The Real Reason You're Not Feeling the Effects of Mindfulness—"Here and Now" Isn't a Point

"Now" is something that flees when aimed at.

"Let's focus our attention on this very moment."

The voices of people who have tried mindfulness and given up are generally similar. They try to focus on their breath, but distracting thoughts immediately arise. Even when told to focus on "this very moment," they don't know where that moment is. While practicing, they think, "Is this correct?"

General explanations often handle this by saying, "That's how it is at first. You'll get used to it if you keep at it."

However, this concern should be taken more seriously.

Because the idea that "now" cannot be grasped when you try to capture it is not an illusion, but an accurate observation. The moment you try to aim your consciousness at "now," it has already passed. If you wait for the next "now," your consciousness has already flown into the future. The present, as a point in time, is, in principle, not in a place that can be aimed at and captured.

The reason you're not feeling the effects isn't due to a lack of sensitivity. On the contrary, it's precisely because your sensitivity is high that you're noticing the model's shortcomings.

Layers, not points—Husserl's triple structure

The problem isn't concentration, it's the current model.

Is "now" truly a single point on the timeline?

When you think about listening to the sound of a bell, you realize we aren't just hearing the exact moment it rings. The rise of the sound, the resonance, the fading resonance—the entirety of it all coexists within a single "now."

Breathing is the same. At the end of an inhale, the feeling of the "inhale" that is ending still remains, and the sign of the "exhale" that is about to begin is already included.

In other words, "now" is not a point without width. It is a "layer" where the past that is passing, the present that is occurring, and the future that is coming overlap. The phenomenologist Husserl meticulously describes this tripartite structure. The present as a point is too crude a description for experience.

If you stop chasing, failure will disappear.

This model's transformation specifically changes practice.

In the point model, meditation becomes an activity of "chasing after the fleeting present." You aim. You get distracted. You blame yourself for not concentrating. You tense up. You get tired. Far from feeling any effect, it becomes an exercise in self-negation. It's natural that you can't stick with it.

In the layer model, there is nothing to chase.

The lingering afterglow of what has passed and the premonition of what is to come are already overlapping within the "now." What needs to be done is not pursuit, but simply to be present within that entirety of overlapping. Instead of "focusing" on the breath, one sinks into the thickness where the afterglow of the inhale and the premonition of the exhale are overlapping. Even if distracting thoughts arise, it is not a failure. The rise and the fading tail of distracting thoughts are also overlapping there as part of the layers.

If there's nothing to catch, there's no way to fail.

T = t + it──Another Axis of "Here and Now"

Finally, here are the coordinates for this "layer."

The layer has no place on the temporal axis, t, a one-dimensional axis that proceeds at equal intervals from past to future. Suguri's fifth paper, "Imaginary Time," argues that this layer structure can be positioned on another axis, it, which is orthogonal to the t-axis. The entirety of time is a two-dimensional structure, T = t + it, and "here and now" refers not to a single point on the t-axis, but to the entire layer extending in the it direction.

"Being here now" is not a technique for capturing a moment. It is about reclaiming another dimension that was being crushed by clock time.

There is nothing to catch. I am already in that layer.

For those who want to know more about "Being Here Now," check out Lambda Meditation now.

↓Yuma Murakami's Fifth Paper "Imaginary Time - Non-closure of Description and the Principle of Minimal Extension" is here↓

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