June 12, 2026

The Present (Not A) Moment

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What a gift! We have heard and read so much about the “present moment” over many decades and wonderful books from Be Here Now to The Power of Now. Like a mind-medicine, future worries and ruminations on the past can disappear into the present moment. Yet, for many of us, that good old ever-present present moment is so very elusive, so slippery. Let’s take a closer look to find out why.

We do, after all, encounter lots of moments; those discrete segments of sensation, perception, emotion or thought. But how do we stay with them? We might, as some suggest, soft-label those moments like “itching” (sensation-perception) or “planning” (thought). Gently noting these moments helps tame a jack-rabbit mind. It helps herd and tether the ox. Note…note…note…it is like knocking on a door with just a peek inside at the present moment, before it disappears. Trying to note oneself into the present may become frustrating–we no sooner note a present moment, before we discover that it has vanished into the past. Dang!

Still, the sensate focus seems to initiate at least a brief experience of here/now, and is welcome respite from past and future preoccupations. But there are challenges. Noting sounds, audition, can seem to reveal discrete experiences of the present in the form of a burp after a big sip or a clap of thunder. It’s tempting to call those moments the present, but difficult to categorize them as such when we ponder the beer drinker’s long-winded belch or echoing thunder across a stormy sky. Are these prolonged sensations some kind of prolonged “moment”? And what about the meditation bell and its euphonious, pealing ring? More complicated yet are long-lingering sights and smells and tactile-kinesthetics-not exactly momentary. As we have discovered, these are moments quite impermanent.

Sensation may be an entryway to the present, but we stumble as we try to catch the moment inside. Be here now is a good start, but maybe not such a good finish. Maybe the present is so darn slippery because (even gently) grasping it in any given moment is the wrong idea. The renowned Harvard Functionalist rejected reducing mental events into discrete pieces or moments, and said that consciousness was like a stream. Try to catch that!

Thus, some have reasoned that the present moment is less a distinct and separate instant and more a continuum; that stream, a kind of flow. Positive psychologists have asserted that flow is like “being in the zone”, where the human subject becomes one with the object of doing. It is said that in certain sports, games, or creative activities, a flow state is achieved where the subjective experience of time disappears! Could it be that in the ballroom dance, or the writer’s scribbling poem, or in a long embrace there flourishes an experience (not a moment) of the present. It is said that the meditator’s quieted mind could likewise experience that flowing state. Perhaps in seeking the concrete and tangible moment of the present, we have foreclosed on the possibility of ever truly knowing it.

So be truly now and here! The connection of now and time transforms as we let go of the present moment, of analogue clock ticks, and relax into flow. Similarly, we could let go of here as place. After all, there is nowhere to go. As E. E. (ee), poet master of lower case put it:

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here.

Here, no path and all paths, non-located.

To sum up, the present is not a moment, it is not exactly now, and it is not exactly here. It more closely approximates something both timeless and placeless, flowing, a river–and that presents another tempting illusion: just jump in! But who jumps where? And, once “in” the river, then what? Float, swim, sink…drown?

Our metaphor breaks down because we are not in the river of the present-we are the river of the present. We are always in flow, but our misperceptions and delusions falsely tell us otherwise. We glimpse this truth in the aforementioned experiences of dancing or poeming or lovemaking or meditating. We are the stream. As the Blog Poet wrote, the present is

“nowhere not,
lost when sought”.

So lose the seeking. Lose the diver and the dive and the stream too. Let go into the present, a soundless splash.

 

May 22, 2026

On Becoming

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Trajectories of a human life seem to follow discrete patterns across fixed domains. After all, we are physical beings and cognitive beings and beings of self and personality. In any given moment, we could observe our body or our mind or our very self. For example we might think “my stubbed toe hurts” (body) or “I’m thinking too much about my toe” (mind) or  “I’m too much of a worrier” (self).

Each observation seems factual and solid. But is it?

After all, the toe pain passes along with thoughts about it and self-judgments in relation to it. The point here is that most everything in the moment seems solid and permanent before it is whisked away in another moment or two. The bottom line is that our sense of a fixed reality might be more illusory than it seems. Decades ago, the esteemed Person-Centered Psychologist of his time noted that we are “a process not a product” and he called this process “becoming a person”. We are not product or static. We are not solid and separate from everything else. A beloved Tibetan Buddhist Nun put it succinctly: “nothing solid is happening”.

