The Screwtape Letters, Session 5: The Ego’s War on the Present

Wednesday’s essay pairs very well with Session 5.

If you have read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, you may have thought of Tolle’s book when you read Letter 15. You may have also thought of our previous work with Oliver Burkeman or the Stoics and on and on.

That’s not a surprise. Lewis’s idea that the “Present” is the portal to eternity is a mainstay idea in the perennial philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations 3.10, “Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.”

Marcus, like almost all of us, found it easy to ignore his mortality. In Meditations 4.17, he again reminded himself “not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you.”

Lewis wants to help us live that truth and not merely remember it as a nice saying. And that is easier said than done. Marcus wrote in 9.6, “Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.”

All we need? Many times, it doesn’t feel that way, and that is what trips us up. When it seems that something else is needed, we consult the past and project into the future, and we become incapable of right action now.