[Living the now] On pain (and pleasure)

Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha, and so many others exhort us to live the now, live the present moment without anticipation, expectation, reservation, preconceived notions, fantasy, judgment, etc.

Just be. Don't name the sunset, don't describe the sunset, don't even watch the sunset, just be with the sunset. Some say be the witness, some say be the observer, some imply detachment, others immersion. Tomorrow does not exist, yesterday is gone, all that we have is the eternal now.

In a recent blog post, I mentioned that Thich Nhat Han (TNH) even says that hope is tragic as it is a projection into the future, which means that we are not correctly living the present. You can't change the future, you can only effectuate change in the present.

Most of these writers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, philosophers who exhort us to live in the present, usually imply that living the present brings us close to bliss, which we imagine to be joyful.

Eckhart Tolle tells us, probably rightly so, that "the mind creates an obsession with the future to escape from the unsatisfactory present." Or "die to the past every moment, you don't need it." That "There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future."

I also find an interesting link between Tolle and TNH and the idea of hope (and goals). The former says, "There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, the Being."

And a final quote from Tolle on hope and expectation and waiting for a better day:

When you catch yourself waiting... snap out of it! Come into the present moment.
Just be and enjoy being.

Now all of this sounds nice from the top of Maslow's pyramid, but I have always wondered how being in the now handles things like hunger, cold and, especially, pain.

I am sure that much has been written about it but I don't seem to remember much writing about being in the now which concerns pain management. Pleasure and pain have often been mentioned together as the two river banks in between which we navigate our lives, trying to row our boats closer to the bank of pleasure and inevitably being thrown against the shoals on the banks of pain.

In particular, I do not recall having seen any discussion on the spiritual nature of pain. Why do I call pain's nature spiritual? Well it seems to me like the only time that we are able (or condemned) to completely live in the present moment, a moment that seems like the eternal now.

Take a migraine headache for example. When you have a migraine attack (or just a bad headache) it seems nearly impossible to think of anything else but the present moment (even just thinking is difficult). You just live the present moment and all concentration is on the present moment and the pain. It seems like the pain is so strong that we cannot think of anything else and we cannot imagine a world in which this pain does not exist. It is all consuming, it is blinding, and it does away with the past and the future quite effectively. So is this a spiritual moment? I doubt that anyone would say so... and I haven't seen it written anywhere.

However, it is interesting to read in the lore of many mystics and yogis the mention of bouts of intense, all-consuming, all-body, pain from which the person (I think I have only heard of men having these experiences) emerges enlightened. In one account of a yogi that I read in "What is Enlightenment?" magazine, the yogi says he felt like he was replaced within his body with another entity, i.e. he really was changed by the experience.

So these extreme situations can be enlightening, but what about the migraines?