I have got many insights on life from my vipassana retreat. One of them is I finally get a understanding on why people hold “live the moment” as a wisdom. Before this experience, I just couldn’t understand. Why live the moment? I had a past that I can reference to and learn from, I have a future to take into consideration, why only “live the moment”? People would say: “past is a concept, future is a concept, what you get is just moments, moment by moment.” Sounds right, but not convincing, not answering my questions. After the retreat, I get a version of answer that is finally convincing, at least for myself. “Live the moment” is the optimal way of living, is the best choice out of all the possible modes of living. Let’s me explain.
First of all, “live the moment” doesn’t mean or shouldn’t mean the ignorance of the past and the future. Present moment is built on past moments. Most likely, you won’t die immediately after this present moment, so you get a future to live as well. There is no avoidance of these facts. “Live the moment” doesn’t mean ignore the reality, quite the contrary, it means the opposite, it means live the reality as it is, no more no less. Yes, we have got a past and future in the physical world, but past is already gone, and the future is not here yet, so both of them exist, but don’t exist now. In terms of personal experience, past lives as memories in our mind, and future lives as imagination in our mind. Both of them are living in our thinking. In the Buddhism philosophy, our awareness interacts with the world through several sensor doors: Smell, Taste, Vision, Hearing, Tactile, and thinking. The thoughts that come to our mind, that shouting out loudly for our attentions, is no different to the pain sensation coming from our knee when we hurt it. Yes, thinking is more advanced in terms of complexity, but not necessary in terms of importance. A wise way of living according to Buddhism is to take all the sensations at this moment into consideration, instead of get attached into any one of them. In this sense, live the moment, have two layers of meaning. At the surface level, it means while you are living now, don’t get too attached to the past and future, because they are only a small portion of your present reality, they are only part of the outputs of your “sensation of thinking”. Since you get only limited attention, if you are hyper focused on what happened in the past or what could happen in the future, you don’t get enough attention to what is exactly happening now. Have a thought about moments where you should take a certain step, but because your mind is occupied with what bad experience you had in the past that could happen again, or what bad consequence could happen in the future, then you hold back, then regret for your cowardliness afterwards. Those are moments that you didn’t live the moment, and the difficulty of action is magnified as a result of that. At a deeper level, live the moment is not only against attachment to the past and future, it is against attachment to any sensation. Because all attachments lead to either ignorance or amplification of part of the reality. Live the moment is like using all the sensations as tools external to our self. Taking in all the sensing data, then make a conscious decision and take our own action accordingly. There is a painting of Buddha, attacked by hundreds of arrows flying towards him, surrounded by five girls sent by evil to seduce him, and he just sit there quietly, meditate. No aversion, no craving, simply take all things in and let them pass through him. Though he is sitting there doing nothing, he is as strong as a big stone, not moved by anything external. That is the essence of live the moment. Be fully informed, but not react to any sensation triggered by external situations, act proactively according to one’s conscious.