Understanding spiritual practice and the emergence of presence.
Most of us are familiar with the two models of enlightenment: instantaneous enlightenment, like in Zen, and the path of spiritual practice supporting a more gradual emergence of presence into consciousness.
Here is a metaphor you might find of value in understanding the relationship between spiritual practice and the emergence of presence.
The Chemistry of Presence
In chemistry, there is the science/phenomenon of precipitates. This is best illustrated by taking two different clear chemical solutions and slowly adding one to the other until a critical saturation point occurs and the clear liquid becomes cloudy. This is caused by solid particles emerging due to the chemical reaction.
To turn this example into a metaphor for the relationship between practice and presence, imagine that your daily practice is like adding a drop of presence to your ordinary consciousness. Some days a drop of presence leaves the eye-dropper and lands in your consciousness. Somedays, the drop comes out halfway, but not all the way, and thus does not drop into consciousness.
Daily practice nurtures our process, increasing the frequency of more drops of presence landing in our consciousness. As our practice continues, our consciousness eventually reaches the saturation point where presence in its fullness emerges into our experience.
Spiritual practice has two main elements: 1) putting our butt in the chair and 2) learning to relax as meditation happens. Bringing tension to meditation is like bringing a hyena to a family picnic.
The Descent of Presence
I remember clearly my first experience of presence. I had no idea of spirituality, enlightenment, awakening, or the spiritual path back then. I was nineteen. A thick substance descended through the top of my head into my chest. It freaked me out a little as I could feel the thickness of it, viscosity, and warmth moving into and through the protoplasm of my body.
It was the most relaxing and welcoming dynamism I had ever experienced. Of course, I was nineteen, and my life was college, girls, and friends. What the heck was this?
Interestingly, as you might imagine, my attention was focused inwardly on this phenomenon, but my awareness was drawn into more immediacy and intimacy. It was like I was the immediacy, and this experience was happening in the body and the field of consciousness that was of the immediacy.
How does one practice and invite the emergence of presence?
Hameed Ali, A. H. Almaas, founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-realization, has said that sensing, looking, and listening (SSL) is all we need to engage for realization. Of course, he also points out that the relationship between SSL and realization is not one of cause and effect. The gift of grace is the sacred determining factor.
Sensing, Looking, and Listening helps us develop the felt sense of presence, awareness, and recognition of the experience of consciousness as a field of sensitivity and perception. SSL is an intriguing practice. It helps to draw the mind away from the future into the moment’s immediacy.
Sensing, Looking, and Listening is a goalless practice. There is no state to achieve, nowhere to go. It’s more accurate to say it’s a practice of intimacy and sensitivity – a receptive availability to our immediate experience of simply being. It’s a practice of “recognizing and discriminating existence,” tuning into the “isness” of us.
Reversing the mirror of experience
When presence emerges fully into our experience, the mirror reverses. There is a distinct feeling of having been living as a reflection. Presence brings into the foreground a sense of radiance, an emanation of beingness. One is not reflecting on experience; one is the expression of experience. The need for and the habit of control and planning are absent. Instead, there is an increase in the sense of discovery. Which, amplifies wonderment, awe, and joy.
Contemplation
Gently, I lower myself into my self
An elegant lady entering her bath
The pool of being welcomes me
A tulip at day’s cool end
Once entered, the mirror reverses
Awakened lucidity
Boundaries fade
Noon sun burning away morning’s fog
No longer seeking
I am
The end of seeking, the freedom of what is
We lose interest in what used to drive us. The ego-self can’t imagine life without past and future, without sticking its nose and fingers into every moment. It’s the deep-seated conviction that IT is the agency of what happens.
The easing away from this conviction is like the fog burning away. We don’t do anything. The emergence of presence is the sun that burns away the fog. We lose interest in what seems like a previous life, but it’s not quite like the ego’s previous experience of losing interest. There is little or no reflection on the past. We are so engaged with the life of presence that our interest is fully in the phenomenology and ontology of “this.”
What’s up
With this pesky chair
I start to leave
It wails
If you listen
To IT
You might think
Sitting
To Be
Just That