Presence: a Practical Plan

It’s easy to dismiss important ideas if they come wrapped in ‘New-Agey‘ jargon.  So that the following ideas aren’t lost in that rejection pile, let’s try to first to clear-up some jargon-ish language.

There are four key terms to define for these purposes (‘not sure how this squares with scholarly definitions): 

1.) Attention - a state of mind where perception or thinking is focused on things or ideas, either briefly (distractible) or for a sustained period (attentive/deep in concentration).  We can make a choice to direct or ‘pay’ attention, or ‘give’ attention to this or that thing or idea.

2.) Awareness - a perceptive state of mind only, i.e., absent thought. (It occurs between thoughts as the attention switches between awareness/perception and thinking.), 

3.) Thinking - a state of mind occupied by consideration of concepts, by either language- or image-based means, 

4.) Presence - a sustained focus of attention on awareness, completely absent of thought.

“Presence” is where fans of jargon might rather employ : ‘Beingness’, or “Oneness”.  It’s all good; there is a sense of merging one’s “self” with ‘nothingness’ or ‘everything-ness’ as one enters a state of presence, as it is defined here.  This is the point of meditation practice.


You might have noticed that "consciousness" is not defined or included.  It was addressed more fully in the previous post.  Presence leads to a "higher state" of consciousness.  For these purposes, we might say that consciousness is the ability to be attentive.  Paying attention to disciplined non-thinking (presence) enables the mind to transcend to pure consciousness: a Buddha state of enlightenment.  

The mind, as we all know, is a very tricky customer.  Let’s say you sit down to meditate and you begin to focus on pure awareness, with a goal of finding your way to presence.  At some point you might think, “Ok, it must have been 5 or 10 minutes already, so I must be aware by now and presence is just around the corner”.  Nope.  As long as your internal voice is describing thoughts, you are paying attention to thinking thoughts and not to awareness.  

We cannot perceive and conceive anything at the same exact instant; the attention can’t be split for most - if any - of us.   One cognitive function informs the other and so the two necessarily happen in alternating fashion.  The attention can be switched back and forth so quickly that it might seem they’re happening simultaneously.  Perhaps a small percentage of gifted individuals can actually split their attention, or maybe it's a latent ability within all of us.  I think that could be handy, say, for those who are texting while driving in the car ahead.

All the time in daily life, any act of pure perception is immediately followed by conceiving thoughts about it, in a relentless effort to find meaning and make sense of the world.  So, it’s especially tricky to just hang with awareness, or perception, and to not jump to naming or thinking about the experience.  Sustained awareness or presence takes patient practice; the Dalai Lama works at it four hours each day and reportedly said he would take a short cut if he knew of one.

Presence is at once a gift we give ourselves and others, and also our most pressing responsibility.  The allusion that follows below is that it is a kind of default mode - an ultimate and inevitable state of mind which future understandings and circumstances will force to the fore.   For example, animals in the wild would seem to have no choice but to live fully present.  Rather than fancy ourselves superior, we would do well to study and learn from them.

Our ability to pay attention to thinking is both the blessing and the curse of being human.  In the realm of thinking, there is dynamic of conflict that illustrates the downside.

Within most human beings, whether or not one is aware of it, there is a kind of urgent dance taking place between two opposing impulses: destructive and constructive.  This conflict underlies our essential, paradoxical nature and is the source of ongoing dissatisfaction with life.  The dance must go on, and we are driven to see what comes next, slightly more than we regret the missteps we just made.

We see illustration of this internal conflict from a wider, external perspective - zoomed out all the way to a view of our species' behavior.  There are ample signs of simultaneous human degeneration and regeneration, of evolution and devolution in all fields of human activity.

In many significant measures of the biosphere, we find disturbing trends pointing toward our extinction.  Since the dawn of agriculture, we have used resources unsustainably and that practice has compounded at an accelerating pace to the point where we now simply call ourselves "consumers".   A contrasting term, "stewardship" now seems archaic, in this age of near-instantaneous obsolescence.  Seemingly with intention, we have undertaken a course of certain destruction.  The drive to destroy can also be seen extending into societal institutions such as politics, education, and religion.

In synchronicity with this steep curve of destruction, we also see a rise in the rate of innovation and progress in all the arts and sciences, and in spirituality.  Development of capacities within these disciplines is racing upward and challenging each of us to stay current, hang on for the ride, or get left behind with obsolete technology and disproven dogma.  

