Presence: What Is It?

It's not what you think!

It’s Not What You Think

Sometimes in the comments, people tell me that my article gave them lots to think about or was very thought-provoking, and while I appreciate their good intentions in expressing appreciation, provoking thoughts is actually not what I’m intending with this Substack. I’m not against thinking, but what I’m pointing to and inviting is direct, non-conceptual experiencing and aware presence.

Another person in the comments said he was following my suggestion to, “Turn your attention to this very moment, right here, right now.” He reported, “I have attentively turned my attention to this very moment and what I felt to be in this moment is an inquisitive ape (me) in front of a computer typing it's thoughts, sitting in a room, on a ball of a planet, racing through the cosmos.” What this person turned his attention to was thoughts, ideas, learned information and beliefs.

But there is actually a great deal going on here besides all our thoughts and ideas about this, and it is to this nonverbal, non-conceptual, living actuality that I am always pointing.

This aliveness, this presence is ungraspable and yet totally immediate and never absent. If we pause the thought-stream for a moment and simply be here, without seeking a result, we might begin to notice and appreciate what is here besides thoughts and ideas. We might begin to actually hear and listen deeply to the music of the birds, the traffic or the rain. We might notice how our body is feeling. We might drop below the labels and storylines into the sensory-energetic actuality. We might discover the felt-sense of being the open, spacious, unbound, listening presence in which all of this, including the thinking, is appearing and disappearing. We might find that in actual experience, everything is much more ephemeral, amorphous, ungraspable and fluid than our word-concepts (“body,” “mind,” “world,” “planet,” etc) would suggest.

It takes thought and memory to come up with “being an inquisitive ape in front of a computer typing.” The actual experience of typing is not that at all and would be impossible to put into words. Those words are all learned ideas.

Of course, I’d suggest that initially, this living actuality is more easily explored in silence and stillness, rather than while typing a Substack comment. But it can be explored anywhere at any time in the midst of any activity. It’s never not here.

It has to be explored, felt into, and discovered directly—no one can do it for us. It’s not a matter of reading about it or getting the right idea. It’s about listening, breathing, sensing, feeling into the vastness and spaciousness of this open aware presence that we are, and noticing how present experiencing actually is, in contrast to how we think it is.

We might begin to deeply enjoy hearing sounds, feeling sensations in the body, breathing, seeing shapes, colors and movements, smelling, tasting, touching—simply being the sensory-energetic actuality of this moment before we label it—being this awaring presence itself. Of course, thoughts will continue to arise—this isn’t about trying to control the mind or stop thinking—but more and more, thoughts may arise and pass through without the attention being completely captured and hypnotized by their content. We recognize them as thoughts, not as objective reports on reality. Thinking is just another thing that’s happening here—little energetic bursts of information passing through like clouds in the sky.

What’s important isn’t what appears, but rather, the presence of it, the aliveness, the open awareness beholding it. The joy, the love, the peace, the beauty is in the presence, not in the object. As I’ve often said, that’s why we can see beauty in a piece of trash blowing down the road when we’re fully present to it, or conversely, why we can feel bored and unhappy while looking at the Swiss Alps if we’re lost in thought. The beauty (the love, the wonder, the joy) is in the presence, not in the object.

Presence: What Is It?

We see book titles such as “The Power of Now,” “Be Here Now,” “The Wonder of Presence,” “The Yoga of Radiant Presence,” and if we have no experiential sense of what these words and phrases are pointing to, we may hear them as just meaningless slogans or New Age jargon. But in my experience, they are pointing to the most important discovery we can make in liberating ourselves from useless suffering and confusion. And it’s a two-fold discovery, which is inherent in the two seemingly different ways I use the word presence. They are different sides of a single coin, both pointing to non-duality or non-separation.

One way I use the word presence is to describe a quality of open attention, “being here now,” being fully present to the non-conceptual, sensory-energetic aliveness of this moment—hearing sounds, feeling sensations, feeling/being this awake presence itself—in contrast to being absorbed in thoughts, storylines and ideas. Mindfulness might be another word for this kind of presence, although that can sound more like a deliberate, concentrated practice, whereas I’m pointing to a very open, spacious, free, relaxed quality of mind, an awake openness.

