Last June I went to one of the most incredible music festivals known by many in the electronic music scene, surrounded by the shade and beauty of Michagen’s pine and spruce trees: Electric Forest.

A month before the festival, over fifty thousand other attendees and I received a welcome package: wristband, stickers, a sunglasses pouch, and a message printed on a card so eloquent, so needed, that it stopped me dead in my tracks.

This message was from a voice that some artists at Electric Forest, like INZO and LSDream, use in their music to add an extra layer of meaning to the whole shebang. Alan Watts reminds us here, at a poignant time in history, to ditch distractions and remember the presence:

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than the present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”

What I love most about this quote is the direct reminder that any time we overthink about the past or the future, we waste that time not living in the present.

The present moment, as Alan describes, is the opposite of thinking in the past or the future, it is simply the direct, undiluted seconds passing by right now.

Undiluted in a real-world context means not watching TV while eating dinner, not looking at your phone while holding a conversation, and yes, not dwelling on the past or planning for the future while preparing for bed.

The undiluted presence will seem boring at first, but only because we are accustomed to filling every moment with something. In time, the presence of nothing will be a place of comfort and gratitude in itself. In a previous post, I wrote about the surprising benefits of doing nothing: Mindfulness & Nothing

Do not confuse overthinking with constructive thinking either, because some thinking is good. Constructive thinking helps us learn from our mistakes, taste the sweetness of a good memory or bitterness of a bad one, plan for the future, prepare for rainy days, and feel the excitement of an experience yet to come.

But Alan Watts is not saying that we shouldn’t plan for our future, he is saying not to live in our future. If “living” is defined as a present state of mind and in the present filled with overthinking about the future, then we are “living” as Alan describes, in a space hypnotized by the illusion of time.

We are all naturally inclined to overthink the past or the future, I find myself planning a lot in the future, spending a considerable amount of time on Plan A, B, and sometimes C. This is constructive thinking in the beginning but then overflows into overplanning, a place much similar to reminiscing of “better” times in the past.

The illusion of time includes these spaces: a future better than the present moment (when it sucks), and a past better than the present (when it sucks). There is no difference between the two spaces, only that they are not real.

Only the present moment (especially when it sucks) is reality, and this space is constantly challenged by our overthinking minds.

How do we live with presence and mindfulness? It takes a great deal of discipline at first, which then turns into a daily practice, which then turns into a state of flow.

If you have the availability, take your shoes off and find a patch of Mother Earth to stand on before going through these simple grounding steps:

Step 1: Close your eyes, cutting off your most distracting sense of vision.

Step 2: Feel the subtle weight of gravity, grounding you not only to your feet on the ground but also to this moment.

Step 3: Stay in this place of grounding for as long as you can. Feel the senses activate, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting even.

Step 4: When it feels right, lower the hands to the ground, bend the knees, and touch your forehead to the ground, thankful for the perfect amount of gravity, stable ground, and the ever presence of this moment in time.

Thank you so much for joining me and my accompanying thoughts in this post on presence. If you find any value in my work and would like to support me, please share this post with your friends and family. You can also support me by buying me a coffee. Thanks so much in advance!