We Grow
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The State of Presence
What is presence? You can’t think about presence, and the mind can’t understand it. Understanding presence is being present.
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. What thought is going to come out?
Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The instant your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, though rushes in. The mental noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time. To be rooted within yourself means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors you in the Now.
In a sense, the state of presence could be compared to waiting. This concept is like analogy of waiting as used in some religious parables. This is not the usual bored or restless kind of waiting that is a denial of the present and that I spoke about already. It is not a waiting in which you focus, your attention is focused on some point in the future and the present is perceived as an understandable obstacle that presents you from having what you want. There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about. In that state, all your attention is in the Now. There is none left for daydreaming, thinking, remembering, anticipating. There is no tension in it, no fear, just alert presence. You are present with your whole Spirit, with every cell of your body. In that state, the ‘you’ that has a past and a future – the personality, if you like – is hardly there anymore. And yet nothing of value is lost. You are still essentially yourself. In fact you are more fully yourself than you ever were before, or rather it is only now that you are truly yourself.
“Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master,” says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master’s arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so mess the bridegroom (the Now) and don’t get to the wedding feast (spiritual enlightenment). These five stands in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious).These are parables not about the end of the world but about the end of psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoistic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.
Zen masters use the word satori to describe a flash of insight, a moment of no-mind and total presence. Although satori is not a lasting transformation, be grateful when it comes, for it gives you a taste of enlightenment. You may indeed, have experienced it many times without knowing what it is and realizing its importance. Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature. Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of it? Have you listened, truly listened to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest? Or to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet summer evening? To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still. You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear. Your presence is required.
Beyond the beauty of external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence. Whenever and wherever there i= beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow. It only reveals itself to you when you are present. Could it be that this nameless essence and your presence are one and the same? Would it be there without your presence? Go deeply into it. Find out for yourself.
When you experience those moments of presence, you likely didn’t realize that you were briefly in a state of no-mind. This is because the gap between that state and the influx of thought was too narrow. Your satori may only have lasted for a few seconds before the mind came in, but it was there; otherwise, you would not have experienced the beauty. Mind can neither recognize nor create beauty. Only for a few seconds, while you were completely present, was that beauty or that sacredness there. Because of the narrowness of that gap and a lack of vigilance and alertness on your part, you were probably unable to see the fundamental difference between the perception, the thoughtless awareness of beauty, and the naming and interpreting of it as thought: the time gap was so small that it seemed to be a single process. The truth is, however, that the moment thought came in, all you had was a memory of it.
The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are. You are so imprisoned in your mind that the beauty of God’s creation does not really exist for you. You may say, “What a pretty flower” but that’s just a mechanical mental labeling. Because you are not still, not present, you don’t truly see the flower, don’t feel its essence, its holiness – just as you don’t know yourself, don’t feel your own essence, your own holiness. You must get in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arise.
When you become conscious of Spirit, what is really happening is that Spirit becomes conscious of itself. When Spirit becomes conscious of itself – that’s presence. Since Spirit, consciousness, and life are synonymous, we could say that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness. Everything that exists has Spirit, has God-essence, and has some degree of consciousness. Everything is alive. The sun, the earth, plants, animals, humans – all are expressions of consciousness- of the God essence – manifesting as form.
God is calling you… all you need do is answer…