Presence. What is it? Is your conscious awareness something you have like your personality or your body?
There’s one common misunderstanding I’ve seen that says that there is a “me” who can be present or practice presence. Being present has a lot of value. To find even more value in presence, see if you think there is actually a “me” here who can be present. If so, investigate deeply for yourself and find who or what it is that can be present in the first place.
What is your story about yourself? Your name, your job, your history, the highs and lows of your life, the roles you play, what you enjoy doing, what kinds of trouble you got into as a little kid…
Go ahead and tell yourself the story about you.
[Pause for storytime.]
Now notice that everything that was said is simply thought arising Now. It’s thought that has been identified with as part of some sort of a “me.” It’s “my” story. Yet the story is not who you are. It’s just a collection of thoughts that exist within awareness.
Why Do We Tell Our Stories?
Our stories are told because we have a yearning that by telling them, we’ll get what we’re looking for.
We get to feel right and justified.
We enjoy hearing ourselves speak.
We enjoy the feeling of existence that, without incessant thought, the mind fears it would cease to exist.
We have the hope that if we can just fix the story and make the necessary changes, we’ll get what we want.
We feel safer because although we can’t control reality, we can control our mental version of reality, giving us the apparent feeling of control where we really have none.
It’s a game that can be played for lifetime after lifetime, and indeed it has been.
Stories can certainly be entertaining. They can be full of excitement or full of horror, encompassing the entire emotional spectrum, yet they are not the Truth of who and what we are. They are true in the limited sense that they describe our perception of experiences, but they are not true as the final Truth of our being.
Who we are is everpresent, eternal, and unchanging. We are the space in which the story arises.
The essence of your being can never be contained in thoughts or in words. If you dropped your story altogether, who would you be? What remains without the thoughts about “my story?”
Dropping Your Story
As long as you are telling your story, you can not experience the Truth. When you are experiencing the Truth, you can not continue telling your story.
It’s possible to see that a story is just a story and to stop following it as if it was something real. Our stories, however long we’ve been telling them and however many people have been telling them throughout our cultural history, they’re still just stories.
The key here is to simply stop following the story and stop feeding it with attention. This doesn’t mean to suppress or push against the story, to play the role of a “spiritual seeker” who has gotten rid of the story. Simply stop. Stop trying. Stop pushing. Withdraw awareness from the story naturally and find what’s left. What is here, now?
Can Presence ever be a story? Can Presence ever be a thought?
Have you ever noticed that, in retrospect, the right people, events, and circumstances synchronistically tend to show up at just the right time?
Looking back over the course of history, it often makes sense why things happen the way they do. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
As you raise your consciousness, something similar happens. It’s like your perspective also raises, giving you a clearer picture of everything around you. You become aware of more, able to see more of the “big picture,” in a sense.
The Big Picture
It is all connected. The appearance of random and seemingly disconnected events is the product of a limited perspective of consciousness. It’s all connected. After all, it must be, since it’s all One.
Everything that’s happening in the universe is perfect. Literally. All That Is unfolds in divine perfection. There are no mistakes. No accidents. Everything is happening absolutely perfectly.
Understanding this, we can become very excited, very appreciative, and very accepting of what arises in the Now. What could be more exciting than being in full alignment with who we are in the moment?
Since we’re very excited about what is happening, we’re never wanting to be anywhere else.
When we’re never waiting for anything else, we don’t even need the idea of patience.
When we no longer need patience, we’re no longer impatient.
Bada-bing bada-boom!
Total acceptance, love, oneness, and peace with the Now.
So, if you’re fully Present in the moment, does what happened in the past no longer matter? Given that the idea of “past” is an illusion anyways, how does it fit in?
From an energetic standpoint, what you put out is what you get back. So in that sense, what you did in the past is like an energetic karmic boomerang. The external world functions like a mirror to reflect back to you the energy you’re putting out into the world.
If you bought a house in the past and now live in it, you can live in the house in the Now, but the past purchase still plays a role in the Now that you experience.
Some people think that by focusing on the Now, all their past problems will magically be resolved on their own. Sorry, but this isn’t the case. In actuality, the power of Presence gives you a better springboard with which to deal with the issues from your “past.” Who you were in the past contributes, to a large extent, who you believe yourself to be now. Thus there’s a lot of past residue, so to speak, a lot of momentum.
What being fully Present allows you to do is to realize that right now, in this very moment, the problems you think you have don’t really exist other than in the mind. That is, you’re making it all up. It’s a big game of make believe. You’re making yourself believe it. With this realization, it’s much easier to let go of attachment to problems because we realize they’re much less tangible and solid than we imagined.
Additionally, this realization makes it much easier to change course in life. Without the burden of the past, life becomes much more innocent and pure. The ability to move in a new direction becomes very easy without the shackles of the past.
While the past often brings limitation and constriction, Presence brings freedom and a sense of spaciousness and openness.
There is a school of thought which suggests that silence is found in the space between two thoughts.
In order to experience mental peace, you need to experience and gradually lengthen the gaps between two thoughts, thereby extending the duration of the silence.
Now, this sounds pretty logical at first, but I disagree with the reality of this idea, for a number of reasons. This viewpoint creates a few problems. Allow me to explain.
