The tyranny of now, mindfulness and ethics, a marriage, regrets

“Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.” (WH Auden)

‘Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out… Endless categories. First, physical causes – like arthritis, gall stones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love.’ (Saul Bellow: More Die of Heartbreak)

‘He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses… He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.’ (James Joyce: A Painful Case)

Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it… Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it… This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life. (Kierkegaard)

Apparently, people can now get married, quite seriously, with the full ceremonials, to themselves. Not only in California, but also here, and Japan and elsewhere. So it is definitely a ‘thing’. But how does that work? Our experience of ourselves would surely have to be fundamentally other than it is. It looks like self-acceptance being taken literally. We have a relationship with ourselves, which is sometimes amicable, even indulgent, and sometimes challenging and even painfully antipathetic. But it is not a literal relationship. We negotiate our experience of ourselves through our relationships with others. That is where our experience of ourselves comes from.

For example, when you get married you commit yourself to a relationship with another specific person. And this has a profound effect on your ‘relationship’ with yourself. If you marry yourself you are putting others at the service of a relationship with yourself; whereas, if you want a healthy relationship with yourself it has to be the other way around. Who we are consists in our relationships with others, which started in our relationship with our mother. Our relationship with ourselves is metaphorical, deriving from these real relationships, and modeled on them.

I mention this latest wondrously bizarre cultural development, because I got married recently - to Claudia of course. It had a practical element to it – it made preparing my will easier. And it was held in Camden registry office. So you’d think, all very businesslike. But it wasn’t at all. It was moving. I could hardly get the simple, secularised words out. We each invited a witness; mine was my old friend Roger Jones (Vajradipa). And it was tears all round. I was taken by surprise. A marriage is a commitment to a future together. In our case, it felt much more like a public honouring of our past together. 20 years, in fact. Antoine took the photos. Claudia and I look like Beauty and the Beast. Well, I look a bit of a monster to me in them, because when I look in the mirror an internal vanity photo-shopping of the image happens, so it’s always a nasty surprise to look at a photo. As for the people who love me, they don’t see the monster; they see me.

Another particularly modern concern, one that like self-acceptance, is central to the mindfulness industry is for ‘being in the present moment’. It is associated, bafflingly, with the Buddha. In fact, the Buddha’s view is that people who are intent on being in the now are caught up in neurotic grasping:

‘Let go of the past, let go of the future, let go of the present, and cross over to the farther shore of existence. With mind fully liberated, you shall come no more to birth and death.’ (Dhammapada 348)

However, the present moment is clearly where people today park their lives. Never before has our present experience been so rich, and those riches so immediately available. There is so much going on, right now, so much entertainment to be accessed right now with a click. It is as if we are trapped in a free-floating present moment, like an astronaut cut loose and drifting in space. We float through this life in a bubble of seductive distractions, all available here and now: ready meals and Netflix. Of course we want to be there for it all. And of course, frustratingly, the present moment has become the promised land. Always just out of reach. It’s the one thing about mindfulness as it is popularly understood that everyone gets.

The present moment tends to be where I live now, but not very mindfully. My life is slow and uneventful. I don’t have much planning to do, my life amounts to visits to the hospital, reading, music, TV, occasional walks, visitors, and getting through meals. It’s almost monastic. Well, that last one, meals, I’m not so monastic about. If I don’t get it right a meal can be really horrible, so I’m really picky. I need clear strong taste, but nothing too chewy or dry. However, my niece, Rose (Tomaszewska), comes round after work once a week or so, and cooks food I can enjoy (though this week her sister Zoe made me a fabulous veg stew). And also the pain from the tumours in my bones and lungs and facial nerves that I had a while back seem to have receded for now - they were a ‘flare up’ apparently. But quite quickly one takes these little pleasures and triumphs for granted. So how can I try to be more mindful? And how will it help?

