Monk:  "What is Zen?"

Tosu (Zen Master): "Zen."

            -D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture

Living in the moment is all there is, yet it is not enough.

I was lecturing in one of my favorite venues, the C. G. Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas, when a woman in the audience said, "I used to look for meaning everywhere, but from now on I'm just going to live with what is."  Without thinking I replied, "The trouble is, what is, isn't."  There is nothing outside our particular imagination of what is, nothing more pure, and that imagination is more complicated than our intention to deal too purely only with what is.

I felt that she was doing something that I have done many times in my life:  finding a subtle, intelligent defense against life's complexity.  The Jungian analyst and poet Patricia Berry says that we are only able to defend ourselves against some life necessity when we find a defense that is so airtight and so reasonable that I doesn't look lie a defense at all.  That is how I felt about the remark about dealing only with what is.  IF we take literally the statement that only what is counts, then we have bracketed out life as it presents itself, opting for our fantasy of simple, clarified existence.  

The idea of dealing only with what is is very different from facing life with all its contrary emotions, personal history and complicated relationships.  The complex mess of life, unfortunate from a certain point of view, is exactly what is.  And so are the anxieties and memories and anticipations.  They all exist in the precious present and constitute, what is.

Maybe what the Zen master is pointing to is the possibility of living concretely rather than abstractly, with originality rather than with a good idea.  In that case, the philosophy of living in the moment is the worst possible way of life because it is abstract.  To find ourselves in the present, we may have to give up any program or idea of living in the present, because being present is not the same as trying to be present.  Anyway, what is never will be.

It might be better to surrender cleverness altogether.  Correct thinking gets us nowhere.  Being smart about life only keeps us from living it.  The story beneath the statement that I want to live only in the moment is a tale of wanting to avoid life's complexity, and, paradoxically, by opting for the idea of what is, we successfully avoid the isness that is full in our face.

The impetus for dealing only with what is may be rooted in a spirit imagination of pristine clarity.  If only life were simple, separated from the haunting past, the underworld of emotions and desires, and connections with the rest of the world!  It may be equally important to deal with what was and what appears to be beneath the surface of things.

As far as I know, the Zen master doesn't advise living in the moment or facing only what is.  The Zen poet says:

"The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection.  The water has no mind to receive their image."

Things happen without any intention to make them happen.  We become involved in situations that we may try to own but resist ownership.  Things happen feely.  Giving up the ego satisfaction fo feeling in control and at the center of the action is a pure way simply to be.  But the idea of being in the eternal now, dealing only with what is, is not pure but puristic.  In the end, it only distracts us from what could be.

    -Thomas Moore