Conclusion

Postponement of 'coming together': Individually we appear to have bought into a socially reinforced process dissociating from the present moment -- encouraged by collective initiatives promoting investment in the future. In the present moment, this has the effect of trapping people in what amounts to temporal dungeons (sweatshops, slave pits, etc) on the promise, in development schemes, that 'everything will all come together' someday -- as exemplified by current hype in favour of globalization. This 'coming together' is a denial of the arrow of time model underlying such proposals -- of which there will always be more of the same. The model offers no convergence -- except at the end of the universe or after death. People have effectively been transformed into waiters -- encouraged to work in a temporal waiting room in anticipation of the happy day. The incidence of Alzheimer's disease now offers a tragic caricature of the individual's relationship to the present in contemporary society. The future will recognize this to be as cruel as the crude practices of slavery and colonialism -- of which this is a termporal variant.

It is understandable that in historical terms humanity would traverse mutual mistreatment in its spatial (territorial, habeus corpus) manifestations before becoming sensitive to its more elusive temporal analogues. It is useful to recognize the extent to which the current manipulation of space-time through project logic -- based on forms of pyramid selling -- is dependent on human sacrifice, whether literally or metaphorically. The present has been turned into an unrecognized altar on which people are sacrificed to the future. This is typified by the worst of assembly line and sweatshop practices, and the enshrined drudgery of the housewife.

Loss of the future: Ironically, at a time when much is made of 'the future', for increasing numbers of people there is 'no future'. They have no sense of having any future. The future has been removed. For many there is a similar loss of the past, as traditional communities are destroyed. They have 'no past'. Much has been made of this sense of rootlessness and loss of history. The past has thus also been removed. Curiously however people are encouraged to take up mortgages, acquire obligations (giri), or are forced into some form of bonded labour (in certain societies). In the word mortgage, the mort- derives from death (as in mortician) and -gage is from the sense of pledge to forfeit something of value if a debt is not repaid. So mortgage is literally a dead pledge. It was dead for two reasons, the property was forfeit or "dead" to the borrower if the loan were not repaid and the pledge itself was dead if the loan was repaid. For many their future has been heavily mortgaged. In this sense both past and future have been devastated and people have been alienated from the present.

Cultivating the present moment: Much has been achieved through industrialization -- but much has also been lost. Nevertheless industrialization, like globalization, is still recommended as a pancea. The point to make here however is not a stress on 'back to the land' or romanticizing the wild, rather it is the patterns of thinking that have been lost to many through this disconnection. Industrial environments rarely offer reminder's of patterns in nature -- with the ironic exception of the atria of expensive hotels. Traditional farming offers, metaphorically, patterns of sensitivity to an individual's immediate environment that are are absent in an industrialized environment.

This paper raises the question as to whether individuals can 'farm the present' for themselves. Is it possible to engage in patterns of relationship with the present moment that nourish in significant ways -- whether or not material foods are adequate? Are there 'fields' to be ploughed and irrigated, 'crops' to be cultivated, 'animals' to be husbanded -- in the microseconds of attention that characterize the present moment, rather than the grosser temporal preoccupations of the day? Are such patterns vital to engendering a more fruitful future?

How may the present moment be more fruitfully encountered or grokked?:

One approach is to 'grasp' or seize it -- Carpe Diem! This approach is very consistent with a particular style of western opportunism, dimensions of which are frequently criticized by feminists. It is useful to speculate that, like many women, reality may have its own resistance to such grasping (see discussion) !
From a different extreme, the moment may be seen in the light of giving birth -- as a process of continuous labour -- giving birth to the future. There are myths which recognize this perspective. The present may indeed be felt as preganant with significance. Alternatively it might be understood as continuous intercourse between two aspects of reality -- again a perspective acknowledged in some cultures.
More accessibly the moment might be experienced as a process of flirting with reality, as a form of continuing courtship between self and other. In this sense it could be experienced as a dance of changing style and rhythm. One might be enfolded by the experience of the moment, or switch to enfolding the moment.
The present might also be understood as a dramatic moment in a continuing drama, with elements of tragedy, comedy and sublime significance. The future might be given form in the present through dramatic enactment in which others are cast in suitable roles.
The moment might be experienced as one of creative composition -- composing the moment, possibly orchestrated to include a variety of instruments, singers and musical styles. The art, in the moment, would be tuning the parts into a melodic whole -- however melodic is to be interpreted as meaningful. This art has been most assiduously practiced and advocated by the Renaissance leader Marsilio Ficino who headed the Florentine Academy (motto: Laetus in Praesens [Joy in the Present]). His approach is skillfully interpreted by Thomas Moore (1982), notably in a chapter on the Well-Tempered Life, and with the endorsement of depth psychologist James Hillman (1975) (see summary)
Can music, or singing, be embodied in the moment to engender a more coherent and meaningful future as suggested by the work of the philosopher, Antonio de Nicolas (1978), using the non-Boolean logic of quantum mechanics (P A Heelan, 1974) in exploring the epistemological significance of cognitive experience grounded in tone and the shifting relationships between tone in the Rg Veda. It is through the pattern of musical tones that the significance of the Rg Veda is to be found:

