The Mechanics of Presence
What even is awakened presence? If you haven’t experienced this transcendent way of being, it will likely begin as a concept in your mind.
Conceptualizing presence this way would be like thinking of a tree - we could create a picture of it in our imagination and make it an oak tree or an apple tree or whatever. You could then add more descriptive aspects to paint in the details of what you conceptually believe about trees such as; they have bark and branches and leaves that collect light and give a tree it’s ‘treeness.’
This is what our conceptual mind does, and has been trained to do since we were very young. We identify features of the world around us and store them as objects in our minds. When we do, we create what’s called a subject/object relationship with that thing. We believe we know what a tree is. While using our consciousness this way, we lose the ability to percieve this tree directly as another ‘being,’ and this is where things get interesting.
The deeper truth is that the tree that exists on Earth outside your mind, is a being, just like you are. Sure, it’s a different sort of being, just like you are not equal to a squirrel, but all living things are beings. Because of this aspect, all beings have ‘beingness,’ which is to say they possess aspects that go beyond what your mind can conceptualize about them.
Imagine someone observing you to try to get to know you. Over time, they will be able to remark on your personality traits, psychological aspects, behavior in certain situations, characteristics, etc. But do they know what it’s like to be you? The way you experience the internal sense of being you in your body?
If this is a leap of faith for you, I’m sure you’re not alone. We can experience our own beingness, but our conscious minds can’t really understand other being’s beingness.
Can you be generous enough to attempt to believe that a tree or a dog also experiences some sort of individual beingness? Sure their level of consciousness is not what yours is, but can you deny that other beings possess a degree of consciousness? Or perhaps you find yourself believing that only humans possess consciousness and the rest of the natural world lacks it?
Beingness is not the same thing as self-awareness, so don’t blend the two as one. Some non-human animals pass our self-awareness tests and can even acknowledge themselves in a mirror. Does that mean that some animals experience beingness and others don’t?
Tapping into perceiving beingness in that tree, or dog, or other person, and yourself is the path into awakened presence. It’s a perception that is beyond what ‘thought’ can do, and therefore requires a different way to use your consciousness.
Awakened presence is simply - being with whatever is. It’s experiencing your beingness without conceptualization, the way you might remember doing so when you were very young - a state of mind that didn’t require thoughts about yourself (subject) in relation to the others (objects) in your world. A place where finding joy was easy and your natural state.
Along the journey of life, we develop the ego and the conceptual mind. These are excellent tools for judging what a safe environment for your body to live in should look like, but they are tools diametrically opposed to beingness. Opposed in that, you can’t use ego or conceptual mind to enter presence. They are inadequate faculties for the task the way using a hammer to screw in a screw would be.
The more time you spend practicing ego and conceptual mind activities, the less time you are practicing experiencing beingness. These two would appear on opposite sides of a continuum and your experience of life would be the dot sliding toward one side or the other depending on what your consciousness is practicing that moment.
Your consciousness, which is in part made up of your subconscious and conscious mind, is conditioned by what form of awareness you’re practicing in this moment, over time. This graphic expresses how one trains their consciousness by pulling from either the “conceptual & ego mind” activities or “beingness” activities to create their life “practice.” The activities from each category reinforce what experience your consciousness has now and will have in the future.
The reason why awakened presence is not your default state of consciousness anymore is because of the amount of time spent practicing the activities of your “conceptual & ego mind.”
If you would like more awakened presence in your life, your work is to become aware of what experience you’re having in this moment. If you’re experiencing conceptual & ego mind activities, release them and find ways to practice more beingness activities.
Meditation is the best practice to bring more awareness to knowing what activities are being practiced within your body. Intention is the best way to start bringing new ways of ‘being’ into your experience.