read it write everything you learn from it 1. The Principle of the Present

Do not lose yourselves in the past Do not run after the future The past no longer is The future has not yet come Live in the here and now.
The Buddha

Learn to live in the here and now and become conscious of transience.

‘I’ll catch up with everything once I’ve finally retired. It’s just another twelve years, I simply have to hang in there until then.’ Does this sentence sound familiar to you? The idea that life at the moment isn’t yet perfect but that it will become better in the foreseeable future? During the week do you live for the weekend and on weekends dread the working week ahead? And during all the other weeks of the year do you live for your holiday, or even for retirement, when you plan to finally do all those things that you believe you have missed out on?

Let’s be honest: how often have you postponed doing things that you really wanted to do? Perhaps out of consideration for others, perhaps because the moment wouldn’t have been suitable or because… well, why actually? And how often have you gone ahead later and done what you once found so important? ‘Not often,’ I hear you say. ‘To be honest, hardly ever.’ How often have you said to yourself, ‘It’s amazing that I am where I am just now; I love doing what I’m doing; it’s wonderful that I have this life. What happened yesterday doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the next day, the next hour, the next minute may bring. It’s just wonderful that this very moment exists, and that I’m allowed to experience it.’ Do I hear you saying again, ‘Not often! To be honest, hardly ever?’

Life is all about the moment

This is the starting point of the Shaolin principle of the present. It begins here and now, at this very second and exactly at the place where you currently are.

This Shaolin principle teaches us to accept the moment. To accept everything that is linked to it, to accept what it will lead to. Accept the moment without judging it, without comparing it with the past and also with the future. Living according to Shaolin principles means to live in the moment and to regard this special moment as a wonderful, precious, transient part of life.

In one of the most important scriptures of Judaism, the Talmud, it is written: ‘Even one lived hour is life.’ That is undoubtedly true, however, the monks of the Shaolin monastery go one step further. ‘Not just every lived hour, every lived moment is life,’ they say. Living in the here and now means catching the moment, accepting it with gratitude and then instantly letting it go. It means understanding that not a single moment in life—whether we value it or let it pass unheeded—will ever come back.

Living in the here and now means to become aware of the moment and its transience.

It means understanding that every moment, whether it makes us happy or sad, leaves us satisfied or craving for more, cheerful or angry, must be given the respect that it deserves, for it is a part of our life.

The wise man and the tiger

Every novice in the monastery knows the story of the wise man who goes for a walk on the hillside. All of a sudden, he hears a tiger snarling some distance away but clearly approaching him. He starts running as fast as he can to escape and heads straight towards a precipice. The tiger is hot on his heels. With nowhere else to go, the man teeters along the edge of the precipice and slips. At the last moment, he is able to save himself by grabbing a root. But with the tiger above him and the abyss below, all routes of escape are blocked. At that very instant the man spies a wild strawberry directly in front of him. He plucks it, puts it in his mouth and murmurs, ‘How delicious this strawberry is!’

That is what I call living in the moment! Most of us would be bewildered by the man’s behaviour. Does he have nothing better to do in this situation than think of the delicious strawberry? Should he not be thinking about where his fate will lead him in the next few minutes? Well, should he really be thinking about that? What would it change about the moment? Even if the man were to be devoured by the tiger in the next minute or fall into the abyss, why should he not enjoy his life until the last moment? Why not savour the strawberry?

To accept the moment without judgement, we must not condemn it.

No moment is good or bad, it simply is. While the man’s situation does not appear promising, each moment can lead to another that has nothing to do with our expectations. Since we do not know how the story ended, we are free to tell it ourselves: the tiger loses interest in the man and wanders off. That could be one ending, could it not? Naturally, an equally possible ending is that the tiger kills the man, but it is just another alternative. Yet another alternative could be that as the man falls, he is able to latch on to a ledge, and manages to save himself.

The strawberry would not have saved the man’s life, nor his interest in the strawberry. Nothing would have saved his life. The subsequent moment merely did not fulfil our expectations. And even if it had, as in the alternative ending, would that have made the moment better or worse? Neither: it was simply there. And the wise man accepted it as it was.

