The Power of Here

The celebration of the present moment is a cliché (which, perhaps, is the expression of a truth) of the spiritual literature. In the seventeeth century, Angelus Silesius shaped it in a beautiful distich :

              One must be limpid and live in the moment

              So that in oneself God sees Himself and softly reposes.

                                              (Cherubinic Wanderer, I, 136)

Like Huxley in Perennial Philosophy (chapter Time and Eternity), Eckhart Tolle quotes Rumi : ''the Sufi is the son of time present'' (The Power of Now).

The Transcendentalists, and close to them Whitman, also attempted to increase their lives increasing their perception of the ''everlasting Now'' :

Thoreau : Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages (Walden, chapter 2).

Walt Whitman :   I have heard what the talkers were talking,

                           The talk of the beginning and the end,
                           But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

                          There was never any more inception than there is now,
                          Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
                          And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
                         Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. 

                                                     (Song of Myself, 3).

But maybe nobody has never more powerfully formulated the ''power of now'' than Emerson, -in all his works, and for instance in Literary Ethics :

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires. In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods, the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers — Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution; — behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron, or Burke; — but ask it of the enveloping Now; the more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, — so much the more you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

So many people have celebrated the present moment -but who has been so coherent and insightful to celebrate also the here -in the proper sense of this word : the material nature as it is wherever you are. We read a lot about the now, but most of the time most of us think : ''Now is good, but elsewhere is best''. Of these two facets of reality, the here seems too often overlooked or forgotten. In Emerson's essays, the two facets shine with equal clarity :

Write it on heart that every day is the best day in the year (Works and Days).

The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best (Heroism).

''...that every day is the best day'' : I have had immediately this sentence in mind when I read the story of Banzan in Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now : Before he became a great Zen master, he spent many years in pursuit of enlightenment, but it eluded him. Then, one day, as he was walking in the marketplace, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. ''Give me the best piece of meat you have,'' said the customer. And the butcher replied, ''Every piece of meat I have is the best. There is no piece of meat here that is not the best.'' Upon hearing this, Banzan became enlightened. 

It seems to me that the intuition of the Now and the intuition of the Here grow on the same root : the intuition of the New. And I think this intuition of the new is the central feature of Emerson's thought. One might call it neology -a concept used by one of the Transcendentalists, Frederic Hedge (cf Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists, Georgia, 2007, p. 166). As soon as the first paragraph of his first book, Nature, Emerson states it loud and clear : Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe ? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (And I cannot quote here all the countless extracts I have in store from his journals, sermons, letters, lectures and essays about ''the New'')

A French translation of Nature (Editions Allia, 2014) 

It is only in the present moment one can perceive nature's newness. But this newness is a property of matter, and nature is everywhere matter, so you can perceive this newness everywhere. Travelling is useless, it is a fool's paradise, as Emerson put it in Self-Reliance. Because matter renews itself incessantly, matter is ever other, and in this sense, one may say : elsewhere is here. Because the world is everywhere new at every moment, wherever you are, you are always everywhere elsewhere. Every moment is a new world : this sentence appears at least two times in Emerson's works (sermon n°158 and journal, Feb 22 1834), and one may add : every place at every moment is a new world. It is in this way I read this paragraph of the last pages of Thoreau's Walking : Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

Eveywhere at every moment our earth offers the enchantment of the New. The problems are in the conditions of its perception (everyday work and concerns, busy crowds, urban and noisy environment...). Travelling may be a solution, but only -besides the stimulation of a new setting, of a new landscape- to get better conditions of perception, no more. Whitman says : There was never any more inception than there is now. And he could say : There was never any more inception and freshness and newness elsewhere than there is here.