Your Capacity for Living in the Present Is a Core Measure of Life

The only thing to do in life is to love yourself and be yourself, grounded in living in the present. See the earlier article “On Living in the Present.”

I. A Person’s Level of Living in the Present

It equals their level of loving themselves and being themselves; it is their level of mental and spiritual development; it is their level of theory and practice, their ability to seek truth from facts (what psychology calls reality testing, integration, and capacity for action); it is their level of subjectivity, human-centeredness, and resistance to alienation, and the extent to which they have lost simplicity, instinct, and common sense; it measures their stage in the core dialectic of intrinsic nature versus karmic obstructions—that is, their level of digesting karmic obstructions, illuminating intrinsic nature, and growing the self. It determines their level of tranquility and connection. What is called awakening is a stage and turning point in spiritual growth.

See the earlier articles “Classifying Levels of Human Development,” “The Stages of Awakening,” and “Losing Simplicity.”

II. Specific Manifestations

1. Awareness of and connection with the full reality of the external world (the world, society, history, the people, nature, class, studies, career, industry, and so on—not omniscience and omnipotence, nor becoming consumed by one-sided delusions, but dialectical, comprehensive, objective analysis);
2. Awareness of and connection with the full reality of oneself (the core dialectic of intrinsic nature versus karmic obstructions, the self, the ego, libido, moving from confidence to pride while also accepting incapacity and embracing mediocrity, and so on, rather than inferiority–conceit–self-hatred);
3. Connection with inner strength, effective meta-action and metacognition, and seeking truth from facts;
4. Balancing work and rest: resting, pausing, becoming still, and stopping.
5. Happiness and tranquility in the present, unconditional well-being, and fulfillment in the present. That is, as in Zhuangzi’s philosophy, the level of connection with innate wholeness and the unity of humanity and nature.

Flow Is Not Necessarily Advanced Mindfulness

Flow is actually not difficult. An ordinary secondary school student doing practice problems, playing Tetris or tennis, drawing, making music, or dancing, or a programmer writing code, can also enter flow. Many people spend their entire lives absorbed in pursuing this kind of flow, which is not a truly mindful life.

Truly advanced mindfulness and awareness are like those of Marx and Engels: aligning with the Way without deliberate intent, truly living within one’s destiny and historical mission. Van Gogh, for example, had ordinary mindfulness, advanced mindfulness, and advanced awareness, as well as inner conflict, distracting thoughts, and psychiatric symptoms.

Other Points

“Living in a Low State”: one’s ability to live through adversity and hardship is also part of one’s level of living in the present. Connecting with reality, the present, inner strength, and oneself. For example, feeling no resentment when others fail to understand you is living in the present. See the earlier article “Living in a Low State 2: The End of Searching Within.”

A person’s ability to rest is a core part of their level of living in the present. “Rest Requires Great Wisdom, Great Courage, and Great Steadfastness.”

“Allow Yourself to Despair”: refusing to allow despair is a cruel refusal. Only those who allow themselves to despair, who allow everything, can live within reality, follow the course of fate, and find their way out of desperate circumstances. The spirit of Van Gogh: despairing all along the way, moving forward all along the way.

III. The Five Elements of Life—Studies, Career, Social Life, Body, and Mind—All Fundamentally Depend on the Extent to Which One Lives in the Present

1. The extent to which a person loves themselves is the extent to which they love others and the world.

Some people counter this by saying that good people go unrewarded and kind people get bullied. “Good people” who lack clear boundaries, self-protection, and independence, who please others, sacrifice themselves, or occupy the moral high ground, do not embody truly simple goodness, truth, and beauty. They lack connection with others; fundamentally, they fear and reject others, abstract them, and treat them as tools.

A person’s level of compassion toward themselves sets the upper limit of their compassion toward others.

The extent to which a person treats themselves as human equals the extent to which they treat others as human.

1. The extent to which a person loves themselves determines the extent to which others and society love them.

(Children are the exception: their love for their parents is 100%. This is why children are angels, and why parents owe them a debt of gratitude. But toxic, exploitative parents drain their children dry and exhaust their reserves, lowering their children’s capacity to “love” themselves.)

Children naturally have no boundaries and do not know how to love themselves, while their love for their parents is 100%. Yet many parents are alienated, exploiting their children’s lack of boundaries to manipulate and drain them. This is the dialectic of the human family in a society based on private ownership. This is also why growing up in a simple, loving family means getting a head start in life. One major role of contemporary psychological counseling is to help young people learn to establish boundaries and love themselves.

1. Choosing Social Connections

Social connection happens in the present, friendship happens in the present, and love happens in the present (with both people loving themselves and others in the present). These are all part of one’s level of living in the present.

Counterexamples are the ineffective socializing, upward socializing, toxic socializing, and entanglements in karmic obstructions of the petty and micro bourgeoisie: these are instances of failing to live in the present.

1. In studies and careers, from value investing to entrepreneurship, one can see the importance of living in the present and the frightening consequences of failing to do so. This is even more obvious with the body: when one cannot live in the present, the body bears the brunt.

