Men are stuck in the past. We have a tendency to hold on to painful as well as joyful experiences as if we are unable to confront the present without them. And our ill founded loyalty to societal expectations only further complicates this tendency.
“The past no longer exists and the future is not here yet.”
Shakyamuni Buddha
If we condense the men’s positivity movement to a few essential elements, “set fire to your past” would be among the most cited precepts. A major contribution to the movement, these five words represent the departure men must make from their past selves, and past memories of themselves and others, to a new beginning and a positive transformation toward integrated men.
The assumption underlying the “set fire” precept involves framing the past as a collection of shattered dreams, failed relationships, lost opportunities, shameful transgressions and all manner of assorted miseries clouding the mind, and without conscious intervention, propelling us into the future. Such negativity is the source of significant despair in the present moment leading to low self-esteem, anger, alcoholism, substance use disorders and a record increase in suicides.
There are numerous threads of the positivity movement and its relationship to the past and present. Let’s examine how these ideas may be related. Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson offered in Self-Reliance (1841):
“Why drag about this corpse of your memory… It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”
Here we have an invitation to let go of past beliefs and memories, even past versions of ourselves, for the sake of reinvention. The transcendentalists believed that each person contains a dynamic variety of potentialities with which to reinvent themselves.
More recently, visionary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle focused on time and the present moment in his book The Power of Now (2004):
“Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
Of course the notion of a “now” moment which is somehow “out of time” is an entirely spiritual conception. Nonetheless it is difficult to argue with the idea that time itself is an illusion.
Neuroscience weighs in with research on the nature and functioning of memory. If the past is presumed to weigh on the present, then the significance of memory cannot be overstated.
Neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Charan Ranganath argues in his recently published book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters (2024) that the brain’s mechanisms of memory did not evolve to help us remember past events with any accuracy. Instead, forgetting is necessary to prepare us for an uncertain future:
“Although we tend to believe that we can and should remember anything we want, the reality is we are designed to forget, which is one of the most important lessons to be taken from the science of memory.”
Granted, forgetting is often not easily accomplished, especially when the memories relate to catastrophic or traumatic events. We must acknowledge that the negative experiences which are “set fire” by the men’s movement precept are, for the most part, the very experiences that most impact our self-perceptions in the present. Without direct and meaningful intervention, there is little doubt that we shall remain stuck in the past.
But we are not suggesting changing the past, only our present perceptions of it. Jon Kabat-Zinn is a major popularizer of mindfulness scholarship and practices. In his enormously popular book Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, originally published in 1994 and still in print, he states:
“Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.”
Think back to those negative and traumatic past experiences. Are we not spinning the negativity and trauma in our own perceptions? This is an unavoidable conclusion. We are masters of our feelings and reactions and therefore only we can change them.
Buddhist traditions describe mindfulness as meta-attention to the content flow of one’s mind, and emphasize in particular how past, present and future moments arise and cease as sense impressions and mental formations in the present moment. The only moment that really matters is the present and its constituent elements.
Ultimately we arrive at Zen mindfulness practices as developed by Zen scholar and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh and others, and gaining significant prominence in the West. Thich Nhat Hanh proposed this perspective based on the words of the Buddha:
“‘The past no longer exists, and the future is not here yet.’ The only moment in which you can be truly alive is the present moment. The present moment is the destination, the point to arrive at. Every time you breathe in and take a step, you arrive: ‘Breathing in, I arrive. Breathing out, I arrive.’” (You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment, 2009)
Mindfulness meditation is all about releasing oneself from the remembered past and the speculative future, and arriving in every conceivable way into the present moment. It is simply the only moment that matters, the only moment in which we are truly alive and aware, the singular moment in which we may find peace from the burdens of the past and the uncertainties of the future.
If you are just beginning mindfulness practice, it is useful to think of time as a flowing stream. The physical characteristics of the stream remain approximately unchanged, and any given point along the stream is the present moment. The water keeps flowing, cycling and recycling. But if we dip our toes in at any one point, we find the present moment.
The present moment is a negative space separating the past from the future. Its epic power derives from the way our minds work. It is the only moment in which we may decide to embrace change.
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