Why You Can't Try Your Way Into the Present Moment

Picture the break at a retreat. A participant comes up to the teacher, his whole body held tight. He has studied non-duality for many years, read the spiritual classics, followed the teachers and gurus, and travelled to India in search of something he calls presence awareness. He is trying so hard to be present that he cannot feel the room he is standing in. That scene opens Jeff Foster's 17-minute video, and it becomes the hinge for his central argument: presence cannot be achieved, because the mind that sets out to achieve it is the same mind that keeps placing presence in the future. What remains, he suggests, is not a destination but a recognition that has never been absent, and the effort to reach it is the thing that hides it.

Why can't you try your way into the present moment?

Foster begins with an instruction that sounds like a contradiction coming from a teacher: "Stop trying to be present." He admits how strange that is from someone who has spent "the last 15, 20 years" teaching people what presence is and inviting them back into the present moment. But his point is that effort is the wrong instrument. "The more you try, the more you strive, the more you try and force yourself into presence," he says, "the more you're going to suffer and the more you're actually going to feel further and further away from the present moment." (video, 0:00 and 0:29)

The culprit, in his account, is the mind's need for a goal. "It's like a goal seeking mechanism," he says. "It needs a future. It operates in time. It's a dualistic mechanism." That mechanism is indifferent to what it grabs. It will take enlightenment and turn it into an attainment. It will take peace, rest, relaxation, and, he says with some irony, "it will even take presence" and make it into a future state to strive toward. (video, 0:58 and 1:14)

This is the core of the seeker's trap. Once presence becomes a thing to get, the seeker stands at a distance from it, measuring the gap. The gap is then experienced as proof of failure. Foster's suggestion is that the gap is a mental construction, not a fact about the moment, which is why no amount of striving can close it.

What does the finger pointing at the moon actually mean?

To explain how words get in the way, Foster reaches for an image from Zen: the finger pointing at the moon. The mistake, as the teaching goes, is to stare at the finger and mistake it for the thing it indicates. He applies this to his own vocabulary. "Presence, consciousness, awareness, the now" are all fingers. "We're not meant to obsess over the words," he says, and he describes seekers who spend years fighting over definitions, "like fingers fighting each other." (video, 3:27 and 4:14)

He is careful not to dismiss language. He describes teaching his two-year-old daughter to name things: "Well, we call it the moon." The word is useful. It is not the moon. Foster, who calls himself a writer who loves language, admits that he has read "a hundred books" and more about presence and awareness, and that the answer "is not there in the words." (video, 5:24 and 6:02)

"The point isn't to suck the finger. The point is to look."

— Jeff Foster, video, approx. 4:20

What is the moon, then? In his framing it is "the majestic unknowable mysterious fact of your being." He insists that the label matters less than the looking. Call it being, presence, consciousness, or who you really are. The name is a finger either way.

What happened when the retreat participant stopped trying?

Back to the break. Foster recognized the man's suffering and the futility of his effort because he had lived it himself. "He was never going to get there through trying," Foster says. So instead of offering another technique, he offered a strange permission: "Try not being present."

The effect, as Foster tells it, was immediate. "I just saw his whole system just kind of relax. There was just this wave of relief," he says, "because being present was not something he could do. But not being present, not being in the now, was something that he was doing really well." The man had been unable to meet the goal, but he was highly skilled at the experience of falling short of it. Permission to fall short dissolved the struggle. (video, 7:37 and 8:19)

Foster then makes the paradox explicit, and it is the most important sentence in the talk to grasp. "Now is all there is," he says. Even the experience of not being present happens "in the only place it could possibly be happening, which is now." There is nowhere outside the present for absence to occur. The sense of being cut off is itself a passing content of the present moment. (video, 9:05 and 9:40)

"Try not being present."

— Jeff Foster, recounting what he told the retreat participant, video, approx. 8:19

If presence is already here, what is meditation for?

This is where the video is most careful, because Foster is not dismissing practice. The description of the video says he offers meditation "not as a technique to attain something special, but as a moment by moment invitation to remember what has always been here." In the talk, he speaks of recognition as "remembering, like a knowing," a quality that arises rather than gets built. (video, 11:42)

He also points to the ordinary contents of experience: thoughts, sensations, feelings, the tree outside a window, a car horn, the grief or joy that can arrive at any hour. Foster's suggestion is that the invitation is in each of these, not in some special state beyond them. Nothing has to be fixed or changed for presence to be realized. That is the radical acceptance the description highlights: whether an experience is joyful or sorrowful, it does not need judgment before it can be noticed.

How does the ocean explain thoughts and emotions?

To describe how thoughts and feelings relate to what they appear in, Foster reaches for the ocean. "It's like a wave in the ocean," he says. A wave rises, takes shape, and falls back. It is never a separate thing from the water that makes it. The description puts the point plainly: all seeking, all thoughts, and all emotions are "waves rising and falling, never separate from the vastness of awareness itself." (video, 13:34)

The image also explains the seeker's frustration. Foster describes a wave that wants relief and therefore keeps trying to become something other than wave. "It's the wave seeking," he says, and the wave's striving is precisely what keeps it from noticing it is water. When the wave is allowed to collapse back into the ocean, there is nothing to reach because nothing was ever apart from the sea. (video, 15:28 and 16:20)

"There's nowhere to get to."

— Jeff Foster, video, approx. 14:36

Should you believe a video that promises to save years of seeking?

The title is a bold claim, and it sits awkwardly beside a teaching that insists there is nowhere to get to. A reader might reasonably ask whether a 17-minute video can shorten a search that Foster himself describes as lasting decades. The more honest reading is that the video does not offer a shortcut to a future state. It offers a pointer, and the pointer works only if it is noticed in the present. Foster says as much: "It really doesn't matter which words we use." (video, 6:40)

For the reader, the practical takeaway is modest. Notice where you are reaching. Notice the word you are reaching with, and the future you are placing presence inside. Then, for a moment, let the effort drop, the way the retreat participant did when told he could stop trying. The talk suggests that the relief is not a reward for doing it correctly. It is what remains when the striving stops.

Where to go from here

Watch the video itself, which is slower and more intimate than any summary can be. Pay attention to the pauses, the retreat story, and the ocean image near the end. If the ideas land, try one small experiment: when you notice yourself striving to be present, pause and ask what the striving is pretending is missing. Foster's own description of the video invites that kind of gentle noticing, and it also points to a free gift on his website, linked in the video's description, for readers who want to continue. The teaching is not asking you to find presence. It is asking you to see that it has been here all along.