At other times, I use the word presence to mean the actuality and totality of this all-inclusive, seamless, boundless, present experiencing that is here regardless of whether we are “being here now” or "lost in thought.” Presence in this sense is the common factor in every different experience; in fact, another word for it might be simply experiencing. It is the aliveness, the present-ness, the immediacy, the thusness of every experience and of this one bottomless moment.

Presence shows up in infinitely diverse ways, but it never departs from Here-Now, the ever-present, dimensionless immediacy or present-ness that shows up as all of time and space, past and future, and is always just this — present experiencing, just as it is, ever-changing while never departing from right here, right now.

It is through the first meaning of presence (open attention) that the second meaning (seamless, boundless, eternal, infinite, immediacy) is revealed and discovered directly, not as merely an idea, but as our living experience.

To some extent, the sensitive reader/listener must discern which way a word is being used when multiple meanings are possible, as is often the case in talking about nonduality. Words get used differently by different people as well, so it’s important not to get stuck on one fixed meaning, but to listen openly in the moment, to see and feel how a particular word is being used in a particular context—otherwise we easily misunderstand one another.

I point at different times to both the importance of “being here now” (open attention) and the realization that “all there is, is here-now-being,” regardless of what is appearing. Both are important in freeing us from unnecessary confusion and suffering. In one sense, there is ONLY here-now-being. EVERYTHING is this, even genocides and factory farms and rape and torture. In another sense, we can discern a palpable difference between apples and oranges, between Hitler and Buddha, and between “being here now” and “being lost in thoughts."

There is a felt difference between open attention and being "lost in thought." Being awake to this difference and able to see thoughts as thoughts can make a huge difference in our lives. And then, the nondual recognition that everything is just as it is and cannot be otherwise, that it all goes together and can’t be pulled apart, that none of it actually resolves or congeals into the apparently solid, separate, persisting forms we imagine—this is also enormously liberating. Both realizations are important, as is discerning both difference and wholeness, and recognizing the nondual nature of THIS that no words or concepts can ever accurately or completely capture. Words are always only approximations, maps, pointers, descriptions. The juice is in the aliveness itself, the presence.

What Do I Mean by Now or Here-Now?

What follows is taken from Chapter Two (“The Immediacy of Presence”) in my book DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement:

Whatever time of day or night it is, whatever season, however old you are, it is always Now.  Whatever location shows up, it always shows up Here, in the immediacy of presence, this unlocatable placeless-place where we always already are. However far we travel, every step of the journey happens Here, and when we reach our destination, we are still right Here. Time and space are a kind of mental construct, a mode of perception. We think of time as a linear progression, but the only actual reality we ever experience is Now, which is timeless and eternal.

Likewise, the only actual place we ever are is Here in this immediacy or present-ness, which is unlocatable and infinite. We can never step out of Here-Now. Memories of the past, fantasies of the future, thoughts about elsewhere can only appear Here-Now. When the past was happening, it was happening Now. When the future arrives, it will be happening Now. If we take a trip from San Francisco to New York, the airport shows up Here, the plane flight shows up Here, and when we reach New York, we are still Here. Now is the only eternity, and Here is the only infinity that actually is.

What is the same in every different experience?  Here-Now (immediacy-presence-consciousness) is the common factor in every experience, isn’t it? This immediacy, this present-ness, this boundless awaring presence is the water in every wave, the screen that is equally present in every scene of the movie. To paraphrase an ancient statement, Here-Now is like a sphere, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference of which is nowhere. Here-Now is the Ultimate Subject to which the word “I” most deeply refers if we trace it back deeper than name and form.

The screen (the still-point of Here-Now) is the ground without which the movie could not appear. As an analogy for consciousness or Here-Now, this is a three-dimensional screen with no borders or edges—it is omnipresent; there is no place where it is not. In the movie, there seems to be a great deal happening: progress and regress, evolutionary development, heroes and villains, plot twists and turns, purpose and meaning, cause and effect, good and evil, free will and choice. The movie is full of drama and action, but the screen is empty of all that. The screen has no preferences. It never takes sides—it reveals everything equally and clings to none of it. The movie involves time and space, but the screen never moves away from Here-Now. In the movie, we have close-ups and long-shots—we may seemingly be squeezed into a narrow constricted tunnel or stand overlooking a vast spacious panorama, but the screen itself never actually contracts or expands. And the fire in the movie never burns the screen. When the movie ends, the screen remains, untouched by all the drama that has taken place within it.

