to our sophisticated tea-leaf reader, there is a chasmic divide between what we have been trained for by evolution and what we should strive for in reality. On one side is our biological conditioning across millennia that says escaping the present and forecasting the next is the most natural and effortless activity for our brain. On the other side, there is reality emphasising on the missed “nows” and misplaced happiness, which is simply not the way existence is supposed to be.
And between these two points, lies the expedition of our life.