1) It creates the idea that thoughts/noise can somehow replace stillness/silence/awareness/presence.
The idea is that you experience either silence OR thoughts. This is true. Physical experience is indeed dualistic, but it’s not how things actually are.
The problem with this idea is the belief that silence somehow “disappears” when thoughts are present. It then magically “reappears” in the space between two thoughts.
Silence is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS present. It can not be replaced by noise, only temporarily covered up by a noisy distraction.
It is the infinite silence of the forest that allows us to hear the rustling of the wind.
It is the silence of the audience in the concert hall that allows us to hear the orchestra perform.
It is the stillness of the mind that allows us to hear thoughts at all.
If the silence was replaced by infinite noise, it would be impossible to pick out any thoughts in particular. It is the presence of silence that allows us to listen to thought in the first place.
Our true nature is one of awareness. Now, awareness can be focused on awareness itself, the unmanifest silence, or it can be focused on thought, the manifest form.
The unmanifest is permanent. The manifest is transient, temporary.
Thoughts do not REPLACE silence. They simply sit on top of silence, are supported by silence, come up from silence and subsequently fall back into silence.
Thus, awareness is more like a continuous background awareness. Awareness can be aware of itself (silence) or of thoughts (noise). Either way, awareness is always aware.
It may SEEM as though silence disappears when the mind is thinking, but the reality is simply that awareness has shifted focus to the thoughts. It’s not that the silence has actually disappeared and will only reappear in the space between two thoughts. Read More …
We’re going to do two quick exercises. Instead of me telling you what the answers are, I’m going to encourage you to experience your own Truth for yourself.
In Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, he discusses the importance of Presence, of being fully in this moment.
Being fully in this moment is a very powerful experience because it sidesteps the ego itself. Now, there’s a subtle trick that can happen as the ego tries to sneak in the back door. It will try to “do” Presence. It will try to take credit for being the individual who is Present. It will say that “I” am being Present.
Let’s look at the ego-based way of being Present and compare it to the experience of the non-ego way of being Present. The differences may be subtle, but they are very important.
Doing Presence
Pay attention to your breath as it goes in and out of the body. Notice what your 5 senses are detecting. Take note of the room you’re in. Consciously be totally in this moment and feel your world. If the mind starts blabbering away, bring your attention back to the sensations of the body and feel this moment.
This will probably feel very good, especially after doing it for a little while.
Now, as you are being present, notice if you feel like an individual being. Can you detect the boundaries between your body and the room? Does it feel like you are being conscious of other objects and sensations in the room?
Just honestly note your experience in doing the activity called Presence.
Allowing Presence to Be Present
Now we’re going to put in even less effort. Instead of trying to do Presence, I want you to just stop doing altogether. Just completely stop.
Notice the sense of Presence that is sitting underneath the action. Is it already there? Allow the Presence to be without trying to do anything with it or magnify it in any way.
Allow the sense of awareness to be aware on its own.
Allow this experience to be for a little while.
Then take note of if you feel a sense of localization. Do you feel any boundaries between your body and the area surrounding your body? There is no right or wrong answer. Just trust your feelings.
Compare and Contrast
How does the sense of being compare to the first exercise in which you were actively doing Presence?
If you’re having trouble remembering, feel free to bounce back and forth between the two exercises. Repeat as necessary.
Find out if each exercise feels more like there’s a separate self doing something or if there’s just infinite beingness being.
Your own experiences will be your most powerful teacher. Find out how the differences feel between deliberately doing Presence and allowing Presence to be.
Let me know. I’m very curious as to your experiences.
I don’t know why everybody’s trying to get to Now since they could never get out of Now in the first place.
Have you noticed that it’s always Now?
I’ve never met anyone that was ever out of Now.
Isn’t your very trying to get into Now happening Now?
There’s nowhere to go!
Certainly there’s a lot of value to being present and not being stuck in psychological time, in the mental past or future. I get that.
The key to realize is that the Now is the most natural thing ever. In fact, it can never be not Now. Getting into the Now is not supposed to be some sort of challenge, a battle against the mind, though it may seem that way at first, when the “me”, the ego, is trying to insert itself into the Now moment.
Thinking does not pull you out of the Now. It just distracts you from the truth that you’re already in the Now.
Realize that you’re already in the Now.
You always will be.
Spirituality is so simple, yet the ego tends to complicate things. Why? That’s how it sustains its own existence. Over the years it’s gotten really, really, really good at it.
Spirituality is simply recognizing who you truly are, right here, right now. It’s being who you truly are, not who you think you are.
The Now moment is where you truly are. The mind is what thinks itself into past and future, though you can never actually go and get there.
You’re already in the Now. Consciously being in the Now becomes your natural state with the realization that you’re already here. Then the struggle starts to dissolve and our lives become that much easier!
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I feel like a proud new father seeing his first YouTube video baby going up online. 
What is your story about yourself? Your name, your job, your history, the highs and lows of your life, the roles you play, what you enjoy doing, what kinds of trouble you got into as a little kid…
So, if you’re fully Present in the moment, does what happened in the past no longer matter? Given that the idea of “past” is an illusion anyways, how does it fit in?
There is a school of thought which suggests that silence is found in the space between two thoughts.