But unlike the movie screen, the mirror, the ocean, or any of the other common analogies that are used for the ever-present, eternal, infinite aspect of this dancing emptiness, Here-Now (consciousness-awareness-presence) is not an object or substance that can be set apart, seen, grasped or measured. It is not a “thing” apart from the flow of experiencing. It is our most undeniable and fundamental certainty, the reality in every dream, the common factor in every experience, and yet, we cannot get hold of “it” as an object. What is liberating is to recognize this dimension for yourself, here and now. Believing in it as some kind of idea is just more mental baggage—another object in the movie, as is identifying it as any particular experience (this but not that). Once we name this omnipresent ground of being, there is always the danger of reifying it and creating a false duality in the mind between awareness and content, emptiness and form, subject and object, screen and movie. But as they say in Buddhism, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Not two. The division is purely conceptual, a helpful map to use for a moment on the pathless path, but then equally important to discard. Subject and object are one seamless whole.

Spiritual awakening typically begins with the recognition that there is something Here-Now that isn’t caught up in the story, something that sees the thoughts as thoughts, something that has the capacity to stand back and observe, something that is beholding “me” and “my story” and “my body” and “the world” and the whole movie of waking life—a bigger context that is always present no matter what the content—a light that illuminates everything. This is an essential discovery. Awareness is the key ingredient in psychotherapy and in all forms of addiction recovery and social justice work. It is also what allows us to recognize that we are not limited to this bodymind, that this bodymind and the whole universe are appearing in us, not the other way around. As awareness, as presence, we are being and beholding it all.

Awareness is subtler than any form. It is invisible, shapeless, boundless, weightless. It has no size, no limits, no place where it is not. It cannot be measured or grasped. It’s not an object. It is the Ultimate Subject. Awareness is another name for Here-Now. It can also be called unconditional love, for it accepts everything just as it is…

Even when consciousness is totally bamboozled by the story of “me,” and even when a huge storm of emotion-thought is passing through the bodymind, it is all happening Here-Now in the utter stillness of presence. And instantly, whatever appears disappears…

The more closely I explore the body, the less solid it seems, and the more it dissolves into indeterminate formlessness, inseparable from everything that is supposedly not the body… I find no boundary between awareness and what appears within it. Without the words and the concepts, it is one, seamless, undivided, unbroken whole. I’m not limited to the body or encapsulated inside it, and the “body” is not the solid, persisting, independent “thing” we think it is.

It can be very helpful to notice when we are identifying as a person. Sometimes in daily life that’s functional, but often it isn’t. When we think, “I’m not awake yet,” or “I don’t get it,” or “I’ve ruined my life,” as what are we speaking? In that moment, consciousness is identifying with and speaking as the apparently separate self. And we might ask, is this self, the apparent subject of these thoughts, real? Or is it a thought-form, an idea, a mental image? If the thought arises that, “I need to stop identifying as me,” to whom does this thought refer? We can also discover that all these thoughts are happening by themselves; the thinker is just a mental image, another thought-form. Thoughts are ephemeral bursts of energy, a happening of the whole universe, an activity of consciousness—gone as soon as they arrive. Sometimes, particular thoughts or patterns of thinking tend to re-play over and over. They seem to refer to something, but that something never actually exists in the way we think it does.

The present moment is a fleeting instant between past and future, gone before we can even perceive it, but Now is timeless and eternal. There is no end to Now. Nothing comes after or before Now. We may think the past is really back there, but actually, when it happened, it happened Now, and Now, it has vanished completely…

Without thought, this moment is without plot or narrative. It has no meaning or purpose. There is no main character, no “me,” at the center of it. There is simply present experiencing—a snowflake landing in a fire. It may all seem quite solid if we don’t look too closely, but if we pay attention, we find reality is actually fluid, ephemeral, effervescent, impossible to grasp or pin down. It keeps changing shape without ever moving away from right here, right now. It is completely obvious, never hidden, and yet strangely elusive if we try to take hold of it. It is at once immovable and constantly in motion, unchanging and yet totally in flux. It is an unbroken whole of infinite diversity. It defies all words and categories.