It is often rightly argued that wisdom is not keeping up with our progress.  It's hard to think of a time when wisdom ever did keep up and could save us from our next mistake.  (The Cuban Missile Crisis might be one instance.)  And, that's a good thing, because trial and error is the homo sapiens’ modus operandi.  Wisdom is most often the product of mistakes, that is, if we are paying attention.

What we pay attention to is the basis for everything we can possibly experience.  Theoretical physicists are questioning in greater numbers whether anything exists at all apart from our perception of it; phenomena come into being in response to our awareness of them!  This theory reconfigures perception and conception into a ‘chicken and egg’ problem.  

(This writing is trying to call your attention to ideas that may be unknown to you, and to that extent they don’t exist for you. You may, in fact, have to switch around and ‘see it when you believe it’.  That is, the conception may have to precede the perception, in order to inform it.)

This physics theory is paralleled in the arts in the breakthrough by conceptual artists, who call attention away from the tangible product toward awareness of the creative realm from which art products are derived.  The question posed to all of us by these innovators is, "what is real?"  Or, “what is real?”...or, “what is real?”

Given our proclivity for predicting the future, one could conclude this conflict or dance (on the macro or micro scale) is logically moving like a story plot line toward some type of culmination.  (Of course, apocalyptic predictions are not new, nor scarce; the Mayans give us another nine months and two weeks and then...poof!?!)  

An image comes to mind for this conflict of a pair of eagles tussling with talons latched onto each other as they tumble in a spiral toward the ground.  At some point they see the ground coming up fast and realize this can’t go on.  Perhaps it's a victory to hold on the longest, but eagles are too smart to opt for self-destruction; in this they are way smarter than us. That is to say, they have no choice but to be present to life.

In this analogy one eagle represents environmental degradations that will inevitably lead to catastrophes of all sorts.  It would appear that the 'ground is coming up fast' for all of us whether we are skeptics or believers.  The other eagle represents the promises held by discoveries in the arts and sciences that 1.) we have capabilities unimagined just a few years ago, and 2.) what seems most real is what resides in the mind. 

 These are paradigm-shattering ideas to consider - if you can.  How can one begin to intellectually grasp the eventualities of these?  What can be thought about these trends?

The answer that is argued here is that there is no way, nor any point, to trying to intellectually work through or around this.  The brain is not equipped to rationally conceive of a strategy or a framework for the unthinkable/unimaginable.  Whatever (survivalist) foolproof plan one may secretly hold to, in that there is only proof of a fool.  Maybe the effects of a catastrophe can be mitigated for a time, but then what?

Now and then, life delivers a mind-numbing wallop and you are left with an abiding sense of meaninglessness.   In a catastrophe, such as a tsunami, hurricane or even the Holocaust, we see that communities spontaneously coalesce with almost no available resources to fix the problem.  They are bound together in presence, which is a bond stronger than disaster relief or class action lawsuits.  In the warmth of shared presence, the sharpness of painful or dire circumstances is diminished.  There’s not so much to think about as there is to be present to, or with.

As discoveries blossom in the arts and sciences, new theories point toward a shrinking circle of explainable reality.  When meaningful words fall away and category boundaries melt and merge, awe is all there is left to experience; an awareness of, or presence to, the existence of all else.  This was a realization clearly known to Albert Einstein.  His intellectual prowess was complemented by a rich imagination and he pushed the frontier of the knowable forward by a quantum leap.

It is my belief that the end of life, each human has some sort of experience of a sense of transition.  I'm thinking this time around, the opportunity will be forced on a different scale and schedule; that every consciously-inhabited person will be faced with making a consciously-chosen quantum leap.  Some might call it "Rapture" or "Judgment Day", etc.   Regardless of label, such a momentous event will require being ready to make some sort of transition, or transformation of being: a developed facility of/with presence.  (Yet, undertaking some noble assignment while thinking this is my ticket to heaven is folly.  There are no goals to achieve in this sense.)

Forty years ago, The Moody Blues' album, Seventh Sojourn included these

lines from a song called You and Me*:  "What will be our last thought?  Do you think it's coming soon?  Will it be a comfort, or the pain of a burning wound?"  My take is that our last thought, whenever it comes, won't be a thought at all.  Rather, we'll be attuned to a thought-less presence to our existence as part of the whole.

*worth a listen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7UZ5oVYmb8

The Human as the 'Total Package'

"The earlier concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic. . . This is good news, for it is no longer appropriate to think of the universe as a gradually subsiding agitation of billiard balls. The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles, is a theatre of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution." --Arthur M. Young  The Reflexive Universe

"The universe...is a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution."
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Arthur Young, like Albert Einstein and a small, select group of other scholars and researchers have deep understanding of difficult subjects and can use words with economy and great skill to illuminate the obscure.  What follows are words chosen with much less-disciplined scholarship and much less eloquence - and even less economy...

