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