Presence
Table of contents
- 1. Notes
The theme for today is Presence.
What is Presence?
For now, let's set aside the dramatic role this idea plays
in so many systems of thought:
plenty of time for that later.
When we ask "What is X" as a contemplative question
we are not asking for a definition
but for knowledge coming from a lived experience,
an act of knowing that reveals
a "distinction in consciousness".
Doing so, we're in a position
to say something about it.
Then, that saying has value
if it can invoke that experience...
can provoke it to come back
into presence.
We use language in different ways:
To describe
is to remember our observations of an object
To define
is to recite formal conceptual properties
To evoke or invoke
is to bring something into presence
To speculate
is to try a conceptual understanding on for size
and see if it fits
and if it does, can grow.
These all have something to say, and
someone to say it, someone to listen to it.
Language and presence have an important, sometimes problematic
cooperative and complementary relationship
as the yang and yin of mind...
...a big inquiry. For now I'd like to say
Presence is where the meaning lives,
the source and destination of language.
The "answers" language sometimes delivers are the consolation prize.
Let's try some things on
and see if they fit.
Presence is not an object, or a state.
Perhaps it is a performance
or a quality.
I like "quality" for this purpose.
Presence is a quality of experience, of consciousness.
Presence is a quality of who I "am":
an uncognized whole
in lived experience.
Presence is a quality of wholeness
a quality of openness and responsiveness
a quality of interrelating
a quality of creative engagement
a quality of recognition, of other, and especially of self
a quality of embodiment.
Let's look for some questions about this
that are "closer"
nearer to experience.
Am I present?
How do I know?
Am I sometimes more present than others?
Maybe it comes and goes?
What is "in" it,
what is it "like",
this experience of
being present?
Notes
- The issue of language and awareness relates to a subtle topic sometimes called "right use of mind". Mind isn't one "thing" but has many capacities or faculties. They can play together, as more of a whole... or not. Then they don't, attention is "captured" by one of them. This can implicitly bias or define both the sense of "self", and in addition, in a more implicit way, the actuality of self. This process is sometimes called "identification": that is, who I (think) I am starts to seem like it is the one who does such and so, who sees things in a particular way that is less than the potential totality.
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