      The previous post highlighted the shortcomings of words when it comes to considering esoteric ideas.  We'll see if a graph can help, or not - along with more words, that are also insufficient to explain the unexplainable.  The 'Total Package' human being is partly a biological being and partly other than that.  I offer an illustration of a three part being, a view informed by Anthroposophy.

The goal of this overall, however, is an attempt to bring together bits from many teaching sources I've come across in the last forty years or more.  I believe I was very fortunate to have recognized the parts of a bigger picture as they came along; sometimes like a swinging 2 x 4, aimed at my forehead.

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The graph shown below has a timeline across the bottom that could be drawn in a circular shape to represent that the beginning and the end are the same point.   But it’s not customary to think of time working that way, and it’s easier to understand the passing of time in the usual, linear form.  The timeline represents an example human lifespan of about 80 years for any given individual.

There are values represented beyond either end of the timeline and these are also not conventional ideas.  We are accustomed to thinking that little else exists, if anything at all, which is not found in the field of time.  The values beyond the frame of the timeline are the basis for understanding the overall significance of the graph.

Line A (solid line) represents the human ability to functionally inhabit one’s body: degrees of mastery of its facility and faculties, so the arc peaks around late adolescence or early adulthood.  This line pertains not only to human biology, but also to that of perhaps most living things.  The approach to the curve peak (i.e., the “prime of life”) is naturally more urgent than the decline.

(Lines B & C depict non-biological, less commonly-understood qualities - though they represent concepts of much contemplation.  Consideration of their very existence gives rise to all manner of reaction, quite often contentious - too often in the extreme.  The whole controversial subject is often politely set-aside with, “it’s a matter of faith”.)

Lines B1,2,3 (short dashes) represent human connectedness to others and attachments to things: the degree to which we follow the desires of our senses and other urges.

The controversy here rests on whether there is such a thing as a transmutable soul.  If yes, then a line representing soul development could enter or exit the timeframe at any point on the vertical scale, depending on how many attachments remain to be negotiated (“karma” to the Hindu).  Or, the line could not exist at all because there is no such thing as a soul.  Here, there is a line (with three alternative trajectories) and that makes the argued position obvious.

Line B1 shows a case where a soul enters life with some unfulfilled desires, acquires more and then satisfies many of them and loosens their claim on the soul “going forward”(for the next incarnation).  In such a case, the line roughly mirrors Line A.  This might be called 'living a temperate life'.

Line B2 shows a “high needs” profile, where “leftover” desires are inborn and more come along close on the heels of the others.  This demanding scenario typifies an early stage of life for most of us, but here that stage continues along.  Excess baggage was brought in, hauled around and left with through the revolving door.  (These souls deserve love, not judgment - because everyone is to some degree "high needs", compared to our ideal selves.)

Line B3 shows a case where the nature of desire* may be fortunately understood sometime in young adulthood to mid-life and the line arcs downward from there and tapers off. (*e.g., Buddhist teaching about the endless cycle of Desire, Fulfillment, Regret...) This line ends because the desires are satisfied and they die with the body.  

(note:  these ‘B’ lines each exit the graph at a point lower than their entry point which is to illustrate some degree of karmic “progress” for the depicted incarnation.)

Line C  illustrates an assumed realm where our spiritual essence exists “off-the-chart” except in this life.  The path of the line (long dashes) indicates a stage of withdrawal from, or rebelling against, unity with the spiritual whole and it dips to its lowest somewhere below the peak of Line A.  From that low point it could stay level or rise on any number of paths.  In this example, the line depicts one who has reconnected with spiritual ideas and seeks answers to ever-deeper questions.  Perhaps gradually, following discovery of some source(s) of inspiration, the line continues upward by force of attraction toward reunification.  The descent and ascent of this arc connotes the idea of spiritual rebirth. 

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Down on the Corner of Time and Space

Writing and reading are two of the best of human activities.  It's very rewarding to use words to create ideas - to make a bridge of meaning - to connect minds.  The greater the gap to be bridged, the greater the reward.  


Words are perhaps our handiest tool of all; they’re the keys to rapid human development.  Yet words fall short, by great magnitude, when we try to grasp ideas that tease our imaginations from somewhere beyond time and space.  For example, the idea of infinity can only be partly understood in anyone's mind.  

