I have noticed a social trend centered on being present or living in the now. It has come to the forefront of social consciousness once again, as it has in the past, due to vast changes in our world and world view. One of the largest influences on this, in my opinion, is the internet. I have not found much literature that made any sense in trying to explain this reoccurring phenomenon and became fascinated in the resurfacing of Now living as I’ll call it here. I believe I have a useful explanation of how it works and how it can be used.
The internet is not bad. Let me get that out there right away. Granted there are many bad things that have come from it but the idea itself is incredible and the fact that it works so well is astounding. Let’s take a look at what the internet did to our collective psyche and how we may utilize this new paradigm to our advantage.
Now living or being in the present moment, never really disappeared from society but it seems to be everywhere you look at the moment. Whenever it popped to the forefront in history, it played a key role in suppressing possible mass hysteria under the strain of large social change. Here are a few examples of what I mean.
“Waste not fresh tears over old griefs”. These words from Euripides perfectly describe living in the moment. He wrote them during the fall of the Roman monarchy and a turn to the republic.
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” Buddha. He was all about living in the moment and lived about the same time as Euripides.
“The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.” Lincoln wrote those words at one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history.
Most would not consider the present day to rival any of the preceding branches of history. They would be wrong. The internet has done more to our consciousness than any single event in history. It did not cause the fall of a regime or anything so detrimental. Instead, it changed our view of the world in such a way that we will never be the same. It shrunk our planet to a singularity.
In physics, a singularity is how the universe was described before the Big Bang. Everything was in the same place and was aware of everything else. Doesn’t that sound like the way we are today?
Flip on your computer and you see international news of places you never heard of and in as much detail as you want or don’t want. You define your view of the world by what you search for on the internet. Thanks to instant translation add-ons, you can chat with people in other countries that don’t speak the same language. If that’s not overwhelming then I don’t know what is.
Look at it this way. Each of us, thanks to the internet, has been given the right to rule and define the universe however, we want. This is something we always could do and have done since we were born anyway but now there are no alternatives. Everything is right there. Our basic choices have been reversed. Where previously we had to search for information, we are now bombarded with info in such quantities that we have to ignore most of the world. So what exactly did this do to our minds? I’ll tell you.
Our senses perceive far more than we can cognify. Which means we need to lessen what we see around us to an edible mental chunk. We do this with a thing called focus. It is how two people at the same event can have different definitions of what happened. That is how we react to things we can see around us. What the internet did was allow our mind to think it can see the entire world if it so chooses. Therefore, we are left with a newer devastating view of our existence because even if we could pay attention to the entire internet we could never contemplate it enough to take it all in. And the internet basically defines our current existence.
On to what Now actually is. What to do about it comes later.
Quantum mechanics deals with the probabilities that a certain thing will be in a certain area at a certain time. None of these certainties can be narrowed down to anything more than a probability so it’s technically a guess. Now this is an explanation of the smallest components of the universe. The entire universe. So that means we have no idea how anything works beyond an educated guess or probability. Quantum mechanics is a prime example of Now living. A moment is decided upon and what is happening can’t be perfectly defined. A physicist knows this going in and doesn’t expect anything more but spends his entire career trying to find out.
The same principle applies to Now living in that we know we can’t control everything or in fact anything but should just deal with a set of probabilities. We can’t get ahead or behind the present moment so to mentally reside there makes no sense. With the singularity of the universe brought on by the internet, Now living is needed more than ever if we expect to not lose our mind.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Chronic Happiness
A state that we should all strive for is chronic happiness. The only problem is that we are genetically wired to go against the main principle of the condition I refer to as chronic happiness. In most everyday situations, we work harder to avoid pain than to gain happiness. And therein lays the problem. Happiness in any degree is not something you strive for at all. It is at its base, a passive situation. The best road to this state of chronic happiness is the passive state of gratitude.
I will now delve further in to the heart of the Nature of 3©. One of the aspects of Nature of 3© basics is the simple concept of the quantum now. I refer to it as the quantum now because it resonates further than a single moment. It’s observed “now” of time remains at a set limit of no longer than the actual moment of time it occurs. The quantum moment outlasts the incedental moment because the quantum moment has no beginning-middle-end trinity as with other perceived occurrences.
