Presence

      What is presence? Is it important? To me it is kind of a confusing thing. It has been and still is hard to pinpoint exactly what it is. I think it's the same thing as being, another difficult idea to really get at least for me. Because if we aren't our ego, then who or what are we? How does this change us, to not be solely this center of tension and conditioned identity? Are we still someone? If we are not just our body are we still somebody? Kind of scary maybe. What do we aim for when we feel the pull to awaken to something greater than what feels like our little confined sense of self? Is there and ultimate self? A ground of being? What are we awakening to? I think we sense where we are going, but don't really know what it is we are looking for. This is inherent to having an ego, being deluded and ignorant of things as they are. What I have learned is that we don't need to completely get rid of our ego. We can discover truth within or among samsara. Obviously this is the case because some days it's partly cloudy and partly sunny...
     What we can discover, what we can become despite our handicap of being a limited human being, is the sunshine behind and between the clouds. I think presence is a good word for this. We discover this as we sip a cup of coffee, as we talk on the phone, as we look out into a room empty of other people. The reason we can be angry shites and know the Buddha is because everything has Buddha nature. God isn't about tomorrow, God's about today. Right now in fact. All of this, right here in from of you right now. God doesn't give a shit about who you are or what you do. At least in the sense that presence isn't denied anywhere because of someone's attitudes or state of mind, or level of enlightenment. What does this mean for us? 
     It means that realizing who we are isn't about achievement, it's about perception. It's the way we look at the world. It's not about becoming something else, it's about seeing what we are, what is right now. Enlightenment isn't quality or worth, it's presence. It's this. How does what is personal and what is impersonal fit into this? First off, are they truly different? Are they separate? How are they different? Can you find somewhere where they split off from each other? What I know is that I have personal feelings and I think impersonal ones. The wiser I have become, the more they seem to be mysteriously blended and apart of something singular which I don't know that I can define. This is where presence and perhaps being arise from. The quietest arising in my consciousness and I begin to feel that something may be here. I have vague feelings, memories, of being and presence from my childhood, but I feel like I have been largely asleep since then. 
     I feel like and perhaps know, that what I truly and deeply wish is to be, right here and now.  I feel that objectively I am here right now, but personally and subjectively I am not, not in a clear and obvious way. Isn't this what life is all about? To be? Isn't this what all of us desire? Clear and present fulfilling being? And it's so elusive. So foggy. To such a degree that I greatly doubt that there is such a thing. I think, and think I sense there is clear and obvious being here now. I think it's hard to find because it is so simple, obvious and we look for it the wrong way. We try and see it through judgment and discernment, which is impossible because it isn't limited in anyway. It's not a thing or a type. Our mind tries to find it through a lens, which is how it finds everything else, and it can be hard to stop ourselves from doing this because it's so habitual. We literally, and I would say subjectively, have to become presence to see it. We have to somehow relax our cognition so it doesn't dominate our perception to a point where our identity as a separate self has dissolved. This is where presence is. When we have peeled away or penetrated all the layers of thought and discernment and there is a place in our awareness where there is no mental alteration of what is perceived by the senses. I think this is where it lies. Our mind deceives us with it's judgments, convincing us that we are what we are not, yet I believe that always we are present. Logically, I do not see how it can be any other way. 
     This matters to us, perhaps for a while, because being present is how we become free. Escaping the confinements of our cognition which suffocate our sense of self. We aren't just our thoughts, or just our feelings, just our identities. We are something more. It's this more that stirs us into expanding our perspectives and experience. It calls us to grow and change, to do things we, in the past, never would have. It is trying to unleash itself completely. It can only do this through deepening and expanding the sense of self. Unfettered presence is a complete transcendence of this sense of self. Our individual identity as such and such. It matters because it shows us this. That we are something which does not depend on any quality that we have, any thing that we have, or anything that we can see. It shows us that there is nothing that we can hold onto permanently and that we aren't who we think we are. Life isn't how we think it is. That obtaining things and striving can't provide fulfillment, because they fulfill desires of a self that isn't the entirety of who we are.
     I think presence is something we can't define. We can't define it because it is what is real. It's not some combination of personal and impersonal because these are just ideas. They are the minds attempt to cut out portions of reality that cannot be fully understood when separated from every other aspect of reality. If you boil any word down to it's essence, you get words like presence, or god, or reality. Reality cannot be completely understood in the dissecting mind, it can only be experienced. Reality isn't an idea. I think ideas are always incomplete and assumptive to a degree. Reality cannot be defined. To know it, you must become it fully. And this is the trick, because we already are it. As far as I know, this is presence. Everywhere is this and everywhere is presence. Wow, it's so simple. This is it. No italics. This is it. wow. It's not how you are now. It's you.