This reflection reflects the wisdom of anicca or impermanence. Nothing lasts; all is process whether me or the days of my life. On a good day we could appreciate the day’s fleeting goodness all the more and on a bad day, well, it’s nice to remember that (from the Sufi Poets) “this too shall pass”.

We are a process; we are becoming; nothing lasts. The child’s body and mind give way to the teen’s. Our young adult body and mind age into middle age, then old age. We are becoming, in this sense, to our last breath. And maybe beyond…

In the fourth Century, the Bishop of Nyssa embraced these principles of process, becoming and growth by invoking the concept of epektasis. From the Greek, it connotes a kind of stretching out and evolving; “never to stop growing toward what is better and never placing any limits on perfection”… “God is indeed in you” (Beatitudes VI).

If there is an afterlife and how we arrive there no one knows for sure. Death empties us of body and perhaps of the brain’s mind as well.  Maybe we arrive with empty bags, no baggage, not a “me” anymore…and we somehow and immediately merge with the Godhead, the Buddha Nature on the spot. God is indeed in you!

But what if we arrive, as some believe, with bags full of the past: of childhood’s ego and egotisms as well as the identities and confusions developed from adolescence onward– a whole lot of ME at those Pearly Gates. It could be a messy afterlife. But perhaps, in that full suitcase case, we are in process too. In epektasis. We are becoming for eternity, we are less and less me (and my identity), and more and more the Essence (the Godhead) that has always resided in and around me.

In the first case, our beatific transition might be considered sudden and immediate; in the latter case, gradual and eternal. And one more thing.  What if these are one and the same? What if eternity is timeless; a mere split second? Then temporal notions of sudden and gradual disappear into that fateful eternity. Either way, what a fate, Amor Fati!

Maybe we should start unpacking now.

 

April 20, 2026

Intelligism And The AI Nightmare

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We live in some kind of mix of wonder and terror, with so many fed-up people swearing off the news… and becoming hooked on their smart phones. Evolutionary biologists have called ours an age of hyper-novelty, whereby our novelty attracted brains bounce from this to that in an ever-accelerating media world bent on attention capture. Minds captured by technologists who manipulate our deepest emotions, like fear and envy and anger. Yep, our mind, our very intelligence, is trapped by clever bells and whistles into repetitive phone searches and doom scrolling. And when you reflect upon it, you are not always sure just why you picked your phone up in the first place.

And it is about to get a lot worse.

Let’s start in the distant past for a chance to understand where we are now, and where we might be going. And by the way, no expertise in evolutionary science is claimed here, so the following is advanced from the perspective of just a sincere student.

Nearly two million years ago, Homo Habilis roamed this earth, Africa to be exact. He was so-called for his ability to use stone tools like large animal bones for butchering. The little fellow stood 3 ½ to 4 ½ feet tall, and his body was somewhat apelike.

This short-legged, long armed being is invoked here to exemplify one of the earlier members of the Homo genus, and an indirect ancestor to ourselves. We are Homo sapiens and hopefully we have learned a few things about tools over the past 300,000 years. Homo sapiens implies “wise man”. How wise human beings have been with the tools they create could occupy volumes of pros and cons. Think hammer and plow; printing press and steam engine, think machines of war. Yes, it’s a mixed bag.

Now, think computers and artificial intelligence, and feel the tilt of the room, if not the whole planet.

A central thesis in this little essay is that wisdom takes some time… and that we are behind schedule. This proposition is best explained by the esteemed Myrmecologist who argued that “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology”. What could possibly go wrong?

AI developers have been obsessed with developing the god-like tech of intelligence, AGI. Theoretically, artificial general intelligence will surpass human capacities in, well, everything. And then there is super intelligence that can, it is said, solve all problems. You have probably heard of the high-stakes race to develop this god-like technology. While it is sometimes represented as a panacea (there will be some of that), it is being created by people with Paleolithic emotions…a room full of Homo Habilis minded chief executives. Think job loss, cognitive decline, autonomous weapons. Nightmares will outnumber panaceas. By a lot.

Motivated by avarice and ego, developers race forward at breakneck speed with no brakes. They seem to wrongly believe that developing intelligence is merely a matter of evermore information and large language modeling. This dangerous race is like something out of middle school…Sam must beat Elon…Elon must beat Dario. But there is a point not considered or perhaps just suppressed because it will only slow these ambitions down.