For such amorphous ideas, words change from handy tools into obstacles.  Words enable intellectual understanding, but - pure experience - unencumbered with narration, is the key to moving beyond knowledge to knowing.  Knowledge is the spoken or written artifact of knowing, which is awareness. The realm beyond words, which is without form and time is a singular place that is no place; an event of divine comprehension where descriptive qualities fall away like loosened veils.  Words can only point toward it.

(If you haven’t yet heard or read the words of Eckhart Tolle, you would do well to sample his talks on your computer.  He masterfully uses words to reveal new meaning in the ancient teachings of the world’s great religions.  He can pare away the troublesome trappings of dogma and is able to find current context for understanding difficult-to-grasp ideas in ways that resonate deeply.)  

When words are clearly understood only as pointers to experience, and are followed with devotion to what lies beyond them, a timeless, formless, limitless realization can be achieved.  It is not so much like a destination arrival as it is like a merger, where one not only comprehends the whole, but one becomes the whole.  Words have no relevance to that pure awareness that invites surrender and submersion with stilled senses.

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Along with the idea of using word-knowledge to get to knowing beyond words, knowledge of one’s self enables one to know the self.  (And, knowing the self enables one to know the other.)  Also, awareness of the senses enables awareness beyond the senses.  All of these enable transcendent movement through knowledge to awareness beyond.  The self and the senses are only portals, they are openings toward transcendence, but because they - like words - are the sufficient sum of our everyday lives, they also can block transcendence like closed doors.  


About a third of our everyday lives is our "every-night" lives, and we mostly ignore the importance of that.  While we sleep lightly, we may still be aware of language, of our self and our senses.  In deeper sleep, if these things are present at all, they are forgotten and we’re not able to talk about any awareness we might have had in deep sleep.  By deliberately quieting the senses while awake, and forgetting about the self, and letting go of words and thoughts, one can sit in the presence of the timeless and formless experience we have in deep sleep.  The same deep feeling of refreshment is about all that remains from the practice.  

Meditation guides abound, and they suggest breathing awareness to start.  (For those that pray, the word "Amen" is a variation of the meditation breathing exercise, sometimes written as, AOM, or OM, or a u m and sounds like"AhhOhhmmm...".   Also, the actual point of prayer is to be open, empty and still - rather than to tick off a shopping list of requests. )     [addtl. note - It has been pointed out to me the commonality among the roots of "Amen" and early Hebrew, Greek, Latin words and in the case of Egyptian origins is has to do with the name of an early deity and later associated with another deity "Amen-Ra".  My source traced the word back to Sanskrit word "Om".] - In all cases, the origins are ancient, and some may have been cross-culturally influenced.

The human path, like that of all other living things, is one of growth and decay, becoming and declining.  For the human alone, though, there are two other, complementary pairs of impulses that parallel this biological arc.  One is the breaking away from and then attraction to the eternal.  The other is the entanglement and disentanglement with the bonds of this world.  Since these latter pairs are not biologically driven, they can easily be ignored or denied by the self, which is captive to physical and intellectual urges.  Unlike the inevitability of the biological arc, these others are matters of choice.

Religions have named these contradictory impulses and externalized them to make them more comfortable: good and evil, God and the Devil.  It’s easier to accept that responsibility for the choice lies outside one’s self.

What sets the human apart is that we must each choose to accept integrity of being that is unconditionally inherent in other living things.  Their part in this world is to sustain themselves and us, but it is also to serve as examples of interconnectedness.  We alone have the choice to live in the illusion of separateness from all else.  The choice to be separate is the source of human pain and suffering.  Regardless of choice, or whether we actively deny it or it remains hidden from us, we are part of the whole.  The quest toward reunification, whether it is understood or accepted, is our life’s work and it is always a matter of simple choice.

Taking responsibility to consciously accept your connectedness to the whole - and living your life out of that awareness - yields the understanding that you are not actually responsible for anything else.   Neither are you in control of anything else - this is both terrifying and ultimately reassuring.  We each have striven mightily for autonomy and now to surrender that seems like a loss.  Any such contest is an illusion; the greatest reward is achieved when we use our free will to wholly rejoin (the holy,) which we renounced as we set out on our mortal journey.

It's important to keep and enjoy emotional attachments to others to the last, and also to recognize them as such.  They are rewarding means for growth, yet their bonds are not greater than your ability to joyfully loosen them with gratitude when the time comes.  This understanding enables both of the emotionally-attached souls to develop mutually in health.

A final thought:  Yes, we are human beings.  That is, we are timeless, formless beings having a human experience - down on the corner of time and space.