Our usual experience of ourselves tends to be dominated by habitual thinking and emotional reactions. So these are the problem, right? Not exactly. When you worry or get upset, your experience is generally not of worry or upset per se; the experience is of whatever it is you are worrying or getting upset about. It’s a whole separate world or life that we retreat to compulsively: it is so secure and reassuring; it’s all centred on myself, me. But it is at one remove from the life your body is living in the world. The practice of mindfulness reverses this. It privileges sensation and feeling. That is, mindful attention is embodied. Worries and thoughts are held in an experience of ourselves that is not about oneself, that is non-conceptual, uncontained, constantly changing, and literally inexplicable. Mindfulness is the discovery of the mind in the body; the discovery that the mind and its awareness is to be found in the body.

The expression ‘Seize the Day’ from the ancient Roman poet Ovid can also be translated ‘Taste the Day’. And this seems much more like it. You see, I am very much in the here and now, but I recoil from tasting it. Especially on my present chemo regime, which is three days of fasting followed by four days of eating with an extra bit of damage to the taste buds and throat and mouth rawness, plus a dose of nausea, and general exhaustion, all from the chemo. (And then a week off). The mouth is naturally a welcome mat to pleasure and nourishment, but mine is either denied anything, with the fasting, or else it censors away the pleasure when food is finally available. It’s like I have a puritan zealot at this particular sense gate squeezing the simplest pleasure out of things for me. My mouth perpetually tastes sour and feels scraped raw; it does not offer the wet sensual welcome that the most prudish killjoy enjoys from their mouth.

So it’s not about being in the now, but tasting our experience, being alive to it, including feelings and thoughts about the past or future. This is difficult for me: instead of bringing that open, welcoming quality of attention to tasting my experience, I tend to get upset and frustrated. But just sometimes I do succeed in being more true to this miraculous one-off experience of being here, doing this. However unsatisfactory, even painful, it is the fullness of my life.

If you are open only to the pleasant, if you close up against the difficult, react against it, you only ever have half a life. And I think this is what people actually feel when they yearn to be in the present moment. They want the fullness of life without the disagreeable bits. Ad this isn’t possible. So ‘being in the present’, as well as being a pallid, abstract and redundant way of referring to something so vivid and demanding as being alive in this world as it really is, misses the point.

Mindfulness means noticing an extra layer of upset that we add to any suffering or difficulty. You could say that it means being ok with worrying, with regret, with anticipation and memory; that it means not getting into a state over one’s normal emotions and feelings, memories, pain and plans. But mindfulness is above all about being truthful, true to your experience. If you are not ok with your emotional experience, then being mindful is to see and feel how it is not to be able to accept your experience as it is.

The present moment or the now is not something we can ever escape from and therefore there’s little point in wanting to arrive in it. It’s a first world problem. The experience of most people throughout history has been that the present is mostly a grind. They avoided it by planning, by anticipating pleasurable events in the future (which is often more pleasurable than the event itself turns out to be), and anticipating unpleasant events (which can help to soften their impact).

The present moment is not always where I want to be either. But what is the alternative? The past is long gone, an innocent, even alien world from which I have moved on. The future is more or less brief and painful and finally a mystery that is unthinkable. At the same time, the past and future hang over my present moment experience. I am nervous that at any time I could be stricken by persistent nerve pain in my face from the pressure of the tumour just below the skull, of which I still have very occasional but ominous intimations. And will my future be terrifying as well as painful? Have I simply not yet quite taken in how frightening the end is going to be? And even frightening after the end, so to speak? I was recently caught by surprise by a news item about the mummified head of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham which can be seen at University College London. The mummification was not expertly done, and the head looks ghastly. Just momentarily, it got to me, the horrific nature of what this body of mine is going to turn into at some point quite soon, probably before the end of the football season. The instinctive reaction of terror reflects one’s identification with the body, combined with an inability to imagine oneself not being there at its dissolution.

But of course I won’t be there. At least, if I am - if, that is, various religious theories are proved right - it won’t be me with an identity defined by this body. I will be engaged, even wrestling, with a new confusing reality. I need to think some more about what I’m truly anticipating in this respect, if anything. But my teacher Sangharakshita says that death is an enforced meditation, an experience of your own mind, and so far as it goes, this seems unarguable. Conversely, meditation is a preparation for death. It is an attempt to hold the gaze steady, so to speak, to open up to something naked and uncompromisingly truthful.

