We're told to be in the present moment. But what if "the moment" isn't a dot on a timeline—it's a thickness that can stretch across minutes, weeks, even years?
That's the gist of what I want to argue here: open-monitoring mindfulness can feel fully present and still hold a wider horizon—so your life doesn't split into "Zen now" vs "past and future." You can be here, and still be with the arc you are on.
Discussions in Thailand
When I was living as a digital nomad in Thailand, one conversation about mindfulness has stuck with me. I was talking with a very earnest trainee Ashtanga instructor Sean, now well-established, about what I saw and a fatal problem with the idea of mindfulness. How do our long-term projects get wrapped into the concept of present moment mindfulness? If you are aiming to be always in the present moment, how do you attend to your logn-term objectives and responsibilities in life? He didn’t address the question in a satisfying way.
Well I have an answer, drawing on the wonderful science of brain criticality.
The Science Behind "Expansive Presence"
Recent neuroscience reveals something remarkable: smart, healthy brains operate at the soft edge of order and chaos — a state called criticality. At this precise balance point between regularity and disorder, neural networks generate scale-free avalanches of activity that cascade across multiple timescales simultaneously. This isn't just abstract theory I’d argue — it's the neurobiological foundation for why presence can feel both immediate and expansive.
When your brain is in this critical state (what I call the "Ψ-band" in my Trident G theory), it naturally coordinates activity across different temporal rhythms:
Gamma waves (30-100 Hz) handle moment-to-moment awareness
Theta rhythms (4-8 Hz) manage working memory and planning
Delta oscillations (0.5-4 Hz) integrate longer-term patterns and consolidation
The magic happens when these rhythms synchronise without being rigid—creating what feels like a "present-horizon" where you can sense immediate sensations and long-term trajectories as one coherent experience.
The Expansive Present
Think of presence as a window you can widen or narrow, supported by your brain's natural criticality:
Narrow window (seconds–minutes): breath, sounds, sensations, passing thoughts—primarily gamma-based awareness.
Wider window (days–months-years): projects, relationships, healing, skill growth—theta and delta rhythms joining the dance, creating that sense of "things that move more slowly but are still happening now."
When the window widens naturally (rather than being forced), the felt sense of "now" becomes a present-horizon: you can sense where things are heading without forcing a fixed script. It's part design, part emergence — exactly what you'd expect from a brain operating at criticality, where small inputs can cascade into large-scale reorganisations while maintaining overall stability.
When Time Fractures: The Brittleness of Control
But what happens when we lose this natural criticality? When our neural networks drift too far from their critical point, time itself starts to feel fragmented and disconnected.
The Over-Strategised Future: When we try to force the future into rigid blueprints, we push our brains into subcritical states — too much order, not enough spontaneous organisation from ‘presence’. The future becomes a series of checkboxes rather than an emerging space of possibilities. You can feel this: it's when planning feels mechanical, when goals feel imposed rather than discovered, when you're white-knuckling your way toward outcomes that no longer feel fresh and energising.
Neurally speaking, this happens when we override the brain's natural avalanche dynamics with top-down control. Instead of letting theta and delta rhythms coordinate organically with gamma awareness, we force a single timescale to dominate. The future becomes disconnected from present-moment feedback — it exists "out there" as a separate entity to be controlled or achieved, rather than "right here" as an extension of the patterned currents of now.
The Disconnected Past: Similarly, when we lose criticality, our past can feel cut off from the present. In healthy critical states, delta rhythms naturally integrate past experiences into current awareness — not as fixed stories, but as living experience and narrative that informs present choices. But when neural networks become too rigid or too chaotic, this integration breaks down.
The past becomes either an unchangeable burden ("I'll never get over this") or an museum piece ("that has little to do with who I am now"). Both signal a loss of the brain's natural capacity to weave temporal experience into coherent, responsive patterns over time.
The Signs of Temporal Fragmentation:
Planning feels effortful and disconnected from immediate experience.
The future often exists as anxiety-provoking scenarios rather than felt possibilities that have intrinsic momentum.
Past experiences feel either overwhelming or irrelevant.
Present moments feel thin, lacking depth or connection to anything larger.
Decision-making becomes either compulsive (forcing outcomes) or paralysed (unable to commit).
Generally there is less enduring effectivenss - since brain criticality is tuned for deeper sensitivity, impact and evolution.
This isn't a moral failing — it's what happens when our neural systems drift away from their natural critical dynamics.
The good news is that criticality is the brain's preferred state if we give it some tuning. Small, appropriate adjustments can help the system self-organise back toward that sweet spot where past wisdom, present awareness, and future possibilities coordinate naturally.
A useful way to hold this is the ‘sweet-spot’ metaphor:
You keep challenge not too easy, not too hard (maintaining optimal arousal near the critical point)
You keep attention soft but engaged—able to notice signals without choking them (preserving the brain's natural avalanche dynamics)
You let plans be living — updated by what reality teaches you (allowing for continuous self-organisation)
I nickname this the "Ψ-band": the corridor where you're neither running on autopilot nor straining or ‘bigged up’ for the future. It's presence tuned across scales, neurally grounded in your brain's critical dynamics.
