Discovery or awakening can happen instantaneously, but can have no meaning outside of a pragmatic context, a domain of continuous practice which is living the time. Maybe you ‘come to’ and suddenly realize that you’ve been absent-minded or preoccupied, and in the moment it seems that the summit of all wisdom is “Be here now.” Can you commit yourself to (lose yourself in) living by that precept? To be committed is to be preoccupied. Without the continuity between memory and anticipation, how can you be here in time?
Consider for instance the mindfulness which is central to Buddhist practice. First, a couple of definitions:
Over the years and throughout various cultures, many techniques and systems of Buddhist practice have been developed … but the essence of awakening is always the same: to see clearly and directly the truth of our experience in each moment, to be aware, to be mindful. This practice is a systematic development and opening of awareness called by the Buddha the four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, awareness of feelings, awareness of mental phenomena, and awareness of truths, of the laws of experience.
— Jack Kornfield (Smith 1999, 32)
The only truths you can be aware of are general truths, which express themselves in many specific ways. Laws of experience, or of nature, are legisigns (Peirce), and have their being in futuro, since they continue to govern the unfolding of experience as of phenomenal events. Awareness in each moment takes time because each moment takes time, just as time takes mind. You don’t get in the way.
Mindfulness is best described as ‘a non-reactive, non-interfering awareness.’ It is pure knowing, without any of the projections of our ego or personality added to the knowing.
— Wes Nisker (1998, 25)
Right mindfulness accepts everything without judging or reacting. It is inclusive and loving. The Sanskrit word for mindfulness, smriti, means ‘remember.’ Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment. The character the Chinese use for ‘mindfulness’ has two parts: the upper part means ‘now,’ and the lower part means ‘mind’ or ‘heart.’
— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 64)
Mindfulness is re-membering what has been dismembered. The Arabic term dhikr, often translated ‘remembrance,’ is an Islamic equivalent to smriti, and a Christian version is the Greek metanoia (often translated ‘repentance’) (Frye 1982, 130). All refer to a kind of resurrection, a coming back to life, a return to presence.
In the ‘kingdom’ the eternal and infinite are not time and space made endless (they are endless already) but are the now and here made real, an actual present and an actual presence. Time vanishes in Jesus’ ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:58); space vanishes when we are told … that the kingdom is entos hymon (Luke 17:21), which may mean among you or in you, but in either case means here, not there.
— Frye (1982, 130)
How could you remember to come back to presence if memory were not already a mode of presence? But then – felix culpa! – how could we return if we had never left? In order to remember we must first forget.
The train that can be expressed is not the express train. You cannot be trained to express it. You express it only in your continuous practice.
You can’t catch up with time. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t need to catch up with time, because it’s carried you all along, and it doesn’t run ahead of living. The impression of lagging behind is caused by your reluctance to let go of permanence in the act of remembrance.