Why Do I Keep Leaning Into the Next Moment?

The present keeps passing away and arising at once, and there's a place close in where you can rest in that.

I’ll tell you something about myself. I really enjoy imagining different futures and planning to go live in them. And under pressure, I shift, hard, into trying to meet a standard, hit a goal, accomplish something at an excellent level. Carrying myself out toward tasks and plans and standards and commitments and duties and the rest of it. I’m good at that. It’s also so easy for it to become a habit that just hijacks you, so you get more and more fixed on how things are supposed to become, and then you’re disappointed, because, as an old teacher of mine put it, you went and got appointed to a particular future.

A few years ago, on retreat, a line from Dogen hit me like a two by four right between the eyes. I’m paraphrasing from memory: carrying the self toward all things is delusion. All things coming through the self, and carrying out practice and action, that’s awakening. I’ve spent a lot of my life on the first half of that sentence.

Try a small experiment. For the next ten seconds, notice what it’s like to be you. Not just that the next thing is happening, but that there’s a kind of leaning into it. A reaching for the next moment. We’re not like a candle flame standing perfectly upright. We’re more like a candle flame being pulled forward, always tipping toward what’s next, as if by a kind of suction.

The Buddha had a precise word for that leaning forward. He called it bhava-tanha. Bhava is becoming. Tanha is craving, and the root of tanha, which I love, being neuropsychologically inclined, is thirst. Thirst is a deficit state. Something is missing, something is wrong, and we’re driven to solve it. An ancient part of your brain, the hypothalamus, runs thirst. It also runs feeling too hot, too cold. Very primal. Tanha is primal.

In his first teaching, as best we can reconstruct it, he doesn’t just say craving causes suffering. He breaks craving into three currents. There’s craving for sense pleasures: we want things to feel good, and if they feel bad, we want them to stop feeling bad. There’s craving for non-becoming: wanting to end, to erase, to disappear, to not be here anymore, which shows up psychologically in the subtleties of dissociation. And in between the two is craving for becoming. Which is a little weird. Not craving a particular pleasure, not craving oblivion. Craving to keep on going. To keep coalescing into a future self in the next second, the next minute, the next year. A future self that’s going somewhere, becoming someone, accumulating a story, getting stuff done.

This isn’t the Buddha saying stop changing. Change is inevitable. We’re continually becoming something else, naturally. Even people very far along the path are becoming: their body is becoming older, their mind is becoming maybe more knowledgeable, maybe less cluttered. That’s fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is the clinging. We cling, we contract, we get pressured about who we’re going to become. And we do it to everybody around us too, wanting things to happen in the black box of other people: that they’ll become, fill in the blank, more affectionate, more respectful, more interested, more well-behaved, whatever it is. It’s the pressure. And especially it’s the way the whole thing keeps circling back to me. Who will I be next? Who am I becoming?

The Losing and the Arising

Let me go cosmic for a minute, because when you sit with this, it’s freeing. There’s a plain question underneath all of it: what is now? What is the present moment? That turns out to be a real scientific mystery. One of my favorite books is Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard Muller at UC Berkeley. A serious physicist who can also write. His idea, which I mentioned in my book Neurodharma, goes like this. The universe banged into being about 13.8 billion years ago, and as it banged, it banged into four dimensions: three of space and one of time. We’re living in the expansion of that four-dimensional universe. Astronomers can now measure the stretching of space itself. Muller’s thought is that time might be the same kind of thing. The universe expands into the next moment much as it expands into the next stretch of space.

And for the universe to expand into the next moment, it has to leave this one behind.

So there’s an endless losing-ness of the current moment, built right into things. That drives a lot of clinging, a kind of low background angst. Oh, don’t change. Don’t go. But every moment of losing is offset by an equal moment of arising. The present is passing away, yes. It’s also arising, continuously, brand new. We’re receiving the next moment as it appears. The giftedness of it. When you rest in that, even for a second, who would ever want anything more? And when you lean into the arising instead of the losing, there’s less sense of deficit. Less sense that something is missing or wrong. And a lot of craving runs on exactly that feeling.

The brain, though, hates losing. It’s got a negativity bias, so it’s forever trying to grab what’s changing and hold it still. It can’t. It never will. The sands of time sift through our fingers, and that’s just how it is. How cool, time. The trouble starts when we clench the fist and try to keep the grains that are going to pass through no matter what. That’s when we tip into pressure and demandingness, and into conflict with the people around us.

So it’s not that you’re bad at being present. You’re running a nervous system built to lean forward and hold on. But there’s a particular place you can learn to stand, way up at the front edge of things, closer than most of us live. And a few plain moves take you there.

The rest of this gets practical: where suffering starts, further back than you’d think; how the brain builds the front edge of now; and a few ways in, including a faintly ridiculous experiment with expectations you can run in your next conversation.