Today I heard of the death of an old friend, Bill Gillies, who used to be involved with our Buddhist centre back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. I was in contact with him again very recently (Dom had stayed in touch with him over the years) and he had much the same thing as me – a rare and aggressive head and neck cancer (in his case ocular melanoma) that had metastasized into the bones and the liver (so in fact not as bad as mine). He died of liver failure - as I will, it seems. The report of his last few days reassured me rather. If he can do it cheerfully enough, then I can too. Well done, Bill. Dying is the most solitary thing we do. In a secular society in which life and death, living and dying, are treated as separate, you are on your own when you die. After a lifetime of being able to share things, you’re alone with the most central experience of your life. But hearing of Bill’s end seemed to bridge that painful psychic gulf for a moment.

So yes, the future is very much part of my present. And there are two kinds of future. One is the future as we are going to experience it. Unless you’re a clairvoyant we just have to wait for this to turn up. When it does, it will be our present experience, so in this sense ‘the future’ never happens. The other future is the future as we experience it now, which consists in educated guesses, and planning, and also anxiety, uncertainty, hope, fear. Some of this is useful; some not. But if unhelpful views of the future are there, even as an occasional icy draft of apprehension when the news is bad, or a sense of relief when it’s ok, then it is part of my present experience; and I must be present to it. At some point the thoughts lose their power over us, when we become, as the Zen tradition puts it, more intimate with the essential incommunicable mystery of this experience before us. An intimacy, after all, that in the end will be forced on us at death.

It is well-known from the old song, that the past also does not really exist apart from our present interpretations and reinterpretations of it:

‘We met at nine, we met at eight,

I was on time, no, you were late

Ah yes, I remember it well…’

The past is always experienced in the present, whether when it was happening, or when it is experienced as history, as memory. The ‘present’ is not some separate category from the past. In fact, the past and the future are what bring meaning into our experience. Anyone who has practiced meditation in some depth knows that images or thoughts of the past come up, and they do so for good reason. There is a sort of ‘digestive’ aspect of meditation. The path to full ‘presence’, to use this indicator of the goal, can involve revisiting often long past experience.

I admire the achievements of the mindfulness industry, but there is a danger in my view from its two central values – being in the present moment and being non-judgmental – that they fail to address the Buddhist concern with suffering as a deficit of meaning. I was interested to read, for example, a report of the effects of mindfulness practice on criminals in prison. It actually increased the likelihood of their reoffending. It would seem that the emphasis on self-acceptance and ‘self-compassion’, together with the encouragement to sidestep the deeper meaning of our present experience in the sense of its connection to the past and future, gives them permission to drop the burden of ethics.

More widely I suspect that the mindfulness industry supports a general secular withdrawal from ethics in the traditional sense of a discomfort with our own personal ethical failings – i.e. judge not that ye be not judged - in favour of a comfortably censorious attitude towards whatever failings of others happen to be in fashion, and an unwillingness to look at ourselves too judgmentally. For example, one day the industrial torture and slaughter of animals will be finally phased out (with the development of artificial meat) and our present insensitivity to it, knowing as we do that animals have feelings and emotions, will be fully exposed. (Will statues of anyone not a vegan be torn down?) But it seems that the important thing is that we feel ok about ourselves now, in the present.

When the Buddha as a young man, before he became a Buddha, made the decision to leave home and seek after the truth, he did so because he came to realize that the pleasures of a life hemmed in by decrepitude and death felt meaningless. The point is that he lived life in the present moment until that realization. He enjoyed life. He lived in the garden of Eden you might say, as we all do at least at times, if we are lucky, in our youth. And of course we want to get back to that lost Eden, if only we could forget what we now know.

It is the land of lost content

I see it shining plain.