Time itself consists of three pieces. All moments fall within them and this is easy to to see. How this relates to chronic happiness will become apparent once this basic principle is understood. The three parts are pre-conditional, post-conditional and the moment of choice. Or simply put; past, present and future. This is separate from the quantum moment, as they requires action and the quantum moment does not. The quantum moment is, as mentioned, passive. All things you experience fall into these three parts of time and define one of the basic principles of the Nature of 3©.
I have found, and will cover in detail elsewhere, that our lives can be explained and bettered by seeing such groups of three that govern our actions and inactions.
How this relates to chronic happiness is quite simple. It comes down to one thing that has a definite quantum nature as well. It is that of gratitude. Gratitude if done properly is not done at all. It is passive. It should have no direction or guidance. What I mean by this is you should not search for things to be grateful for, they are searching for you.
If you live in the passive quantum moment, gratitude will come much easier. The way to define living in the quantum moment is to define the three components of gratitude.
The first part is right there. Gratitude. Gratitude consists of itself because it transcends duality, or it goes beyond having a simple opposite. The opposite of gratitude is regret, which is the second part. Take any given situation from your past and you can be grateful for it or regret it. Regret is more of a past tense occurrence of the mind as it is difficult to regret things that have not happened or not happened yet. The third part is the present moment. To be grateful at the present moment is the hardest, and yet the easiest, part of the three. It requires no work due to its passive nature.
You can be grateful for things in the past, present and future. What makes gratitude a quantum notion is its ability to exist in any part of time from the same reference point? It only works if done passively. It is like a submarine’s sonar system. Don’t “ping” your environment. Just sit quietly and let the world come to you. If this principle didn’t work, there would be no such thing as passive sonar, which is technically the hardest to slip past by other targets.
This is the way to chronic happiness. Have nothing be the object of your gratitude. Be grateful at the beginning and end of each day for nothing more than the day.
I will now delve further in to the heart of the Nature of 3©. One of the aspects of Nature of 3© basics is the simple concept of the quantum now. I refer to it as the quantum now because it resonates further than a single moment. It’s observed “now” of time remains at a set limit of no longer than the actual moment of time it occurs. The quantum moment outlasts the incedental moment because the quantum moment has no beginning-middle-end trinity as with other perceived occurrences.
Time itself consists of three pieces. All moments fall within them and this is easy to to see. How this relates to chronic happiness will become apparent once this basic principle is understood. The three parts are pre-conditional, post-conditional and the moment of choice. Or simply put; past, present and future. This is separate from the quantum moment, as they requires action and the quantum moment does not. The quantum moment is, as mentioned, passive. All things you experience fall into these three parts of time and define one of the basic principles of the Nature of 3©.
I have found, and will cover in detail elsewhere, that our lives can be explained and bettered by seeing such groups of three that govern our actions and inactions.
How this relates to chronic happiness is quite simple. It comes down to one thing that has a definite quantum nature as well. It is that of gratitude. Gratitude if done properly is not done at all. It is passive. It should have no direction or guidance. What I mean by this is you should not search for things to be grateful for, they are searching for you.
If you live in the passive quantum moment, gratitude will come much easier. The way to define living in the quantum moment is to define the three components of gratitude.
The first part is right there. Gratitude. Gratitude consists of itself because it transcends duality, or it goes beyond having a simple opposite. The opposite of gratitude is regret, which is the second part. Take any given situation from your past and you can be grateful for it or regret it. Regret is more of a past tense occurrence of the mind as it is difficult to regret things that have not happened or not happened yet. The third part is the present moment. To be grateful at the present moment is the hardest, and yet the easiest, part of the three. It requires no work due to its passive nature.
You can be grateful for things in the past, present and future. What makes gratitude a quantum notion is its ability to exist in any part of time from the same reference point? It only works if done passively. It is like a submarine’s sonar system. Don’t “ping” your environment. Just sit quietly and let the world come to you. If this principle didn’t work, there would be no such thing as passive sonar, which is technically the hardest to slip past by other targets.
This is the way to chronic happiness. Have nothing be the object of your gratitude. Be grateful at the beginning and end of each day for nothing more than the day.
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