The body and the present moment

I am constantly seeking ways to cultivate the ability of living in the present. In one sense this is paradoxical, as we are always in the present moment; but we are probably familiar with the difficulty of this way of living, and how it seems to elude one’s efforts to live in this way. I have received helpful instruction from different writers—Alan Watts (particularly his Wisdom of Insecurity), Ram Dass, Maurice Nicoll, and others. Philosopher Ken Wilber, in his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), provides some insight into this issue. Before giving an example, I will quickly introduce his fundamental distinction between two "modes of knowing." As he points out, many philosophical, psychological, and religious traditions have noted these two distinct approaches to the world, but here is a succinct description from the psychologist William James: 

There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Although such things as the white paper before your eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically. 

For example, the only way to "know" truly what an apple tastes like, is to taste it. No amount of words (symbols) no matter how skillfully or poetically combined, can truly convey the experience of tasting an apple. Both modes of knowing, of course, have their purpose, but it is important to note that the rational mind is fundamentally occupied with symbolic/representative knowledge. And it is the opinion of many religious traditions that there is a significant difference between "knowing" the Ultimate Reality through symbols, and knowing it nondually, immediately, and without representation.

So, in describing the present moment, Wilber discusses what he terms organismic awareness, which is opposed to the awareness of the conscious ego, which uses the symbolic/linear mode of knowing:

Organismic awareness is what we--on the Ego Level--ordinarily, but clumsily, refer to as seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. But in its very purest form, this "sensual awareness" is non-symbolic, non-conceptual, momentary consciousness. Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only--you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past [italics mine]. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch, or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is necessarily spaceless. Just as organismic awareness knows no past or future, it knows no inside or outside, no self or other.

In other words, the body as conscious organism only lives in the present. Though I won't discuss it here, there are many examples of the body holding "traces" of the past, which can be uncovered in certain psychosomatic therapies like Rolfing. But the body still retains these traces in the present. It becomes clear that the mind is largely responsible for the sensation most of us feel in our daily life, of not being fully present HERE, but occupied with issues of the past and the future. And it is that same mind that can be trained to rest more completely in the present.