You see, while intelligent, these very smart AI’s are not wise, nor will they ever be. This reflects the intelligent but unwise minds of those creators. AI creators seem not to understand that when wisdom does take hold, it is more than an expanding cranium. It is that larger brain but so much more: development across vast expanses of time with a visceral exertion to survive, and send our genes down the road for one more generation. That is what has grown whatever wisdom humans might take credit for across religions and philosophies and mythologies. Technologists can set in motion the ingredients but only time and (right) effort will bake the evolutionary cake. AGI will mimic Lao Tzu without the wisdom of the Old Master. Lao Tzu with hallucinations.

Perhaps this error in conceptualizing intelligence and wisdom relates to a prejudice most of us can understand. We all knew a smart kid growing up. Maybe we were that kid. And we have been swarmed with stereotypes about intelligent people and unintelligent people our whole lives. Status and accolades surround the intelligent; there is understandable pride and, quite often, the social trappings of success. AI creators occupy that space.

All this begs the question, what about the unintelligent? What about people with intellectual disability and what about people with dementia and other cognitive impairments?  There has always been a societal tendency to stigmatize and shun persons with mental statuses like these. Our (false) belief system about these people promotes disrespect, indifference and abuse. Here we find ourselves facing square-on an under-discussed prejudice, intelligism–A bias against persons with cognitive limits or impairments, based on an over-valuing of intelligence itself.

Of course, it matters when impairments happen, the onset, be it at birth, midlife, or in later years. Congenital disorders seem to be part of Identity and are often embraced. Later onsets with accidents and illness may seem alien to Identity and are usually rejected. All of that is a story for another day. Here, we contend that truly seeing the personhood of an individual with a diminished mind is a great blessing to the person and to their beholder. To believe otherwise is to discount personhood and buy into the intelligism that inflates the merit of intelligence into a false god. The AI rush is a nightmare and a heresy.

After all, AGI will certainly surpass all of us intellectually- you, me, and everyone we know. In relation to AGI, we are all the impaired, the unintelligent masses. We will bristle against this late-onset condition and feel trapped in it and by it. For it was only yesterday that we were ok, and then suddenly, we find ourselves thrown from the top of the heap.

Will AI condemn us? Shall we condemn ourselves? Shall we forget the wisdom that will always distinguish us from an intellectually superior AGI. At our best, we have these hundreds of thousands of years of exertion and learning, yielding personhood’s wisdom, and we desperately need it now. Lao Tzu did not represent wisdom as a function of Large Language Models. In truth, he said The Way was ineffable.

So it is all about to get a lot worse. Unless we can be wise, put intelligence in perspective, and pause AI development before that nightmare takes hold.

 

April 15, 2025

Already Forgiven

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Long ago an Indian Sage offered up some wisdom into an age-old philosophical dilemma: free will versus determinism.

Most of us enjoy the day-to-day experience of freedom as we choose the time we rise, our fare for breakfast and the route to work or school. Sometimes the multitude of choices may even overwhelm. Consider breakfast and the over-stocked cereal isle at the grocery store-Frosted Flakes or Frosted Mini Wheats? Sometimes, we just choose none of the above.

We also choose our friends and relationships; we choose our career paths and our politics. We become upset, and sometimes choose to lash out and even harm others. Most would agree that we make these decisions and are responsible for them.

But are we truly free? Some behaviorists argue for the profound effects of the environment to influence, if not determine, our actions. And some proponents of biological determinism posit that our physical and mental selves are a function of the physical body and hereditary traits. These influences of nurture and nature, respectively, are briefly mentioned here to set the scene for that Sage cited above.

The karmic principle of cause and effect was central to this Wise Man’s analysis and it aligns with determinism. By this spiritual concept, our seeming choices for setting the alarm, picking breakfast foods and driving routes are not choices at all but an expression of the thousands if not millions of factors that preceded those actions: “everything is predetermined”. Harms to others are an expression of this principle too. Referring to the everyday experience of me as the Ego, one could thus imagine an egoic being, predestined by its nurture/nature past, while just imagining a life of free will. Our suffering emanates from this core delusion. If I am free and do these harms I must be bad. If you are free and do these harms you must be bad. All is unforgivable.

But suppose our nature is two fold. There is the Ego, an expression of nurture and nature, conditioned by both with the illusion of free will. And there is a Self, or Soul or Buddha Nature which exists without encumbered conditioning and in perfect understanding and freedom. Identification with the former invokes a path of suffering; of guilt and grudge, of karma. Identification with the latter is to awaken to that sacred space of freedom and responsibility.

