The Uncertain Present

When you look carefully at the present moment, it’s hard to understand how people could say that the present moment is the goal—learning how to be constantly in the present, accepting whatever comes up in the present—because the present moment is a very uncertain place. You’ve got the results of past karma, and who knows what karmic monsters you have in your past, what you’ve done, which karmic seeds are going to sprout at any particular time? And then there’s the question of what to do with them.

We’re fashioning the present moment—for what purpose? What purpose is a good purpose? What means are actually useful for that good purpose? We were born without a handbook. Our parents help us, give us some ideas. Society helps us, gives us some ideas. In some cases, the ideas are genuinely helpful; in some cases, they’re not. It’s all very uncertain.

We see things change in our lives, sometimes very suddenly, and we wonder what to do. That’s one of the reasons why we delight in the Dhamma. The Dhamma gives us some directions, tells us where to look, what questions to ask, for the purpose of getting out of the present moment to find some certainty.

For example, with appropriate attention: When something comes up, ask yourself, “Where is the suffering right here? Where is the stress?” The Buddha tells you to look inside the mind, to see what you’re clinging to, what activities you’re clinging to. There you find that you’re clinging to the activities that are putting the present moment together.

Those aggregates, by the way, are not things. They’re actions. They’re the actions by which we feed on the present moment. We’re attached to them because we feel the need to feed. As long as the mind is weak, it does need to feed, so you have to be careful about what you feed on and how you do it.

So which aggregates are you going to foster? Which type of form are you now going to develop? As you focus on the breath, you’re developing form. The way you focus is going to determine whether the breath is comfortable or not. What feelings do you want to develop? What perceptions can you use in order to get the breath to be a comfortable place to be? What thought constructs are helpful as you examine the breath? What’s the best way to be conscious of the breath? Where in the body do you want to focus your awareness? What kind of awareness, what kind of focus do you want to focus on?

These are good questions to ask. This is a good place to focus your attention because you can create, in the present moment, a state of well-being. You can create the dwelling of concentration.

We talk about the present moment as being a construction site. Well, the dwelling place of concentration is one of the best things to construct because you see clearly what you’re doing as you’re doing it. But you also see that even in this good state of concentration, as long as you cling to those activities, you’re still going to be suffering some stress. Even this concentration home is uncertain.

So, what’s driving you? Craving: craving for sensuality, which you’re trying to put aside; craving for becoming, in this case, becoming focused in the present moment. As for craving for non-becoming, any other states that would come up in the mind that would detract you from your concentration, you’re trying to put them aside.

You get to see your cravings right here. This is where you’re approaching an answer in those other two noble truths you’re supposed to look for—the cessation of stress and the path to the cessation. You’re creating a state of concentration. You’re creating the path. Then the question is, “Where is the craving now? How can I deal with it? How can I get past it?” These questions give you focus, because otherwise you just thrash around in the present moment.

You can get onto the Internet. You can surf all day. You can hear all kinds of opinions about where you should be focusing your attention, what you should be taking seriously, what you should not be taking seriously. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, but there’s a lot of uncertainty built into the mind, right here. We can’t blame our social conditioning for our uncertainty. Just the nature of being a conscious agent in the present moment is an uncertain thing.

But at least we have some guidelines. The Buddha gives us an analysis of what’s going on: We’ve got potentials coming in from the past, in terms of our past karma. Then we’ve got the skills we’ve been developing: the skills of virtue, the skills of concentration, the skills of discernment. Yet even though we can master these things quite well, we find that, at the very best, the present moment is an uncertain thing. It’s like building your house in one of those canyons in Borrego where they have many earthquakes every day—little tremors, little tremors all day long. There’s nothing really solid there.

So we’re not here to just be in the present moment or to accept the present moment. If you decide that accepting the present moment is an easy way of dealing with the uncertainties that come up, you just say, “Whatever comes up, I’ll train my mind to be equanimous, to be accepting, to be okay with it.” There’s a certain amount of peace that comes with that. But then it’s an eternity of uncertainty, an eternity of accepting.

The Buddha says we can put an end to this uncertainty by taking apart the way we construct the present moment, being sensitive to what we’re doing, asking questions about it, noticing where we’re causing any stress, any disturbance, stopping that activity, and seeing what happens. You get more sensitive and then you find other, subtler ways that you’re causing disturbance. Well, you just stop those activities, too. You drop them.

Ultimately, you get to a point where you actually step outside the present moment—that’s the place where you can find certainty. As the Buddha says, that’s the ultimate noble truth, or the highest noble truth, because it’s undeceptive.

The certainty of the world is very deceptive. Insurance companies say they’ll take care of you. The health care system says they’ll take care of you. But when things get really difficult, they say, “Oops, sorry, can’t. Can’t do that anymore.” The only really reliable people on Earth are those who are getting out. So you take their advice, and delight in the fact that we do have their advice.

Now, some people say they prefer to have a life of mystery. But what good is the mystery if it’s causing you to suffer? You could put a blanket over the suffering, deny it, and say, “Well, I’ll just accept things and it’ll be okay. I wouldn’t want things to be any different from what they are,” But there’s would still be uncertainty. This is the nature of the present moment.

This is one of the reasons why we get nostalgic for the past. We think about periods in the past when things went well and we forget about the uncertainty we experienced at the time. It was built into each moment—“What do I do next? What do I do next?” So, what happened in those periods that we’re nostalgic for? We had been doing things well, or relatively well. So the past gets set in amber and we forget about the uncertainty that went into constructing that present moment when it was a present moment. This is why the nostalgia lies to us, because the present moment is constantly undermined by the question, “What do I do next? What do I do next? What’s going to come next? What do I do with it?”

So remind yourself that this home of concentration that you’re building here is one of the best homes that you can build in the present moment, but it will show you that the present moment has its uncertainties. Even the best construct you can make in the present moment can fall apart, which is why you have to work on it, keep it going, because it’s part of the way out.

Remember, that’s what we’re working on here: the way out. We’re not here to settle down. We’re moving through. As we move through, we leave good things behind. It’s not selfish to get out. After all, samsāra is like an addiction. We’re addicted to this uncertainty because we don’t think there’s anything better. Yet when you find there is something better, you realize that continuing with your old addiction is not helping anybody else who’s addicted. You can be one of those reliable people who finds the way out and so sets a good example for others. That’s why we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, so that we can become members of the noble Sangha, too.

The Dhamma the Buddha taught, of course, is in words. It, too, is a construct. But just as the path is a construct, the words of the Dhamma are a construct that points out, points out to certainty. That’s one of the adjectives they use for someone who’s gained the Dhamma eye: The person has become certain, both in having found something reliable inside and being reliable for other people.

So as you find your way out, you’re helping other people find their way out as well. This is some of the good news that the Dhamma has passed along to the world, which otherwise is dark with uncertainty, undermined by uncertainty. This is the Buddha’s gift to us: a certain path through an uncertain world.