Three Dials That Quietly Run the Show
Your brain naturally runs several control systems that maintain criticality. You don't need to understand the neuroscience, but these ideas help:
A difficulty thermostat: Your brain automatically keeps you near the sweet spot of optimal challenge. When success trends accumulate, it nudges the difficulty up slightly. When volatility rises, it dials back complexity. This isn't conscious — it's your neural criticality controller maintaining the responsive learning zone. Crucially, uncertainty (χ) also influences this moment-to-moment by making choices feel softer or harder through what's called choice temperature — when subsystems (perceptions / mental models) disagree, decisions naturally become more exploratory rather than decisive.
A confidence dial (η tracking): "Does this click yet?" Your brain continuously tracks felt competence across timescales. When confidence rises steadily, you naturally commit more resources — biasing toward applying existing patterns and allowing higher challenge levels. When confidence stalls or drops, you automatically shift toward exploration mode or narrow your focus to rebuild competence on simpler applications.
An uncertainty dial (χ monitoring): "Are my perceptions, understanding and actions agreeing?" Or do I feel dissonance? This measures internal coherence — the degree to which different brain networks are sending consistent versus conflicting signals. Low agreement triggers higher choice temperature, promoting more creativity and exploration until coherence is restored, then the system naturally tightens back up a bit. This creates the rhythm between consolidation and discovery that keeps you adaptively learning and feeling ‘alive’.
These aren't metaphors — they're simplified descriptions of real neural control systems that maintain brain criticality. Tick these dials lightly (by staying aware of them) and the next steps start to appear instead of being pried out with effort.
What Multi-Scale Presence Feels Like (and Doesn't)
Feels like:
A direction you can name but not micromanage.
Your brain's natural avalanche dynamics creating coherent patterns across timescales.
Decisions that start as soft commits and firm up as evidence accumulates.
A body sense of "this is coherent" even when logistics are messy — the felt signature of internal synchronisation.
Thick present, not brittle plans: You hold a long-horizon trajectory as a live "planform" rather than a fully specified script. A planform is a view from above - a top-down geometry, whether of an object or a spatial pattern.
Doesn't feel like:
Waiting passively for fate.
Writing a five-year spreadsheet for your soul.
Grinding willpower to silence doubt.
The rigidity that comes from forcing the brain away from its natural critical dynamics!
The Phenomenology of Neural Criticality
What does it actually feel like when your brain operates in this critical state across multiple timescales?
Low effort, high coherence: Internal subsystems feel increasingly in sync — different brain networks coordinate without micromanaging. You notice gentle nudges rather than having to force decisions. Actions flow because the underlying neural dynamics are naturally organised. And sudden breaks (critical bifurcations) materialise unexpectedly effectively.
Time feels widened but present: With both fast (gamma) and slow (theta, delta) rhythms engaged simultaneously, you can sense near-term moves and longer arcs as one scene — like mindfulness stretched over a broader window, yet still "now." Alpha rhythms help gate when to protect current patterns versus when to update them, contributing to that felt dilation.
Resilient adaptation without anxiety: Your brain's avalanche dynamics create robust flexibility — the system naturally incorporates new information without destabilising the whole structure. This is true resilience: not brittle resistance to change, but the capacity to bend and reorganise while maintaining coherence. Plans feel living —responsive to feedback rather than rigid — because they are supported by neural networks that are inherently self-organising and adaptive. You can absorb surprises and setbacks without losing your overall directed patterns.
Staying in the Zone
The beauty of understanding this scientifically is that you can recognise when you're drifting out of the Ψ-band and gently correct:
Supercritical tilt (too much chaos): The path feels fragmented, urgent, overwhelming. Your brain is generating too much uncorrelated activity. Stabilise by adding structure, making smaller bets, focusing on immediate sensations — essentially helping your neural networks re-synchronise.
Subcritical tilt (too much order): The path feels flat, rote, disconnected, dead Your brain has fallen into overly rigid patterns. Revive by adding appropriate novelty, trying new approaches, raising the difficulty — encouraging the system back toward criticality.
Both are natural fluctuations. The key insight from brain criticality research is that you don't need to force your way back to balance — small, appropriate adjustments naturally cascade through the system because that's how critical dynamics work.
Combining hyperventilating-breath-holds-diaphragmatic breathing with working memory brain training also helps keep the brain tuned to criticality.
Beyond the Meditation Cushion and Yoga Mat
This isn't just about sitting practice. When you understand that healthy brain function naturally operates across multiple timescales, traditional mindfulness instructions start to make sense in a new way. Be present doesn't mean shrinking awareness to a pinpoint — it means allowing your brain's natural criticality to coordinate awareness and presence across the scales that matter - some unfolding over years.
You can be fully present and deeply engaged with long-term projects. You can sense immediate sensations and feel connected to gradual growth. You can hold plans lightly and move with real direction. This isn't a contradiction — it's what your brain is designed to do when it's functioning at its natural critical point.
The invitation is simple: instead of forcing presence into a narrow band, learn to recognise and trust your brain's capacity for "expansive presence" — a kind of depth of time - an awareness that is both immediate and expansive, both responsive and stable, both accepting and directional.
That's mindfulness across scales: not escaping time, but attuned to it and inhabiting it fully.