Carpe Diem Regained

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by Roman Krznaric


  Writers such as Coleridge and Goethe not only created poetry out of the awe-inspiring sublime in nature; both of them also had a strong scientific bent. Indeed, it is the poet-scientist, possessing a capacity to observe the world and a curiosity to understand it, who may be best placed to speak the language of wonder. I will always remember the opening words of Carl Sagan’s television documentary series Cosmos, first broadcast in 1980 and now seen by over 500 million people. Sagan was an astronomer who knew the power of poetry. To launch his epic, he deliberately eschewed statistics and attempted to convey the wonder of the universe in almost biblical cadences:

  The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries. The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth… I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

  Sagan was a champion of wonder. ‘My parents were not scientists,’ he wrote, ‘but in introducing me simultaneously to scepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.’51 His reflections raise a question: can we really learn to wonder, like we can learn to ride a bike? A natural capacity for wonder is a deeply human quality, and is reflected in the way that most creation stories express wonder at the very existence of the earth, the sky and the starry firmament above us. Yet how often, in our world which worships speed as much as gods, do we pause long enough to feel that tingling in the spine, the stir of the Cosmos? This is where mindfulness comes into its own as a tool for wonder, a key to unlocking its possibilities. It can slow us down and open our eyes to objects of wonder in everyday life, from the changing seasons to the laughter of a child. An iPhone app might help you name the stars, but a state of mindful awareness can provide the attention you need to gaze at them in awe. Even when packaged as a method for solving our personal problems, mindfulness has a capacity to give us a vista beyond the self.

  Collective Ecstasy: Dancing with the Crowd

  While mindfulness and wonder are close cousins amongst the varieties of now, there is a final form with a distinct personality: collective ecstasy. Perhaps our most common experience of ecstasy in daily life comes from sex, which can embody not just a sense of presence, but also other forms of carpe diem such as hedonism and spontaneity. But here I want to focus specifically on ecstasy as a collective or group phenomenon. Some of the earliest accounts of this come from European explorers who witnessed communal rituals on far-flung shores, which they usually viewed with horror and revulsion. The ‘savages’, wearing strange masks or headdresses, would dance, sing and chant, often for hours on end, and frequently enter a state of trance or frenzied possession, shouting and groaning amongst the blazing fires. Charles Darwin was a typical observer, writing with unbridled disgust about a corroborree dance of the White Cockatoo Aboriginal people he encountered in Western Australia in 1836:

  Their heavy footsteps were accompanied with a kind of grunt, by beating their clubs and spears together, and by various other gesticulations, such as extending their arms and wriggling their bodies. It was a most rude, barbarous scene, and, to our ideas, without any sort of meaning.52

  What Darwin failed to remember was that Europe had its own tradition of ecstatic rituals, ranging from the Eleusinian Mysteries of the ancient Greeks and Rome’s Bacchanalian cult through to the masked revelry of Venice’s annual pre-Lent Carnival. Perhaps at heart the Europeans were not quite so different from the natives as he liked to think.

  In his 1912 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out that such indigenous ceremonies and festivities were actually abundant with meaning. These rituals produced what he called ‘collective effervescence’, an ecstasy that created social bonds and formed the ultimate basis of religion.53 There was a stepping outside the self – what the Greeks termed ekstasis – which melted away individuality into a larger unity, something like a group consciousness. It was a process that brought participants utterly into the now, dispossessed of their personal pasts and futures, and suspended in time in the social body.

  Where can we find such collective ecstasy today? You might come across it in Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God, where charismatic preachers excite their congregations into collective effervescence with rousing cries of ‘Hallelujah!’. If you are lucky you will see someone entering a trance state like being ‘Slain by the Spirit’, a kind of sensory override where people feel so filled with the Holy Spirit that they collapse backwards (into the arms of ‘catchers’) and may find themselves speaking in tongues, or laughing or weeping uncontrollably.54

  Stepping away from the pulpit, you may also find communal ecstasy at your nearest rave, the mass dance phenomenon that emerged with electronic dance music and drugs such as Ecstasy in the 1980s. Those attending raves frequently describe how they can lose their sense of self, feel a strong communal bond with their fellow ravers, and may enter a trance-like state where they can dance for hours on end, seemingly oblivious of the passage of time (similar to being in flow). While certain drugs can help generate such experiences, they can also occur without any artificial stimulants, possibly due to the effects of the musical rhythms on modifying brain activity, or as a result of the psychological phenomenon of ‘emotional contagion’, where an emotion such as joy can spread and lead to an ecstatic merger with the group. Anthropologists have pointed out that modern ‘trance’ music – a genre characterised by repeated melodic phrases that build up to a mid-song climax, followed by a soft breakdown – can have a particularly mind-altering effect, and have noted that the mesmerising rhythmic beat resembles the ritual drumming found in indigenous communities around the world.55 If you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, go online and have a listen to Tobias ‘TB’ Bassline’s classic ‘Supernova’ psytrance mix. And make sure you turn it up loud.

