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.
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