Now is holographic—it contains the past and the future. Everything happens Now, and yet, a symphony wouldn’t make any sense, it wouldn’t be music, without the context, without a memory of the notes that have come before and an anticipation of what might come next, without the sense of progression and relationship between what came before and what is arising now, and without the expectation of what may come next. The same is true of a novel, a play or a movie. This is precisely what makes it meaningful to us. But at the same time, we can see that each note happens Now, that the future resolution will happen Now, and that the context for the whole unfolding symphony (or story) is Now. Past and future are Now, memory happens Now. “Relationship” is simply a description of this seamless happening that all happens Now. That Now-ness doesn’t deny past and future. It includes them. No concept can ever capture reality, so beware of fixating on one side of any imaginary conceptual divide. Life itself cannot be pinned down or captured by formulations.

When we’re fully alive to the naked reality of the present moment, it turns out to be an astonishing and extraordinary miracle, this luminous awaring presence bursting forth as flowers, leaves, mountains, oceans, chairs, tables, planets, rabbits, giraffes, zebras, people, birds, tornados, planets, stars, random acts of kindness, horrifying acts of cruelty—one seamless and shimmering display, appearing and disappearing in the vastness of Here-Now.

But when attention is caught up in thoughts and what Zen teacher Joko Beck called the “self-centered dream,” we don’t notice what shines and sparkles right here, right now. We don’t notice the beauty of the simplest and most ordinary things—white clouds moving through a puddle of rainwater on the sidewalk, late afternoon light on a dilapidated building, a colorful piece of trash blowing down the street, the exquisite mountains and valleys in a crumpled Kleenex on the table, the sounds of rain on the roof.

We imagine that everything of value and importance is “out there” somewhere, somewhere else, in the future, after we finish graduate school or get a promotion or get married or do another retreat or attend another satsang or find another teacher or have some transcendent experience or get enlightened or stop smoking cigarettes or go on a diet. Then we will find happiness, or so we imagine. Someday we will become the person we are supposed to be—that is the story. Until one day we look in the mirror and see death looking back at us, and it hits us that this is our life, right now, just exactly as it is. And as someone said, whenever you die, it will always be today.

—from DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

A Fool’s Errand

Trying to write about presence, awareness, nonduality and so on is a fool’s errand. That’s why some teachers, sages and monks simply remain silent. But words can be helpful and evocative pointers, and words can help to untangle the mental conundrums that we so easily get ourselves tangled up in. I write because I have no choice. It is what life is moving me to do. But I also spend much time in silence, doing nothing, simply being. And who knows, I may never write another word. But I suspect I will.

And, of course, people will hear all this only on the conceptual level until a different possibility dawns or opens up for them experientially, and how that happens is a mystery. The nonconceptual actuality is always here, always being experienced, and aware presence is never really absent, but this that is most obvious is easily overlooked because we are deeply conditioned and habituated to mistake the map for the territory without realizing we are doing this. Consciousness is easily hypnotized by its descriptions of reality and its stories and explanations, so that we seem to actually see only the map-world and never notice the actual territory itself, even though we are really seeing the territory all the while. Once recognized, the more often and the more deeply we tune into this non-conceptual dimension of here-now presence, the more it opens and reveals itself. So I encourage taking time to be in silence, to be still, to do nothing other than simply being this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

And yes, ultimately, the territory includes the maps and the mapping—thinking and conceptualizing and imagination—but there is a world of difference between seeing all these as what they are, as they arise, on the one hand, and being hypnotized by the stories and ideas they assert, on the other. This is the difference between samsara and nirvana, heaven and hell, imaginary bondage and freedom. And this freedom is not the freedom to do just as we please, have everything we want, and always feel good—it is the freedom to be just as we are, and for everything to be just as it is.

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"There's nothing to get to the bottom of," my friend and teacher Toni Packer said. "Just one bottomless moment." At the end of every silent retreat she gave, she would read from Huang Po, Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, Mary Oliver, Rilke and sometimes others. These are a few of the lines from Huang Po:

Thus all the visible universe IS the Buddha; so are all sounds… On seeing one thing, you see ALL… for there is nowhere at all which is devoid of the Way… Above all, have no longing to become a future Buddha; your sole concern should be, as thought succeeds thought, to avoid clinging to any of them… Ah, be diligent! Be diligent!

—Huang Po

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Love to all…