There is an art to being in the moment and fully appreciating something. There is a great subtlety involved with it. The art of the moment is where one drops off into an inclusiveness defined by nothingness, where the allure of the sensuous casts a light over all that is and can be felt, enclosing us in a timeless landscape of constancy and synthesis.

But to truly be in the moment one must give up a sense of being someone in the moment. This is not an easy thing to do. Most of us, even in moments where we claim we are in the present, are not. We are instead judging the world, capturing it, interpreting it in relation to how we have constructed our world in relation to our own identity and in relation to ideas. We try to be in the moment, but we want the moments to be ours, we want the moment to be our own, and the second we begin processing and acknowledging what we are experiencing, the second we are not experiencing.

With stillness and a finely tuned awareness one can watch that moment in an experience where one begins to move from the complete moment of the experience, off into one’s own world away from the present. It is very subtle and rather abrupt, but it can be experienced. In such a moment one will notice that often when perceiving something, one’s mind immediately wants to process that experience and categorize it in relation to itself and the conglomerate of memories and identities. Often, one is more concerned with being able to translate the experience to another. We are eager to put a label on it. We feel the urge to define, that egotistical urge, desperate to think the moment into existence, pretending that thought makes it real.

Thoughts, words, and ideas have a place of course but they are all only representations and as such they can never do justice to the experience, though that is what we desire from it. We want something to show to others and we get frustrated trying to explain ourselves. Language is flimsy at best and so our definition of experience is one that has an experiencer, but this kind of experience is different. When such things occur, the moment is lost and the purity of the experience is lost.

The most rewarding way to appreciate something and to fully experience it is to engage in a sensory experience without feeling the need to think about it or process it; without the need to say anything about it; instead, simply be with it and not try.

Indeed, trying becomes something paradoxical in and of itself. Naturally we are trying to do something, that is, be in the moment, but there is a difference between trying from an egoistic standpoint, and trying, where the intention to be is not a product of thought or conformity to some idealization. Instead, the intention to be becomes. This distinction can be experienced, again with careful awareness; one can watch the ‘you’ that is trying to be; one can see that conception of one’s self that has been created, the ego and the persona struggling to make the world more real and permanent than is possible.

In the end what “defines” the ability to be present has nothing to do with any force of the mind, there is no thought, or even mental effort. It is a letting go, an observing without an observer, a being without a being.