Anywhere but here and now

I just finished listening to the Pensees or Thoughts on Religion by the French thinker and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Among other things, he designed a calculating machine, arguably a distant forerunner of the computer. 

He also apparently had a mystical experience of which he wrote 

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

For those of us out of the math world, he's best known for nuggets from the Pensees, such as "the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of."

This time around, I found his insights on the human condition to be brilliant and his theological musings a bit dogmatic, which is probably what he was going for.

He was a devout Catholic, although one accused of being a Jansenist heretic, (Jansenism was an almost Calvinistic tendency in the Church), but sometimes he sounds downright Buddhist. Example: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Here's a great passage from the Pensees about our chronic tendency to be anywhere but where and when we are that could have come out of an old school dharma talk:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Ouch. That hit close to home.