Three-Second Present

I began meditating many years ago. I am fortunate to have a Buddhist monastery/retreat center nearby, where I have been able to acquire a solid training in meditation techniques. It has brought a major and positive change to my life. At the core of Buddhist meditation is the concept of mindfulness: living fully in the present moment.

The present moment is all that we have that is real. The past is gone and the future has yet to be realized. Just because we humans, with our higher cognitive abilities, know that there is a past and a future, doesn’t mean that we can reach out and touch them. Animals, in contrast, are always able to live in the present moment, because they don’t have the higher mental powers to conceive of either a past or future. 

It is through our ability to place full attention to the moment-to-moment passing of life that we can live it to the fullest (as animals do). We so easily miss much of life by going into our heads and either dwelling on what once happened or anticipating what may be. We become embroiled in emotions of regret about having missed certain opportunities or try to relive past times of victory. We worry about coming events—investing psychic energy into playing out threatening or exciting scenarios that may never happen. In the meantime, we’re losing out on what’s happening right now—the only reality that we have access to.

When we are able to avoid being sucked off into the inaccessible past or future, we can fully participate in the now. We become mindful of what’s happening in the present moment and find ourselves not missing opportunities that manifest themselves and thus making wiser choices on how to live. The present moment is also very personal—it’s our own experience.

Many meditators view the present moment as an instantaneous window in time, during which one attempts to be aware of every split second that exists—fully engaging with it. That work is extremely hard to do. No matter how diligently you try to be fully aware of each moment in time, your mind will repeatedly follow some event into the past, or be dragged into the future, or take off on flight around the world. I spend most of my meditation time being reminded that I’ve once again drifted off from the now and patiently returning my mind to the present moment. A second or so later, my mind is once again off to distant temporal realms.

It can become rather frustrating. I believe that the practice is valuable, however, if only to demonstrate to us how uncontrollable the mind is, and to periodically experience the exhilaration of “now,” or occasionally remaining mindful for a few minutes. It is very liberating. An additional reward comes when you arise from your meditation pillow and resume your normal activities: you’re just a little more aware of the value of paying attention to what is going on and engaging life as it unfolds.

I recently read about some current neurological research on how our brain perceives time. Our personal apprehension of time is referred to as “biological” or “psychological” time. It’s different from physical time, which is an objective entity, something that can be measured by instruments. Our brain continually receives signals from our various senses, and then it constructs our view of reality from those inputs. Neurologists have wondered: How does the brain distinguish between past and future stimuli? Where does the mind draw the line between past, present, and future? 

This research suggests that our temporal reality is not based on the instantaneous now, but interprets events as being on the order of three seconds long; in other words, reality comes in three-second chunks. It seems that our gray matter integrates over a three-second period and creates a subjective response for that interval of time. In other words, the subjective “present” for us is not an instant, but a three-second-long temporal window. Our mind will see “one thing” for three seconds and then shift to another equal span of time. 

These findings have cast a little different light on meditation for me. I’m now not trying to adhere to that elusive instantaneous moment, attempting to surf the crest of a temporal wave and repeatedly “wiping out.” It’s  not so precise as that. Maybe I can cut myself a little slack, knowing that, at best my attention is smeared out over a three-second interval. Maybe I can be more successful in staying within that interval, than trying to be ever present with each passing instant. Maybe I can ride the wave all the way through to the beach.