We've been having discussions about the "ego" and the "now" in the Ego Hunting Pod, and I ended up trying to make a diagram to illustrate an series of concepts that I've been using to think about the "Now" experience. I thought I would post them in this blog and see if they can stimulate more discussion. This text might be a little disjointed, because it's copied and reassembled... 

Well, I don't know if this is true for everyone, but as far as I can tell, my ego, or rather, the part of my mind I call my ego, can't function in the now. I'm not sure it can even enter it.

I experience my ego as following behind the now, trying to think of something to say.

I sometimes think people mistake the 'now' state for the 'flow' or 'zone' state that people talk about with sports and creativity. I'm not sure those two states are the same.

I say that because the more in the 'now' I am, the less I seem to want to do or communicate or create.

Anyway, to explain it, this is the model I have of the "Now".

The actual, physical now is forever unreachable.

It takes a certain fraction of a second for the brain and mind to process experience and display it as sensation. We can guess that on the average that short interval of time is about 1/30th of a second or less. Why? Because of movies. A movie is actually a series of still images, but when they are played at 30 frames a second or faster, we experience them as a seamless whole. There is reason to believe that we can actually process sensation in milliseconds, thousandths of a second, but we rarely do so.

So, the "experiential now" is as close as we can get, in these human bodies, to the actual "Now" of the physical universe. That happens when we turn off as much interpretive thought as possible, and are immediately and directly in our bodies, experiencing the universe as closely as our eyes, ears, skin, and other sensory organs are capable.

(I like that state a lot, but, like I suggested earlier, the deeper I am in it the less I'm interested in acting or communicating. The experience itself is so rich, and frankly pleasurable, that I'm totally satisfied just absorbing sensation.)

I have been thinking that the "Zone" is _just a little distance_ behind the experiential now. Close enough to direct sensation to allow maximum responsiveness, but there is still room for certain parts of the mind to make plans, project into the future, and make strategic and tactical choices. (A tennis player in the "Zone" still is able to plan how to make the next shot and position themselves in the optimum spot on the court, for example.)

And the ordinary ego spends it's time some distance behind the experiential now.

What's your experience of the 'now' state?

 

In my blog, in the "You Wanna Hear A Crazy Story" entry, I described the night when a guy crashed his truck into my stream. Well, the township gave me an award for that. Here I am with some policemen getting the award. In case it's not obvious, I'm the big guy at the right end of the row of policemen.

The Cheif of Police started calling me, out of the blue, last week. leaving messages on my answering machine, saying they wanted me to come to an awards ceremony with the policeman and fireman who helped save the guy. At first I ignored it, but she kept calling me, so I gave in. This is a picture of the award ceremony which happened this past monday. 

http://telesterion.zaadz.com/blog/2006/3/wanna_hear_a_crazy_story

What the hell, how often do you get an award? the water wasn't waist deep tho, they fibbed a little about that, it was about two feet deep. The certificate is in a nice frame, but I only scanned the document.

http://telesterion.zaadz.com/photos/view/14553