The Miracle of Presence

and a few reflections about Love

Years ago, I briefly studied traditional Chinese medicine, and we learned that on the traditional Chinese calendar, the solstices and equinoxes are regarded not as the beginning of new seasons, but as the height of the season. On that traditional calendar, there is a different day that marks the beginning of a new season. And on that calendar, today is the beginning of autumn, the day when the autumnal energy begins to enter the picture, or if you’re on the other side of the blue ball, I assume it’s the day when the spring energy begins to enter. I find that the day they mark as the beginning of each new season is always spot on for a noticeable energetic shift and for the first signs of the new season. So, happy autumn….

Periodically, I change the title and text on the Home page of my website, and perhaps in tune with the shifting season, I just did so again. This is the newest version, titled The Miracle of Presence:

Presence is undeniably here now, requiring no belief, impossible to doubt. We can doubt all our ideas about what this is and what we are, but not the bare actuality of being here, present and aware. This presence is boundless and unencapsulated—there is nowhere it is not. It is radiant and aware, seamless but infinitely varied, ever-changing while never departing from Here-Now.

Appearances are like a kaleidoscopic Rorschach blot that the pattern-seeking mind is always interpreting—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—creating the illusion of a seemingly solid world of separate things “out there.” But the more closely we attend to bare presence, the more we can see that there is no actual boundary between inside and outside, and that nothing actually forms into solid, persisting, independent things. Each wave in the ocean is absolutely unique and at the same time inseparable from the whole ocean and from all the other waves. We imagine we are something small and separate, the character in the story. We identify as the voice in our head, the thoughts posing as “me.” But can this mirage-like “me” actually be found?

What is beholding the character, the world, and the whole universe? Awareness is like vast space or unconditional love. It accepts everything and clings to nothing. It is the transformative power that illuminates and dissolves delusion and opens the heart. The beauty we see, the love we feel is in the awareness, the listening presence. When we’re truly awake and present, we see everything from love, from wholeness—including everything that comes from ignorance, insensitivity or delusion, and we know that reacting to any of that with fear, hate or judgement is only fueling the delusion. Simply being present is one of the greatest gifts we can offer to ourselves and to the world.

We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is an immense openness and freedom. What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. In this pathless path of being awake here and now there is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this radiant aliveness.

---

Reflections on Love and the sacred

Some preliminary notes I’ve been jotting down:

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on Love. The phrase “God is Love” keeps popping into my mind. And for those of you who are allergic to the word God, I should say that to me, God is another word for boundless presence, the infinite and eternal Here-Now, formless consciousness, the no-thing-ness of everything, the zero upon which all other numbers depend, the ground of being, groundlessness, primordial awareness, unconditional Love, the stillness at the center of the storm, the silence at the heart of everything, the aliveness of being, that which is at once limitless, all-inclusive, closer than close, and most intimate.

Anyway, for a while now, I keep being led to things about Love. Back in June, for example, I stumbled upon a conversation on YouTube between the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach and A.H. Almaas, creator of the Diamond Approach, about his new book, Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality. I have yet to read the book, but I have it, and I’m greatly enjoying the mostly yellow-orange, with some red and white, colors and galaxies of light sparkling on the cover. I enjoy looking at it, and I enjoy picking it up and holding it, and in this visual and tactile communion with it, I feel Love. One reason I so strongly prefer print books is that books are so much more than just the words. And with this book, just being with the title and the subtitle is a meditation in itself. “Awakening to the loving nature of reality” is an unusually challenging koan with which I’ve been keeping company all my life in various forms.

I have a memory of my mother in her final year, age 95, that seems to capture the essence of love. I’m at her apartment, and I’m exhausted, so I lie down to nap on her couch. She gets up from her rocking chair and very tenderly covers me up with a blanket.

Maybe that offers a clue about why I love the word God in addition to all those other words that I could use instead. The word God has a personal dimension to it, a sense of this kind of parental love, and it’s a word that goes far back into childhood. I was not raised in any organized religion—my father was an atheist, and my mother’s religion was Love—so thankfully, I never had any kind of literalist religion forced upon me. I was mysteriously drawn to religion as a child—I felt the spiritual dimension of life very deeply. I had a real sense of God, not as a person, and not as anything I could have put into words back then.

My mother always said, God is Love. That was what religion meant to her. Seeing my tendency to be self-critical and self-doubting at times, she repeatedly told me to love myself. She had friends of all social classes, rich and poor, all ages and races and  sexual orientations, Republican and Democrat, far left and far right, from different religions, and she’d throw a big party every year and invite some eighty wildly different people into her rather small apartment, and she’d say to me, “We all need to learn to love each other.” She lived and embodied Love more than anyone I’ve ever met. I have a card she sent me long ago that says, “Don’t let anything dampen your spirits.”  She always looked on the bright side. She told me she would always be with me, and I feel her presence in my heart.

I read recently that our actions come either from fear or love, and I’ve been watching that—noticing where I’m coming from as I say or do things. It’s a rich and sometimes surprising exploration.

Hate separates and divides; love unites.

Hate sees others; Love sees only Itself everywhere.

Love sees the light, even in the darkness.

Love is the light.

---

As I’ve mentioned in previous Substack articles, I’m endeavoring to listen to a wide range of viewpoints on the hot button issues of our times, and in doing so, I continue to discover how easily trapped we all tend to be nowadays in our chosen bubbles, left or right, how trapped I was in the left bubble, how subject we all are to confirmation bias, how easily we identify with a particular viewpoint or issue and then defend it as if our very life is at stake (which it almost never actually is), how we demonize and caricature the other side, and how in many ways, each side is reacting to the excesses on the other side. I’m discovering how much of my obsession with various political issues, and the urgency I sometimes feel to convince others, comes from fear and not from love.

And I truly do have a deep sense that being present and dissolving into presence, as I spoke about in my new Home page above, is the greatest gift we can offer to the world, to one another, and to ourselves.

---

I’ll end with two quotes I love, one from Simone Weil, and the other from Leonard Jacobson:

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

– Simone Weil

To be truly awakened is actually very ordinary. It just means that you are here as the trees are here. You’re here as the flowers are here. That’s all it is. You’re here, rather than lost in a world of not here. As you relax and deepen into the present moment, no matter how ordinary it appears to be, then slowly and gently the deeper levels of Presence will open up…

God cannot be known with the mind. God cannot be understood or defined. The best that the mind can do is believe in God. But to believe in God is a very poor substitute for knowing God through your own direct experience. And once you know, there is no need for belief.

For me, God is the silent Presence at the very heart of all things present… If you want to experience the living Presence of God in all things present, you will have to come to where God is. You will have to come out of the mind and become present. When we become fully present, we will begin to sense the Presence that is in everything. This Presence is what I mean by God.

– Leonard Jacobson

---

With Love to you all…..