  While dancing at a rave can be a blissful experience, there is no doubt that collective ecstasy also has dark sides. From the ecstatic atmosphere generated by the Nazis in their annual Nuremberg Rallies, to the violence that can quickly spread amongst rival supporters at a football match, there is a possibility that a mass immersion in the now can erupt into what Elias Canetti referred to as ‘the destructiveness of the crowd’.56 In this sense, mindfulness could provide a less volatile route to entering the present, avoiding the potential formation of a toxic ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality.

  On the other hand, in our highly individualised and atomised world, where social trust is in freefall, long-term neighbours often hardly know each other, and one in four people say they are chronically lonely, collective ecstasy may play an important role in creating new kinds of social bonds and communal values.57 This is clearly what Evangelical church movements are doing, generating a collective effervescence that provides a sense of community to their followers. But it is also the case with dance, which the neurobiologist Walter Freeman has described as ‘the biotechnology of group formation’. He argues that the rhythmic beats and movements in unison in many forms of dance ‘can lead to altered states of consciousness, through which mutual trust among members of societies is engendered’.58 So in the interest of communal bonding, it might be time to get yourself to a festival like Burning Man or Glastonbury, head for a tent playing trance music, and dance the night away.

  Some admirers of mindfulness might wish to claim that all four ways of entering the now that I’ve been describing – exuberance, flow, wonder and collective ecstasy – are really just different forms of mindfulness. You can dance mindfully, gaze at the stars mindfully, surf mindfully and sing mindfully on a mountaintop too. But if mindfulness simply becomes a catc
h-all term for every kind of living in the moment, it begins to lose meaning and coherence. The conscious practice of MBCT mindfulness techniques – such as a three-minute breathing space done with your eyes closed – offers a very different mental and physical experience than being immersed in the flow of a high-speed ice hockey match. Mindfulness is best thought of as one amongst several varieties of being in the now, all of which share a common feature, which is to absorb us in a timeless present.

  CONFRONTING THE DIGITAL NOW

  In May 1844 a breathless article published in the New York Herald celebrated an astonishing new invention that, in an instant, appeared to annihilate both space and time: Professor Morse’s telegraph. Suddenly, thanks to the tapping down the telegraph line, you could be aware not just of the ‘now’ in your immediate surroundings at 11am in a town like Baltimore, but simultaneously aware of another ‘now’, such as the words of a legislator being spoken in Washington DC at that very same moment. As the article put it, ‘it requires no small intellectual effort to realise that this is a fact that now is, and not one that has been.’59

  The internet and other digital technologies have taken this transformation to a new level. Courtesy of instant messaging, Facebook, rolling Twitter feeds and streaming electronic news, our own present moments have been invaded by the present moments of potentially millions of other people from around the planet, which are all competing for our limited stock of attention. While we can attempt to filter them out, the space in which we experience our personal present can feel difficult to protect. The multiple nows of humanity have been crammed into our own, often leaving us bedazzled and bewildered.

  This electronic multiplication of the now ranks as one of the most momentous changes in the history of presence. How should we negotiate it? Which of these nows should we seize, or let ourselves be seized by? A good case can be made that mindfulness may be one of the most effective tools at our disposal. It can offer calm in the digital storm, allowing us to attend to specific presents – whether it’s a text from a friend or a video report about an earthquake in Japan – with sufficient focus that they don’t just add to the glut of information but can touch us and even change us. Mindfulness might also encourage us to step away from the screen and immerse ourselves in a more tangible now, where we can hear the live tweet of a songbird rather than the 140-character variety. ‘Where can we live but days?’ wrote the poet Philip Larkin. Mindfulness allows us to be in our days, and immunises us against a constant distraction of digital nows.

  It also raises the possibility of turning carpe diem into an everyday way of living instead of an occasional act that punctuates our existence. Some forms of seizing the day, such as grasping windows of opportunity, may not present themselves with great regularity: true opportunities in work, love, travel and other realms can be few and far between. Mindfulness is different; no matter where we are and what we are doing, we can almost always seize the moment by bringing more attention to the present. And if you’ve got good at it, you can probably maintain your focus for more than the twenty seconds that most competent surfers manage to ride a wave.

  This does not mean, however, that we should allow mindfulness to be a ‘big now’ that dominates our routes to the present tense. Exuberance, flow, wonder and collective ecstasy all offer alternative and valuable ways to be in the moment. The carpe diem tradition will be richer for incorporating this diversity of nows. Yet it will be diminished if seizing the day is reduced to the single dimension of living in the present. We will always need to draw on a range of approaches to Horace’s ideal to help us live full and vibrant lives, and ensure that we do not become consumed by regret as our mortal clocks tick by. We need many stars to help us navigate the course of our personal journey. Having explored opportunity, hedonism and presence, we must now turn our gaze toward another of them: spontaneity.

  Notes

  1 This figure is based on data from 2005 to 2015 (Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015).

  2 http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/transcripts/jon-kabat-zinn.php?camefromhome=camefromhome; http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/mindfulness_truthiness_problem_sam_harris_science_and_the_truth_about_buddhist_tradition/

  3 See http://funktionellelidelser.dk/en/about/treatment/mindfulness/. For another example of the way that the concepts of mindfulness and carpe diem are fusing, see Langley (2013, Introduction).