Exercise
AN EXCURSION INTO THE HERE AND NOW
Many moments will have passed as you were reading, probably without your noticing. So it’s time to become conscious of the moment, to experience it, in fact to ‘live’ it. Are you ready? Good. Now please read through the following paragraph to the end and then put the book aside to live the moment. No, not at some point when you have the time. Here and now!
If we wish to consciously experience the moment, we must define it. We can use one second as a unit, but that would define only time, not life.
What about one breath? Take a short break and observe your breath. It may not be easy in the beginning, so use your hand to assist you by placing it on your stomach.
 
Now breathe consciously. Feel how your lungs, your chest, your stomach and your abdomen fill up with oxygen.
Hold your breath briefly, and then slowly let it escape.
Do you feel the rise and fall of your hand? The rhythm of your life?
Now remove your hand and focus your attention within. Is your breath still there? Do you feel the source of your life? If not, use your hand again to help you. Do you feel it?
Let us define the time between two breaths as this one moment that we want to become conscious of. Again and again. Feel your breath. Feel the moments, feel how they come and go. Can you sense your life? The here and now? Before you read on, focus on yourself for twenty moments.
You have now consciously experienced twenty moments of your life. But did you really experience the here and now? Were your thoughts with your breath and in experiencing the moment as it passed? Were they where you yourself were? Or were you also thinking of all the things that still needed to be done, what you would eat for dinner and the friend you haven’t called in a long time?

Living in the moment means to focus on it fully; to extract everything from that moment, but also to give it everything.

A student at the Shaolin monastery once approached the teacher and asked, ‘Master, how do you practise living in the moment in your daily life?’

The master replied, ‘When I am hungry, I eat. When I am full, I wash my bowl. When I am tired, I sleep.’

The student replied, ‘Everyone does that. So does that mean that everyone practises living in the moment like you do?’

The master explained, ‘No, not in the same way.’

The student asked, ‘Why not in the same way?’

The master smiled, ‘When others eat, they do not dare to eat. Their minds are filled with an endless number of thoughts. That is why I say, not in the same way.’

What about you? Did you experience your twenty moments like everyone else does or like the master? Did you experience them or did you squander them away because you were everywhere else except with yourself?

A good example of living beings that live by the Shaolin principles are birds. Probably all animals live by these principles but it’s easiest to observe them in birds. Birds always live in the moment. They sing because spring, summer, autumn or winter is approaching. Because they are healthy and happy, because they live in the moment. When they sing, they just sing—they don’t eat, feed or sleep at the same time; they do that when they eat, feed or sleep. Birds live every single moment. When one hears them sing one feels they know what makes every moment so infinitely precious: its uniqueness.

Every moment is unique

Each individual moment comes, goes and never returns. There may be similar moments, better or worse, funnier or sadder, but the one that has just passed will never come back. When we reflect on the value of the present, we must understand that what is so incredibly special is that it makes everything unique. Even if you were to read the same words again in the same book in the same way as you just did, it would no longer be identical because the time is different. No matter how we try, we can only imitate, never replicate.

So, it is not surprising that humans have always attempted to hold onto the moment that has irretrievably passed. A study conducted about what people would save from a burning house brought out some initially surprising conclusions. Other than documents, the next most important items that people tried to salvage were their photographs. Other personal objects came later.

What is it that makes a photograph so very valuable? The fact that it can never be replaced. One can always buy various objects again or repaint a painting; but a photo, which always captures a fleeting moment, can never be recreated. Even two pictures taken half a second apart do not show the same moment. Nothing documents the transience of time as starkly as a photograph.

Western societies always seem to have been oriented towards preserving happy moments through dreams rather than increasing those moments themselves. Initially, this was done through sketches and paintings, and later through photographs. It was always the memory of this one happy moment that was sought to be preserved for posterity. But the Shaolin principle of the present teaches us that we cannot hold on to the moment. Our responsibility is to live it.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, ‘There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.’

Nonetheless, we constantly hear or read only of these ‘more beautiful times’. They might well have been tougher, more difficult or required more sacrifices, but apparently, they were always better; they were different times. This is an idea that is alien to the Shaolin principle, which believes in, ‘Every day is a good day’. This should not be understood from a Western perspective. A day is not good because we judge it to be so. It is also not bad because of how we perceive it. This sentence is not even an exhortation to find something good in every day.

A day, an hour, even a moment is neither good nor bad when taken as it is. It simply exists. ‘Every day is a day’ would perhaps be a statement we could more readily understand. In the context of the Shaolin principle that attempts to teach us not to judge the moment, ‘good’ is not the opposite of ‘bad’.

