An Argument Against Mindfulness

When “Be Here Now” Asks Too Little of Consciousness

Mindfulness has become a central spiritual practice of our time.

Be present.

Stay in the moment.

Return to the breath.

Don't get lost in the past. Do not become consumed by the future.

There is wisdom in this. Anyone trapped in regret knows how merciless the past can become. Anyone who has lived with anxiety knows how frightening the future can seem. The present can be a refuge. A breath can become an anchor. The body can remind us that, in this moment at least, we are here.

But I have begun to wonder whether we have turned mindfulness from a useful practice into a spiritual ideal that asks too little of consciousness.

What if consciousness was not designed merely to remain in the present?

What if one of its deepest purposes is precisely the opposite?

What if consciousness gives us the ability to travel through time?

In my last reflection, Children of Earth, Travelers through Time, I explored the relationship between Mother Earth, Father Time, and consciousness.

Our bodies belong to Mother Earth.

Gravity, hunger, aging, pain, pleasure, sleep, birth, and death govern them. The body can exist in only one place and at only one moment.

Now.

No matter how much I may wish to return to yesterday, my body cannot go there. No matter how vividly I imagine tomorrow, my body has not yet arrived.

The body always obeys the present.

But consciousness is not.

Consciousness can leave.

It can return to a childhood bedroom that disappeared decades ago.

It can hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive.

It can revisit a conversation and understand it differently than it did when it first happened.

It can imagine itself five years from now.

It can construct a world that has never existed.

It can dream.

It can remember.

It can anticipate.

It can wander.

And I find myself asking a very simple question:

Why would consciousness have been given this extraordinary freedom if spiritual wisdom required us to remain permanently in the present?

Perhaps the problem is not leaving the moment.

Perhaps the problem is that we become trapped wherever we go.

A profound difference exists between being imprisoned by the past and visiting it.

Memory can torment us. But memory can also restore.

A scent can return us to a kitchen we knew as children.

A piece of music can collapse forty years into a few seconds.

A photograph can awaken an entire world.

Someone we loved can suddenly become present again—not physically, but unmistakably within consciousness.

The past is not always a prison.

Sometimes it is a sanctuary.

Sometimes it is a teacher.

Sometimes it is the only place where a conversation can continue.

The same is true of the future.

Yes, the future can become anxiety.

But it is also where hope lives.

Every promise is made toward the future.

Every garden is planted for a season that has not yet arrived.

Every parent imagines what a child may become.

Every artist sees something before it exists.

Every act of courage depends, at least in part, upon the belief that tomorrow can be different from today.

If we remained entirely within the present moment, would there be aspiration?

Would there be planning?

Would there be imagination?

Would there be hope?

Mindfulness often tells us to return to what is.

Consciousness continually asks:

What was?

What might be?

What if?

Perhaps those questions are not distractions from life.

Perhaps they are part of what makes human life possible.

I have begun to think that mindfulness sometimes asks consciousness to behave more like the body.

The body says:

Here.

Now.

This.

Consciousness says:

Then.

Someday.

Elsewhere.

Remember.

Imagine.

Become.

And perhaps that tension is not something to overcome.

Perhaps it is the human condition.

Mother Earth holds us in place.

Father Time carries us forward.

Consciousness moves between them.

Spiritual maturity may not be learning to remain permanently in one moment, but learning to move among moments without losing ourselves.

To remember without becoming imprisoned by memory.

To imagine the future without becoming consumed by fear.

To inhabit the present without believing that the present is all that exists.

This distinction becomes especially important when we speak about grief.

When someone we love dies, time makes a brutal claim.

That life happened.

That moment is over.

That person was here, and now is not.

Chronological time is relentless.

It does not turn around.

And yet consciousness does something astonishing.

It refuses to obey.

I can remember someone who is gone and feel their presence immediately.

I can hear a phrase they once said.

I can see a look on their face.

I can remember the way they entered a room, the cadence of their voice, the way they laughed.

For a moment, years disappear.

What exactly has happened?

Have I escaped the present?

Have I become lost in illusion?

Or has consciousness revealed that our relationship with time is far more mysterious than the clock suggests?

When my son Sam died, time drew a line through my life.

There was before.

And there was after.

The calendar continued, as calendars do.

Days became months.

Months became years.

But consciousness did not obey the calendar nearly so cleanly.

There are moments when Sam feels far away.

There are other moments when five years seem to disappear entirely.

A memory appears, and he is close.

A number appears—444—and an entire relationship enters the present.

Chronological time says that January 27, 2021 grows more distant with each passing day.

Love does not seem to understand that arithmetic.

Perhaps grief teaches us something important about consciousness.

It teaches us that presence is not always determined by physical proximity.

It teaches us that time does not erase what consciousness can still encounter.

It teaches us that a human being may be absent from the world of matter while remaining deeply present within the world of consciousness.

I am not suggesting that memory defeats death.

I am asking a different question.

Why does consciousness possess such an extraordinary ability to move outside chronological time at all?

Why can it return instantly to events that no longer exist materially?

Why can it imagine realities that do not yet exist?

Why can it dream of people who are gone?

Why can it conceive eternity when the body has never experienced eternity?

These capacities are so ordinary that we rarely stop to consider how strange they are.

Every night, consciousness loosens its connection to the physical world.

Every day, memory allows us to revisit what has passed.

Every act of imagination allows us to enter what has not yet happened.

We spend our entire lives practicing a kind of time travel.

Perhaps consciousness has always been preparing us to understand that time is not as absolute as it appears.

This is where I find myself questioning the phrase that has become almost a spiritual commandment:

Be here now.

Yes.

Be here.

Absolutely.

There are moments when we desperately need to return.

When fear has carried us too far ahead.

When regret has pulled us too far behind.

When our own thoughts have separated us from the person sitting directly across from us.

Then the present becomes medicine.

But medicine is not meant to become a prison.

Why only here?

Why only now?

Perhaps the deeper goal is not to remain in the present.

Perhaps the goal is freedom.

The freedom to move through time without becoming trapped within it.

The freedom to visit memory without drowning in nostalgia.

The freedom to imagine tomorrow without surrendering to anxiety.

The freedom to experience this moment fully and then allow consciousness to travel again.

Maybe mindfulness is not wrong.

Maybe it is incomplete.

It teaches us how to return.

But consciousness teaches us that we can leave.

And perhaps both abilities are necessary.

The past gives us memory.

The present gives us experience.

The future gives us possibility.

Why would wisdom require us to abandon two-thirds of that landscape?

I increasingly believe that consciousness is not a point fixed in time.

It is a traveler.

The body remains with Mother Earth.

Father Time carries the body relentlessly forward.

But consciousness seems to possess another kind of freedom.

It can look backward.

It can reach forward.

It can step outside the immediate moment and observe the entire journey.

And perhaps that capacity offers us a clue about what consciousness truly is.

We are children of Earth.

We are carried by Time.

But consciousness may belong entirely to neither.

Perhaps that is why it wanders.

Perhaps that is why it remembers.

Perhaps that is why it dreams.

Perhaps that is why love can cross years in an instant.

The goal, then, may not be to remain forever in the moment.

The goal may be to know where we are—

and to know that we can leave,

and return.