Making the Structure of the Present Moment Work for You
On the best use of attention, intention, intuition, modeling, and planning.
If being in the present is so important, why is that? Among other things—including the quality of one’s own experience—it must be because it is within the present moment that anything consequential happens. This now is where all causality ever is, was, or will be. There is nothing paradoxical or contradictory about this statement.
The Future Is Implicit
But what about what will happen next year? True, but that is here—the idea of it is here. So it is in the anticipation that we have the choice about how to approach that, and that planning process is in the present moment, alongside the mental model we have of that future event. The quality of the model will hopefully have a good basis, and ongoing reflection, updated with new information and insights, will continue to refine it. That way, when that future moment becomes present, it falls into place.
With this in mind, it is mission-critical to have a model of the present moment itself. That model will have many elements, each capturing some important aspect of reality. Some will be internal, some external, and some about the interdependence where they meet. Some will be organized along a linear timeline, while others will be nonlinear, and again, how they relate. Likewise, cognitive, affective, embodied. And in different spheres—personal, professional, private, and so on. And about different content areas, different groups, different goals.
The Present Moment Contains Representations of Itself
This model of the present moment itself, therefore, contains at least one recursive self-model. This has to be running in the background, but can be brought more into awareness. Because much of our process is not consciously experienced, and our conscious bandwidth is a narrow window, we must be selective about what we pay more attention to. It is conscious attention that pulls up swatches of unconscious process into being experienced.
The nature of the attention makes a big difference. Is it light attention, without desire or purpose? Or is it deliberate attention, close and more imbued with motivational drive? Attention is the key factor, the particular properties of attention, and dexterity and range with different forms of attention. Attention and will are closely related, and willful attention is linked with causal outcomes. Attention, and the way attention is structured, is inherently informational and performs operations on experience, while also watching emerging experience dynamically. Attention pays attention to itself—"self-attention", in transformer LLM architecture—a critical aspect of the experienced and experiencing present moment.
However, it is also the case that unconscious or automatic activities carry great causal impact. Some are deliberate processes that we have incorporated into our way of moving through the world. This saves free energy because they run in the background, only coming to attention if there is a problem—they’re habits, routines.
Unconscious Influences
Then there are unconscious ways of paying attention and acting which we haven’t chosen, and may or may not know are running. These can be useful, though they tend to be less flexible, and are the result of conditioning or learning that happened without our full engagement. Family history, cultural mores, personal lessons learned that we haven’t really reflected upon, and the like.
Attention is important in many fundamental ways. In terms of the structure of the present moment, attention and the deliberate use of attention to scan the present moment are important for modeling it. There also has to be memory of what was modeled, and attention to those memories as they become conceptualized.
Then there is how reality unfolds, compared with the current version of the model. We pay attention to the differences between our model and the experience we are having as it continuously arrives. The difference between expectation and actuality provides potentially useful information-it can be like panning for gold, though, because the sheer volume of experience far exceeds our conscious bottleneck.
Selection and Sorting of Emerging Experience
Attention is also core to how we sort all this information. In particular, the templates we carry for how information is sorted are important because attention helps us recognize what is happening, and then we pay attention to the selection process, the decision-making rubrics we use. All of this presumes a highly conscious approach.
More intuitively, we may gently guide less conscious attentional and intentional processes, waiting for the ideas to cohere and become more usable and relevant to consciousness. Or again, they may be entirely automatic, perhaps not observable even if desired, but detectable by their impact, which cannot be due to external factors. This allows one to infer that it must be me, even if I don’t know what is happening fully.
The structure of the present moment is hard to visualize, but it’s well worth a try. The way this is modeled internally is multimodal—polysensory, embodied, cognitive, affective, unlabeled categories of experience, and within a mental space which is of the psyche and mind. There are inevitable physical elements, given the embodiment and material substrate. The biological and empirical reality of these processes is a critical part of the structure of the present moment.
Linear Time as a Bookkeeping Tool
Beyond a snapshot, when conceptualizing the structure of the present moment, it’s important to consider how moments stack up over time—even if we are using linear time notions as a bookkeeping device. This is because we can imagine, in the moment, a domain of linear, sequential causality, giving the impression of a process over time. It’s a useful tool regardless of what we think time is or isn’t, what change is or isn’t. Attention again comes into play here, shaped by the template we are using when we deploy attentional resources.
The linearized model of the structure of the expanded present moment places moments on a string, with each unit of time a point evenly spaced apart from its neighbor. However, this is misleading.
Expanding Time Outward From the Center of the Present
Consider, alternatively, that time is being conceptualized not by sequential units, but by breadth (width), or span. So if, due to how our brains work, a present moment is on the order of fractions of seconds, or slightly more, we can say that it has a width of a single second or so. However, the bracketing of temporal width can be arbitrarily assigned, increasing the possibilities available. For example, a moment could be a couple of days long, a week or a month, years or a lifetime. The moment is as large or as small as we want to imagine—changing how we conceptualize it—even if our actual capacity for feeling grounded in the moment is limited to shorter spans. This is a key perspective to consider, and the choice here is sometimes of great consequence, as we allow experience to fully unfurl.
Finally, it’s important to call out the element of perceived free will in the structure of the present moment. Areas like this—whether free will exists or not—will have a decidedly different qualitative feel, which becomes more pronounced as one learns to recognize the inner experience. This may be a reflection of rigidity or flexibility in some areas, or it may be a reflection of how some parts of consciously accessible experiences are causally intertwined with aspects of external reality. These are areas where immediate experience seems to have the most traction in terms of direction of attentional and intentional resources.
Book: Making Your Crazy Work For You: From Trauma and Isolation to Self-Acceptance and Love
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