  4 Quoted in Orrell (2012, 223).

  5 Cohen 2010, 110.

  6 For a critique of the narrowness of the Kabat-Zinn approach to mindfulness, see Pagnini and Philips (2015, 288–289).

  7 http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/11/mind-reading-jon-kabat-zinn-talks-about-bringing-mindfulness-meditation-to-medicine/; Kabat-Zinn 2004, xiii.

  8 http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk/images/reports/Mindfulness-APPG-Report_Mindful-Nation-UK_Oct2015.pdf

  9 Cohen 2010, 111; Crawford 2015, 3–27.

  10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html

  11 My first encounter with Buddhist meditation was in my twenties, in sessions run by the Triratna Buddhist Order (what used to be known as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order). I have also had some experience of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and been especially influenced by the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh.

  12 I actually took a second mindfulness course, but it was just as self-focused as the first.

  13 Public conversation between Matthieu Ricard and the author, Amsterdam, February 2nd, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B287LxA4Lo4. In the original conversation he said ‘five letters’ by mistake, and actually meant six, so I have changed it to this in the quote to reflect his true intention.

  14 Singer discusses some of her latest research findings here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hKS4rucTY

  15 Stanley 2012, 639.

  16 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-28/to-make-killing-on-wall-street-start-meditating

  17 Cohen 2010, 112; Stanley 2012, 631–641; Hickey 2010, 174, 178.

  18 Salecl 2010, 148.

  19 http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/mindfulness_truthiness_problem_sam_harris_science_and_the_truth_about_buddhist_tradition/

  20 Stanley 2012, 638.

  21 http://karuna-shechen.org/

  22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTfYv3IEOqM

  23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

  24 Kabat-Zinn 2004, 47, 57, 63.

  25 The main finding of the study reveals a correlation between mindfulness and reported ethical consumption, but no clear causal relationship (Armstrong and Jackson 2015, 25–30).

  26 Corkin 2013, xii, 234.

  27 Corkin 2013, 235.

  28 Kringelbach 2009, 215.

  29 Frankl 1973, 20.

  30 Quoted in Thomas (2009, vii).

  31 Frankl 1973, 32.

  32 Frankl 1987, 35, 79.

  33 Frankl 1973, 32.

  34 Frankl 1973, 35–36.

  35 Frankl 1987, 65.

  36 Frankl 1973, 40.

  37 Frankl 1987, 98.

  38 Frankl 1973, 23, 29, 31, 33, 49, 73.

  39 As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, ‘The future is a concept – a very useful concept. I’m not putting it down. The past, memory, is also a concept. But the only time that our lives are unfolding is now. And if we learn to inhabit the now more, with awareness, it is almost as if the universe becomes your teacher, because there’s no boundaries to this.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

  40 Tolle 2005, 28, 189.

  41 Jamison 2004, 4.

  42 Jamison 2004, 5–6.

  43 Jamison 2004, 130–131.

  44 Quoted in Jamison (2004, 11).

  45 Partington, Partington and Olivier 2009, 176.

  46 http://www.theskooloflife.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/stokedforlife.pdf. See also Wayne Lynch quoted in Stranger (1999, 269
).

  47 Krznaric 2006, 11–30.

  48 Csikszentmihalyi 2002, 3.

  49 Holmes 1989, 330; Coleridge 1991, 139–143.

  50 Coleridge 1991, 145.

  51 Quoted in Spangenburg and Moser (2004, 4–5).

  52 Darwin 1977, 434.

  53 See especially Book 2 Chapter 7. https://archive.org/stream/elementaryformso00durkrich/elementaryformso00durkrich_djvu.txt

  54 https://newrepublic.com/article/106464/when-god-talks-back-vineyard-evangelical-church

  55 Papadimitropoulos 2009, 71.

  56 Canetti 1962, 19.

  57 Krznaric 2015, xx, 3.

  58 Freeman 2000, 1–7; see also Ehrenreich (2006, 24).

  59 Quoted in (Gleick 2012, 149).

  7

  Recovering Our Spontaneous Selves

  I am not, as a rule, a particularly spontaneous person. I’m organised. I like to plan. I’ve got plenty of inhibitions. But occasionally I break the mould. For me, spontaneity is the moment when my daughter sees a steep grassy slope in the park, throws herself to the ground, and starts rolling down it – and I join in with her too. It’s the moment when I’m running a workshop in a prison and I realise that the inmates are taking the discussion away from my planned topic – and I suddenly decide (despite some trepidation) to abandon my plan and do an improvised session around what they want to talk about. It’s the moment when a friend of mine hears some fireworks outside while we’re having dinner, and immediately gets us all to scramble up onto the rooftop to watch them, leaving our rhubarb crumble half-eaten. It’s the moment at the end of the film Zorba the Greek when the repressed, bookish Basil turns to the life-loving Zorba and says, totally out of character and out of the blue, ‘Teach me to dance’ – and they dance the sirtaki together on the beach.

 

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