Rain and Spinning Tops

Before spending time reading this post, please consider clicking on this link to view an amazing example of the TED series of lectures.  This one is by Wade Davis, an anthropologist, explorer, author and contributor to National Geographic.  Although his talk is now a few years old, the message still applies - and his presentation manner is beyond impressive.  (Maybe do a double-click to "open the link in a new window".)  

http://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures.html

If you went to that site and returned, or if you skipped it for now, please continue here first with a short story -

As Rod Serling used to say in introducing a surreal vignette on the Twilight Zone, “Submitted for your consideration...”:

    Two men are playing chess in a parlor car on an overnight train, rolling across the flat land of open country.  The train rumbles rhythmically along, slightly swaying the soft, overhead light and the game proceeds with undisturbed concentration, such that they don’t notice it’s begun to rain outside.  A few drops spattered on the window next to them just as a white bishop takes a black pawn, and before the captured piece is set aside, little diagonal rivulets are already streaking down the dark glass.  
    In a while, their focus deepens; the strategy intensifies because they have each lost a handful of pieces to the other.  The rain has intensified also; they’ve each noticed it - and the sharp flashes of lightning - but neither breaks the silence with the mention of it.  The door at the end of the car opens just briefly and a man and woman are shouting above noise from the loud clatter of the train and the claps of thunder.   She is growing hysterical and is worried that the storm could wash out the upcoming bridge just before the next town.  Trying to calm her, he grabbed her by the shoulders and spoke in a measured voice.  With a hushed, but insistent tone, she said she it had happened once about ten years ago in a storm like this one.  
    By now, the chess players and the others in the car were all glaring at them and none caught a glimpse through the rain-streaked windows of a figure outside, silhouetted by lightning, waving his arm and swinging a lantern.  They couldn’t know the engineer was momentarily distracted and hadn’t seen it either.  The door opened again for an instant and the couple hustled back out and the chess game resumed.  One chess player muttered to the other, “Some people have no consideration for others.  Imagine all that fuss over a little rain.”


The point of this story is to highlight the human tendency to view the world narrowly, passively, and with a short memory.  With each passing generation we are less intimately connected with nature and are less attuned to what it has to tell us.  Case in point, just reading the previous phrase might raise some eyebrows; how can nature tell us anything?


Based on reading way too much (depressing) information about climate change, it seems that the delicate balance of nature is entering a phase of wobbling like a spinning top that is about to go careening off the table.  This is a serious analogy.  The laws of physics point to exponential compounding of co-efficients in situations where decay begins to assert its force over dynamic balance.  Have you ever lost control of your bicycle or skateboard just after it started to wobble and then wildly gyrate?  At a certain, irreversible point, correction attempts can't overcome wilder gyrations in the moment just before the crash.  The global ecosystem isn't there yet, obviously.  Corrections might still have good effect, but how much longer do we want to wait?


Climate change skeptics tend to be politically conservative and suspect a leftist influence on scientific research and reporting.  They prefer to believe what the fossil fuel industries want them to believe, it much easier and more profitable.  Skeptics should note that some of their favorite institutions: the Department of Defense, all their contractors and all the major insurance companies are not the least bit skeptical.  For almost a decade, that pinko-commie bunch of tree huggers at the Pentagon have been strategically planning for security threats caused by climate change.  


I've mentioned before that the idea of excarnation should be given consideration.  Suicide or euthanasia have long been taboo subjects in our society, but it easy to see that these ideas, if not commonly spoken, will become more prevalent as personally-plausible options in the coming years.  Eventually, public discussion and policy changes will have to follow.  Dignitas, Exit International and a host of other voluntary euthanasia organizations are pushing the difficult agenda in the right direction.


That option will take care of removing the body from the suffering in this life, but is that all there is to attend?  My personal take is very much in line with the teachings of Eckart Tolle, who encourages an intentional, practiced detachment from the world of form.  That is, take care that your concerns do not utterly dominate the stillness that is within.  For almost all of us, our concerns have done that for nearly all of our lives.  But the practice of giving increasing attention to that stillness could help to ease your transition out of this life whenever that time comes.  And, it will make life meanwhile much richer.

When the passengers on the Titanic in the frigid north Atlantic found themselves without enough lifeboats, they had three basic options to briefly consider:  Panic, pray, or open some champagne and tell the band to keep playing.  After thoughtfully considering all the consequences, one finds praying is the only sensible thing to do.  Don't pray to be spared; you wouldn't really want to be a survivor in some apocalyptic scenario.  Pray in stillness - without any thoughts at all.  Let your concerns be quiet, they'll take care of themselves.