On Being Present

If you consider yourself to be a "spiritual person", then you are almost certainly aware of (if not submerged in) the spiritual concept of "being present". If you are open to it, I am here to assist you in gently relaxing out of your concept of what that means. 

Before we go any further, I want you to know that I am not down on your or anyone's concept of what "being present" is supposed to mean. I just want to help you relax out of whatever concept you have around it, so you can be more in your actual reality around it. (If that last statement offends you in any way, I'm sorry. I'm not meaning to demean the profundity of whatever you may have already realized. It's just that I have my own profound experience of the depths to which we are all conditioned -- especially in our ideas around spirituality and awakening.)

In my experience, "being present" has nothing to do with mindfulness, mindlessness, intention, self improvement, or meditation. It is neither a technique nor a practice, and there is no practice that can bring it about. It is not what most mean by consciousness, transcendence, witnessing, or "being in the now". When you are present in the manner I'm speaking of, you are just as present with life and others as you are with your mind, your feelings, your body, your past, your future, your pain, and your happiness. You are just as present meditating as you are masturbating, just as present living as you are dying. Presence is not about light vs. dark, good vs. bad, or right vs. wrong. When you are present, nobody and nothing can possibly derail your presence because presence is not derailable. When you are present, you are simply here in a way you never were before. Presence is the result of having your awareness fall out of primary identification with some particular territory in Being (like your consciousness, your mind, your body, your emotions, or even with others) and into identification with ALL of Being. 

As you might imagine, that shift is BIG. Really BIG. No matter how big others shifts have been for you, I predict this one will be bigger yet (which is not to say there won't be bigger ones yet). The shift itself may or may not produce a big contrast from your previous state (thereby producing more or less temporary energetic phenomena during the shift), but the impact of the shift is even bigger than discovering that we're not alone in the universe. It's bigger because it's more personal, because you discover that YOU are not alone in the universe -- because you ARE the universe of Being, in its ultimate, eternal Aloneness. The good thing is, we get to notice that we are Alone Together.

Being present is a stage of life; before shifting into that stage, there is no way to even understand what presence actually is or means. You can read about it, you can talk about it, you can think and philosophize about it, you can pick the brains of awakened beings about it, but you will still not really know what it actually is until it's your turn. Now that you're reading this, perhaps it'll be your turn really soon.

So here's what it comes down to for you: see if you can relax into permitting everything that happens in your reality. Everything internal, and everything external. If you find yourself resisting something, permit that. It's OK to resist stuff; that's part of how you protect yourself. You have a right to protect yourself. After all, survival is your #1 imperative, and avoiding unnecessary pain is #2. If you find yourself being an asshole, permit that. I'm not saying you should pretend you're taking pride in that, only that if you're being an asshole in the moment, there is it; give it a green light. Resisting who you are -- what you're thinking, doing, or feeling in the moment -- takes a lot of Free Energy And Attention that simply distracts you from awakening into YOU. 

One of the main difficulties with most concepts of "presence" is that the term is often equated with some sort of idealized "state" in which everything is Good, Perfect, Empty, Full, Transcendent, or at least something positive -- in any case, something you think you'd like. But what if being present isn't about anything positive, or empty, or full, or expanded, or transcended, or perfected? What if it includes lots of stuff you don't like and don't want? What if being present is actually just about how it really is for you, right here, right now. Including the way you feel messed up, conditioned, depressed, abandoned, misunderstood, separate, confused, incomplete, trapped, pressured, crucified, or whatever? You see, our conditioning about what spirituality is supposed to do for us runs incredibly deep (The Violence Of Spiritual Idealism). What I mean by Whole Being Awakening is not about creating your life to be the way you want it. This is about helplessly falling out of the need to try to create your life at all -- from the platform of mind.

But you cannot will that need to go away. You cannot take on some yet more sophisticated way to practice yourself into practicelessness. You cannot create yet another holy war for the sake of peace. You can only rot into the realization that the effort is simply not paying off. You can notice that you've been trying not to notice that. You can start to come to grips with the monumental implications of life beyond the mental. 

© 2005 Ted Strauss