IV. Dialectical Materialism and Opposition to Striving

Living in the present does not imply idealism, as though changing one’s mindset and manifesting things were easy. The extent to which a person lives in the present is also determined by historical materialism and dialectical materialism, as with the process of children’s alienation mentioned earlier.

“Spiritual Cultivation Is a False Concept,” “Striving Is a False Concept”

Allowing yourself to “fall short of living in the present” is also a form of acceptance and a deeper form of living in the present.

Being attached to “living in the present” is also an attachment, a form of failing to live in the present. Buddhist concepts such as the Middle Way and the emptiness of emptiness all point to not becoming attached to what is used to break attachments.

Pause, become still, stop, reduce. Sit in forgetfulness; in pursuing the Way, diminish daily; an empty room gives rise to light.

Reduce the extent to which you fail to live in the present, and what remains is natural connection, living in the present. Keeping a journal and taking a stroll both work this way.

Through dialectical materialism, a person recognizes that they cannot control and determine everything in their own mind: it is jointly determined by the subjective and objective, the internal and external, the present and history. The passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom is a historical process. Recognizing that spiritual cultivation cannot accelerate one’s development into omniscience and omnipotence; recognizing that within oneself is an intrinsic nature that heals, shines, and moves upward, existing as an objective material reality, and learning to recognize it and entrust oneself to it; recognizing that compulsive striving and compulsive spiritual cultivation are mistaken understandings, rather than true capacities for action and practice; recognizing that freedom and agency contradict attachment and forceful effort, and that attachment and forceful effort are karmic obstructions and mistaken understandings, manifestations of unfreedom and opposition to agency. This is precisely an expression of one’s level of mental development and living in the present.

Living in the Present and Class

Of the seven billion people on Earth, hundreds of millions, or more than a billion, cannot live in the present, and there are clear class patterns to this. This is plainly a matter of statistics and materialism.

The proletariat lives in the present more than other classes: labor, suffering, life, love, and friends are all in the present, also because they simply “have no future.” Meanwhile, the petty and micro bourgeoisie experience existential crises, and other classes are more deeply alienated. The petty and micro bourgeoisie build their lives around capital, living in an illusion tacitly sanctioned by the Cthulhu-like big Other, living in daydreams, poetry, and faraway places. Why do I focus on criticizing the petty and micro bourgeoisie? They embody ignorance and alienation in extreme form and are central to our everyday lives. Finally, I am also petty and micro bourgeois, as were Marx, Engels, and Lenin. So long as one is an intellectual, so long as one is petty and micro bourgeois, one is petty and micro bourgeois.

The Essence of Bolshevism Is Not Being Advanced, but Opposing Backwardness in Oneself

That is, the left-wing vanguard among petty- and micro-bourgeois intellectuals can barely manage to keep pace with the proletariat. (Lenin said repeatedly that the Bolsheviks had already fallen behind the masses.) This is also why the Bolsheviks so often degenerate from being advanced into decline and decay. This is the Marx-Zhuangzi framework’s psychological explanation of the theory of revolutionary Thermidor.

Correct understanding comes from a correct standpoint. To sum up the experience of the October Revolution: if soldiers possess proletarian consciousness, armed force, this highly alienated form of capital, can serve the proletariat and the people. Around the First World War, countries undertook general mobilization and conscripted proletarians on a massive scale, departing from the traditional Junker-style conscription of peasants. This was why Bolshevization occurred widely across the globe.

Likewise, if intellectuals possess proletarian consciousness, knowledge, this alienated form of capital, can also serve the proletariat.

In the early twentieth century, the revolutions in China and Russia brought together workers, peasants, soldiers, and students. This was an opportunity arising from a particular historical period and cannot be mechanically reproduced. Yet, like the Paris Commune, although as brief as a flash of lightning in the long night of history, they embodied radiance.

Appendix: The Purpose of This Article

It extends the “Living in the Present” series and provides a clearer systematic framework. “On Living in the Present” focuses on explaining the significance of living in the present, how to live in the present, how to live in an extremely low state, and how to accept not living in the present. “Living in a Low State” points out that living in a low state is harder than living in an extremely low state, because the ego has revived, with its greed, aversion, and delusion concerning higher states.

This article, “Levels of Living in the Present,” connects the study of the inner life with psychology, taking one’s level of living in the present as a core measure for “Classifying Levels of Human Development,” “Choosing Social Connections,” and “The Stages of Awakening.” It takes “living in the present” as a core element of “practice” and action, analyzing how it manifests in concrete practice and in the five elements of life.

This is also where dialectical materialism and Daoist philosophy come together, and a foundational interpretation of Leninist vanguard theory, offering a renewed critique of the common misinterpretation of vanguard theory as elitist enlightenment theory or indoctrination theory.

Marx: A human being is the sum of social relations. The more deeply I understand the philosophy of the inner life, the more I think this statement is brilliant. This is what makes humanity’s greatest philosophers matter. “Psychology Needs the Guidance of Marxism”