The day, the hour, the moment is good simply because it’s there. And because there is no alternative.

Life is here and now, whether we like it or not. If anything had been different at any point we would not be where we currently are. Neither you, nor I. But nothing was different, so it is entirely pointless to think about other possibilities—whether good or bad.

Even if we wake up in the morning and find ourselves ill, unemployed, alone or think we are overweight, it is what it is, and life still goes on. How you happen to feel is completely inconsequential for the time or day. The sun continues on its path, the moments of life come and go. And each time you think about why the current moment is not a good one, it is lost forever. What happens in that moment is not important, but what you personally make of it is.

Don’t live your life on hold

When I tried earlier to make the time span of a moment tangible, I had first proposed a unit of one second. It is a deep-rooted human trait to want to pin everything down, to have everything neatly slotted and under control. We attempt to capture time by dividing it into seconds, hours, days and months. Everything important in our lives is allotted a specific time: Christmas, the beginning of the holidays, retirement, the delivery date of the long-awaited computer, the job interview, losing weight. And everything that does not have an allotted time becomes less important than the other things.

If we are on our way to an appointment and happen to run into someone we have been wanting to speak with for ages, then this person will still be pushed to another time slot. We will stop smoking when the New Year begins. We will familiarise ourselves with the new software when the new computer finally arrives, which should be in a few days, after all. And when we are on holiday, we will finally enjoy life again: one more week to go, seven more times to get up, five more days of going to the office. If only the week were over already! On the bright side, only two hours remain for the working day to get over, then it’s another day down. One day of your life, incidentally. Do I see you nodding again? Do I hear you say that there’s nothing wrong with that, after all one must be able to look forward to something? Of course one must, and one should.

But what of the time between the highlights in your life? The time between holidays? The time that you literally kill, waiting for time to pass? The time you spend on thinking that there are another hundred and seven more days of going to work before the next holidays? Have you ever considered how many moments of your life you have allowed to unthinkingly slip by because you were waiting for something? And what would happen if the holiday for which you sacrificed so much time in anticipation suddenly had to be cancelled at the last minute? So many lost moments when, in fact, each one of them could have been the most wonderful moment of your life. It is tempting to neglect the present especially when we must do something that doesn’t really appeal to us or give us joy.

Living in the here and now means accepting things the way they are at that moment, and accepting from every moment what it has to offer us at that precise time.

The principle of the present teaches us to live every moment; to do things when we want to do them, when we think it necessary. Or consciously desist from doing them. It’s now or never.

At some point there will no longer be a later. I remember once mentioning to a friend that we should get in touch again with a very dear colleague. It was late in the evening, and I was going to pencil in the call for the next day. ‘Let’s call now,’ was my friend’s reply, ‘let’s call right away.’ It might sound like a convenient cliché for this story that our colleague didn’t wake up one morning just a few days later, but sadly it’s true. It is proof that sometimes there is no tomorrow.

People who slot their lives into various sections assume that they know the big picture: they will study until a particular point, work for a specified period, take holidays in between and then retire. Then, finally, they will be able do what they always wanted. Unrestrained freedom at last! A life worth living.

But I often wonder, how do these people know how long they are going to live? How do they know they are not wasting their entire lives waiting for something that will never happen? What makes them believe that at some point they will be compensated for all the moments they suffer now? Every day, when we wake up in the morning, we should understand clearly that whether we feel good or bad, happy or sad, whether we are alone or with someone, the secret of life lies in the present. Every moment that is not lived is lost forever. And sooner or later the day will come when it is time to go.

The present is not measured in days, not in todays and tomorrows, but in moments.

At any moment we could fall down dead and exit this game, just like that, without any reason. So, live in the here and now and never wait until you have the time.

Exercises
THOUGHTS ABOUT TIME

Are you able to live in the moment or do your desires and your life move in different directions? Using the questions below please reflect on how you deal with the time you have in your life.
Into which sections have you divided your life?
…
Which of them are you currently in?
…
If your life were to end in the next minute, what would you still absolutely want to do?
…
Why have you not done it so far?
…
Which was the last moment that you consciously experienced?
…
Do you wish at this moment that time would pass more quickly? If so, why?
…
If a moment were to correspond to one breath, how many moments should then have passed already?
…
The wise man is someone who, like a child, can be filled with wonder at everything