06. Presence in Practice

What is time?  And what kind of role can time play in our lives? How can we get in touch with time, how can we open up for the power, beauty and creativity of time?  These are some of the central questions in this book.  And at first sight, there seems to be no obvious way in.  We have all kinds of manuals, guide lines, and received wisdom to deal with many different questions.  But how to even start asking questions about time?

Our approach so far has been indirect.  Instead of working directly with time, we started with appearance, which led us to awareness.  We then looked at the arising of awareness, and arrived at the notion of appreciation.  A natural approach was to appreciate appearance, or more precisely to appreciate the way that appearance continuously arises: to see each moment as a new presentation by time.

One problem with such an approach of talking in terms of arising, however, is that it may reinforce in a subtle way the past-present-future structure of linear time.  Along the way of our investigation we found an alternative: timeless time.  This alternative goes beyond the duality of change and no-change, so it is very hard to put into words.  Calling it "eternal time" would seem to freeze it into something fixed and unchanging. But calling it "ever-new time" would seem to introduce the kind of past-to-present-to-future restless change that is also not an accurate pointer to timeless time.

Therefore, instead of focusing mainly on the arising of appearance, we spent some time on the notion of presence. Instead of directly appreciating appearance, we have tried a more subtle approach: to appreciate the presence of appearance. This refinement has the promise of leading us back to our original questions concerning time.

If we really could get in touch with a lived sense of presence, we then might hold the key to timeless time, beyond both restless change and habitual fixation.

6.1. Presence

When we first confront the question of time, we probably think of change.  Motion is what signals time to us, from motion of the Sun, Moon, and the stars to the motion of the minute hand on a clock.  And indeed, without time there would be no motion. But motion and change are only shadows of time, they do not capture the essence of time.

Imagine that we meet somebody from a different country, with a different culture and language, and we find out that in their language there is no word for time.  They can talk only about motion and speed.  There is a lot of motion in a stone that you throw, or in the droplets of a waterfall.  There is less motion in a leaf or snow flake slowly falling down, or a cloud lazily drifting by.  And there is no discernible motion in a motion or rock just laying there.  How are you going to explain to such a person the notion of time?

Not easy.

It is here that the notion of presence comes in.  Simply by being present everything in our world partakes in time, and you could even say that as such everything is given by time, presented by time in each moment.

Really tasting presence is quite a challenge, though, for us modern people living in a hasty world.  We tend to deal with time in a bimodal way.  Either we run around or we freeze.  We work hard and play hard and then we tend to collapse at the end of the day.

In order to taste presence we can't rush.  But we can't just sit still and freeze either.  Presence invites something else, beyond those two extremes.  It combines a kind of stopping and starting: it invites us to stop our running on in our habitual tracks, and it also invites us to start looking around in a much broader way than we have ever done.

In other words, presence invites us to jump out of our self-imposed story lines.

6.2. Looking Beyond the Story Frames

When we read a novel, watch a movie, or are wrapped up in the middle of a dream, we spend all our time and energy and attention on the story that we have fallen into.  It is no different in our daily life.  When we are in the middle of an activity we can be totally absorbed, whether we are cooking a meal, playing a musical instrument, are engaged in a game or puzzle, or whatever it is we are doing.  But we have the choice to look up, beyond the dimensions of the activity at hand.  And when we do so, it can feel like waking up into a different world.

And this kind of awakening can be sobering.  We can have become experts at the story that we were engrossed in, but that may not have prepared us in any way for the wider world in which the story was playing out.  We may look up from our novel or wake up from a dream, and find us in a situaton that is beyond our control, perhaps even beyond our understanding.  And while this is the case already so clearly when we look beyond the immediate action we are involved in at any given time, how much more so when we dare to look at the story of our life, our personality, our goals and ways of giving meaning to our life.

We can be expert movie critiques, knowing hundreds of thousands of facts about movies and movie actors and their backgrounds, and yet we may know next to nothing about the technical details of how movies are made.  The world of cameras and script writing and splicing of scenes and all that is really a different world, outside the horizon of the movie stories, invisible to those who watch movies on a movie screen.  Could it possibly be that the story of our own life is similar, that we are totally familiar with the stage on which our life plays out, yet know very little about what is happening behind the scenes?

The answer is clearly yes.  Already on the level of biology and physics, we know that there is an utterly complex world of cells, biochemistry, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles that underlies anything we see and do. In short: the reality of the physical world in which we live comprises far more than strikes the eye, or any other sense organ, in our daily life.  But what about the reality of our mind?

6.3. Neuroscience and Phenomenology

What do we really know about our mind?  We don't even have very precise words for to begin to talk about mind.  Neither in daily life nor in philosophy or psychology do we have anything like the precision with which we talk about material objects. We use words like mind, consciousness, awareness, experience in ways that are typically only rough ideas, and are often used interchangeably.  And yet: all that we know about matter and energy and space and time, all that natural science engages itself with, is known to us through our consciousness, our experience.