Note the irony. The conditioned and predestined Ego while un-free suffers the illusion of freedom. Our failure to understand that we are all the effect of a myriad of causes promotes endless fault-finding; blame and self-blame. On the other hand, The Self, free by its very nature, is unconditioned and embodies wisdom and compassion. From that perspective, there is deep understanding of the Ego predicament and tenderness over the pain of grudge, resentment and unforgivable acts.

Most of us occupy that Ego space a lot with an occasional glimpse into our True Nature as we experience a little freedom. But maybe that’s enough to understand that somehow we are both free and determined. These experiences are compatible-the compatibilist view. In that space, the free will illusion starts to recede. We begin to understand that the messes of life are karmic and nobody’s fault. In some sense, we all have done what we were destined to do. Nobody’s fault. In and from that space, we all might release and be released from past transgressions. This fragile insight comes and goes at first. The fault-finding Ego is unsatisfied, with last gasps to never pardon and forever condemn self and others.

We persevere and continue to cultivate those synergistic qualities of wisdom and compassion. We contemplate these elements; we chew and swallow the sacrament. Cause and effect wobbles; conditioning corrects to mere ethers. The Old Sage smiles.

We arrive without baggage at the forgiveness impasse again, and prepare to conquer it. But then the unexpected- All causes and effects have disappeared into the Self where the Truth is suddenly upon us. The Truth is that each of us has been natured and nurtured and acted as only we could all our lives. And in this brief, bright moment we understand. No blame.

There is nothing more to do. We are, all of us, already forgiven.

 

May 6, 2024

When No Comes Before Yes

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Following a nine-month (or so) gestation, birth is our first big “yes” to the lifespan. Many more moments of yes will follow. The body says yes and the mind says yes to our newborn human life. Our cerebellum doubles in volume by three months. The number and density of brain synapses (connections between neurons) grows in dramatic affirmation of our mental potentials.

But then negation comes in the form of synaptic pruning, a cutting away of less used connections in favor of making fewer stronger ones. Yes, no, yes…

We could notice the ebb and flow of yes and no through the years, and even in the moments of our lives from the very start. Babies are a symphony of yeses and nos. A cacophony sometimes.

Think of it, consciousness placed in our tiny selves (the first yes?) as we womb float and then crunch through a canal into a human life, crying “No” all the way! We learn to move, then move to learn. And we start thinking, not in words at first, but in sensory and motor intelligences or schema. Words are learned as we go and added to the mix.

At the center of thought (and actually created by it) is “me”. The infant’s myriad of experiences begins to have a constancy and predictability in a world that truly does seem to revolve around “me”. We are called by a name. My name.

So perhaps there is a second gestation of say 1-24 months. After all, it is said that a sense of “me” is formed over those first couple of years. An ego. And it begins not with a yes but with a resounding NO! No I am not you, I am me! That is not yours, it is mine! For the toddler, no truly comes before yes.

This brand new “me” is glorious and seems to include you and, well, everything. As marvelous as that sounds, it is also pretty scary and feels massively out of control.

Toddlers are big on control.

That brand new me needs external limits set consistently and with love. Thus, the ego is protected, contained and at least partly stabilized toward autonomy. Children need those external boundaries that model the internal ones they will erect. Boundaries, inside and out, hold the “me” and prevent the “you” from swallowing me. Children could learn to trust trustworthy others and begin to feel safe in their world.

What then? Growing up, we all start to believe in “me”; in its solidity and reality. Each sensation and perception and thought is mine. And it is all “me”, an illusion increasingly understood as a function of brain regions dedicated to the theme of my mind; my body.

There is little doubt as to the survival value of higher cortical functions like planning, tool making and language in its various forms. And we should put the individual, the ego, in that same category of evolutionary advantage. The illusion of a “me”, separate from everything else, is an adaptation that gains momentum over our lives.

But maybe, at this juncture of human history, the advantage is disappearing.

It seems that after several hundred thousand years, more or less, our individualism has developed to the extreme. One could argue that besides reason, love and empathy, we have all become masters of poisons like greed, hatred and ignorance in ten thousand forms and ways. Modern economic systems, armies and media all seem to double-down on those poisons.

What to do?

Maybe recognize what we forgot long ago or never fully understood. That my thoughts do not come from me, but rather, a me-illusion develops from all my thinking (and emoting and perceiving). But I am not my thoughts. Illusions and opinions should not be taken too seriously. With that a fluidity emerges…a flow. Like a river that is always the same and never the same and where egos evaporate. The river sound holds our collective experience, every yes and every no of everyone.

Listen: Flow.