'Therefore, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, we have to be aware that we are dealing with a language where tonal and arithmetical relations establish the epistemological invariances... Language grounded in music is grounded thereby on context dependency; any tone can have any possible relation to other tones, and the shift from one tone to another, which alone makes melody possible, is a shift in perspective which the singer himself embodies. Any perspective (tone) must be 'sacrificed' for a new one to come into being; the song is a radical activity which requires innovation while maintaining continuity, and the 'world' is the creation of the singer, who shares its dimensions with the song.' (1978, p. 57)

This offers new dimensions to sacrifice that contrast with those required by contemporary economics. The physical effects of resonance from sound are well known. Can such psychological analogues be set up to engender the future and exert a time-binding force? Within such a context, can analogues to overtones as vehicles for particular forms of understanding?
Another approach to the moment is through humour. Many spiritual traditions celebrate the moment through humour, notably in folk tales such as those of Nasruddin. Some taoists, and others (Chogyam Trunpa, 1991), practice a form of 'crazy wisdom' to cut through mental clutter surrounding fruitful appreciation of the moment.

Separately, or as complementary attitudes, any of the above could effectively used to make of the present 'Camelot-in-the-Moment'.

Right to quality of well-being in the moment: Much has necessarily been made of the rights of individuals to tangibles (food, health, etc) and to intangibles manifest over time (freedom of information, freedom of religion, etc). Little attention has focused on the rights to what Christopher Alexander has discussed as the 'quality without a name' (Timeless Way of Building, 1979) as manifested in the moment. Industrialized society has however come to recognize aspects of its importance under the term 'quality time' or in the increasing difficulty for top corporations to retain valuable exectuives. But the popint was made long ago by the realization that 'man cannot live by bread alone'.

The question raised here is whether a future of quality in the moment can be continually postponed to provide tangibles for some, and promises of tangibles to others -- with little attention to the quality of experience in the moment.

Aesthetics of nowness: There is an aesthetics to nowness that is being lost in industrialized society. This has been review by Gary DeAngelis in relation to Shintoism and Zen in Japan (, Zen And The Art Of Teaching: the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, Diotima: a philosophical review, 2, 2001, 1). He argues that from this perspective:

...beauty is tied into mortality and a deep awareness of the frailty of life, beauty and love. This awareness leads to a heightened sensitivity to and appreciation of the immediacy of things or the nowness of life. This is most clearly manifested in the Japanese concepts of mono-no aware and yugen.... I think that aware could also be translated as a sensitivity to things, an incredible and profound sensitivity to life in its very 'beingness' or 'isness'--a sensitivity to the wonder, beauty and pathos of things because of the transitory nature of life....

If we add to this the notion of naka ima, with its emphasis on living in the purity of the present moment, we perhaps come closest to the uniqueness of the Japanese religious worldview. It is here that we see a vision of life not based on rational abstractions and artificial social conventions but in emotional and aesthetic sensitivity to the beauty and pathos of life.

This understanding is quite elusive at the rational level--so, how does one acquire this? Where does one look? This leads us to the notion of yugen. Yugen is a symbolic word used to describe the mysterious, the profound, the remote--things not easily grasped nor expressed in words--a region lying well beyond form....The yugen is this elusive place, this silence which lies beyond our rational grasp. It may be impossible to explain the yugen but we can intuitively sense it....

What needs to be emphasized here is the centrality of pure feeling, experience and sensitivity of the quality of the lived moment. For the Japanese the realization of truth at this level is what makes life extraordinary.

Clearly religions with other aesthetic and spiritual emphases -- notably Christian religions -- would attach quite different terms to such experience.

A focus for such explorations is the signficance in many cultures of the natural spring -- stylized and enhanced in fountains. It is the upwelling of the spring which beautifully epitomizes the emergence of the present moment -- defining the future and its transition into the past. In the brief moment of emergence it holds imaginative magical qualities that have made it a focus for human architecture down the ages. Unfortunately, in practice it is surrounded by material accretions that deny the quality of that moment whilst claiming to enhance it. It is in the world of these accretions that industrialized culture encourages people to live. Spring water is commodifed as bottled water imported from afar -- and the qualities of the present moment are commodified in media moments.

'Time past and time future, What might have been and what has been, Point to one end, which is always present.' (T. S. Eliot)

"To master attention is to hold consciousness like a paintbrush and transform one's life into living art." (Vivian Wright)

'The future will be made by the people who can relate to the present' (Allan Howard)

Laetus in Praesens [Joy in the Present -- motto of the Florentine Academy]

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Conclusion