The happy highways where we went,

And cannot come again. (AE Housman: (A Shropshire Lad)

You could reduce much of Buddhism to the simple saying, ‘Actions have consequences’. Consequences not only for the world around us. We imagine that we can do something and remain the same person after the act as we were before. Buddhism points out that who we are is the result not of what we experience, but of what we do, our actions, whether physical or mentaland it is being modified at every moment, through every intention we harbour. We aren’t ‘beings’ but ‘becomings’. So again traditionally, mindfulness is not just purposeful attention to the detail of our experience as it arises; it is also mindfulness of our purpose, that is, of the mind’s intentions, as they arise in response to that experience. In this sense mindfulness is to recollect, to remember our purposes. It is to take responsibility for this intentional activity of the mind, and the consequences that may arise from this ‘karma’ (which traditionally reaches into a future rebirth).

For me, the past is not what it was. It’s almost done. It’s now near enough ‘a wrap’. I can’t help surveying the story, the general patterns and details. And I can’t help reflecting on how it all went, how I think and feel about it all, both in general and in various particulars. Regrets mostly. I’m not berating myself. I am aware that what I have done with my life is very much a function of my character. And even though I had the good fortune to live much of my life with the powerful conditioning and support of belonging to a Buddhist Order, it is idle to imagine that I could have behaved altogether differently, given the weaknesses of character I was born with and those forged in my early years. However, I take responsibility for the things I have done. I could have given a better shape to my character in my time here.  

OK – so let’s look at the ledger. There are many choices I’ve made that have given my life its overall shape. And you can’t help picking away at what might have been. And I think there is little point in that unless we’re talking about criminal activity. I remember over forty years ago displaying myself in a tight-fitting pair of ‘flares’, a demented style of trouser matched with a great deal of free-floating hair – this was regrettable, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Relationships of all kinds though, I think are worth examining.

Sexual relationships are a bit of a hot topic at present I see. Predatory alpha males are getting it in the neck, which is good. I am more of a supine beta male. But the nature of sexual relationships is that unless they lead to lifelong marriage, you are, when you embark on one, starting something which may well end in disappointment and hurt for one or both parties. So there is something at once emotionally risky and forgivable about them. This said, I’ve been careless; also vain, disloyal, unaware – and, oh yes, supine. However, all these weaknesses resulted in my son, who as far as I can see appears to be a very good bloke. He seems to have a pretty strong character, I think - he worries about other people, his old friends from school; at his age I just worried about myself. So it’s complicated. How can I regret the fact that I have had twenty years with my wife, Claudia, which I would not have done if I had behaved better – i.e. differently - in the past.

So I don’t berate myself, but at the same time I don’t accept those weaknesses, I don’t think they are ok. There is a certain superficiality about my character I think, a fascination with the surface of things, with pleasure. Again, in some ways this has positive features to it. But I could have looked more for substance in what I did. I could have considered what I was doing with my life more deeply. My friend J has observed to me that there is a ‘peacock’ side to me, and that the destruction of my face is in a way appropriate to this. And I think the challenge to my pleasures from my present condition is also in some way appropriate.

I have also been careless with many of my friendships. I have I think taken them for granted in the past. I have been complacent, or distracted, in losing them. The thing about any relationship is that it cannot be replaced. It is always unique, and it becomes more individual, and goes deeper the longer it survives. When any relationship goes west there is some kind of absolute loss there. You may make other friendships, but they will have different things going for them. And they will take time to develop. I think here I could have thought more about what was happening. Having said that, of course friendships have to change, and sometimes one just moves on. And even when you do drift apart, the good time in the past when you were close is still there, it is still having an effect. There is loss, but the past is real. I can think of one old friend I fell out with who had quite a profound and lasting effect on my thinking. But I think men in particular tend to become more isolated as they grow older; we need I think to make an effort with their friendships, to keep those they have working.

Then there are difficult relationships. I had a few of these hanging over from when I was chair of our Buddhist centre a few years ago. In some ways I did the job that needed doing, but I was no good at certain aspects of the job. I was a bit like Trump – a populist who annoyed the professionals around me. But it is remarkable how the coming of death miraculously repairs these rifts. Someone asked me if I forgave her for the way she treated me at that time. I said of course. For what purpose would I be keeping resentments warm at my time of life? There are still one or two people who I may have felt treated me badly at one time or another, that I’ve lost contact with, but you know, we’re all in the same boat. Human beings do damage to each other. And now it’s the damage I’ve done to those I love that I feel in the guts, not the damage done to me.