Given that there is such a rich world of science already hidden behind the daily experiences with matter and energy, what kind of world could be hidden behind our experience itself? There are two ways in which we can direct our search.  One is to continue our exploration of the material world, and to analyze the way our brain works, studying our nervous system and sense organs.  This is the approach of neuroscience, and it is a fruitful approach: every year brings new discoveries, and it is fascinating to learn more and more about the way the brain is wired in space and its signals are correlated in time.

The other way to study consciousness is exemplified by phenomenology, the study of phenomena in their own right, without asking questions about the neuronal basis of our experience of phenomena.  Whereas the way of neuroscience is external to consciousness, the way of phenomenology is internal to consciousness itself: it starts with a study of the content of consciousness, and it studies the structure of consciousness qua consciousness.  Neuroscience views consciousness as secondary, a product or side effect of the way neurons fire.  Phenomenology views consciousness as primary, as a subject to be studied in its own terms, according to its own logic.

And within phenomenology, the rock bottom of phenomena is the simple fact of their givenness, their presence.  Whereas neuroscientists deal with electrical impulses and chemical reactions, and physicists deal with those in terms of atoms and electrons and quantum fields, when studying phenomena we are led back to their presence, the presence of their sheer appearance.  However, the presence of phenomena is really different from the information in and description of phenomena. The two are separated by a kind of gap, one of several gaps in the way we normally look at the world.

Even though there is one world that we live in, we can look at that world in different ways, ways that seem to be very hard to reconcile or translate between.  Here are four of them.

6.4. Information, Matter, Consciousness, Presence

Let us make the pictures sketched above a bit more precise. Physics, chemistry and biology use mathematics to describe the structures and processes that they find.  In other words, natural science is reductionistic: it reduces relatively complex phenomena through a much simpler mathematical description of building blocks.  Given such a description, the challenge then is to get insight in the complex emerging properties that seem to arise out of the interplay between the building blocks.

This reductionistic move has proved to be very powerful, and has led to modern science as we know it.  What we don't know is what has been left out, when taking such an approach. Reductionism may be like a fishing net: we may catch all kind of interesting creatures, but when we study only our catch, we have no way of knowing what has slipped through the mazes of our net.  No matter how complete a given description of the world can appear on one level, there may still be a whole lot left out when we switch to a different level of observation or immersion.

Let us take a simple example.  You can walk into a room while you are mostly thinking about something else, problems in your work place say.  In that case you may walk on autopilot, noticing only minimally the arrangements of tables, etc.  You won't stumble on the chairs, since you are processing enough information to move around, but beyond that basic information of roughly what's where, there is little appreciation and awareness of your surroundings.

Perhaps your attention is then grabbed by a sudden sound, and you wake up from your reveries.  In an instant you may notice the beauty of the light around you, the rich texture of the wood out of which the tables are made, and so on.  You have switched from viewing the world as information to viewing the world as matter in all its richness.  In a way, you have entered a different world.

If you then reflect on how all that richness is given in your consciousness, you can make a second shift.  Rather than seeing richly textured matter around you, as existing objects, you can focus on how everything is displayed as phenomena.  We can learn to view everything as a lucid dream or a movie, without necessarily any substantiality behind it.  We still retain our sense of a subject watching objects, but all that the subject watches are given as phenomena.

The third shift is the one where we focus on presence, a shift that goes beyond the subject-object split that we grow up with.  When we first shift from viewing the world in terms of existence to viewing the world in terms of appearance, we still retain a sense of self.  This lonely self is a watcher watching the world but as an isolated knowing subject within a world of things and other subjects that can only be indirectly known. The third shift changes all that.  We can shift our attention to the pure presence of appearance, of anything that appears in its very appearing, including our sense of self.  Instead of appreciating only the stunning variety of what appears, we can appreciate the one taste of the very presence of all that appears.

Vividly feeling the presence of what appears, together with our own immersive presence, is different from appreciating the phenomena themselves is different from appreciating the materiality of the world is different from dealing with the world as information.  What can we say about the three gaps or jumps between those four ways of approaching the world and ourselves?

6.5. Why Matter, Why Consciousness, Why Presence?

Physics describes matter in terms of mathematics.  But why is there a world at all, why does anything exist at all?  This is a question that physics cannot answer.  No matter how detailed the description of an atom or molecule or any material object, it will remain a description of atoms or objects in general. The leap from that description to the actual particular object right here and now is profound.  It is the jump from information to matter, across a chasm -- from the world of mathematical information to the world of physical matter.  Yes, they are correlated, but at the same time they are also totally different.

The jump from matter to consciousness is similarly mysterious.  No matter how much biochemistry and neuroscience can tell us about the workings of the brain, such a description is couched in terms of third-person descriptions.  What we actually experience, we can describe only in first-person terms.  Yes, there are clearly very precise correlations between the way that light signals activate neurons in our retina leading to visual information processing in our brain, on the one hand, and what we consciously become aware of seeing, on the other hand.  But the conscious experience is a totally different thing from the information processing that happens on the material level.

Finally, there is a third jump.  This is the jump out of the story of conscious phenomena to the very presence itself of those phenomena.  Each phenomenon is only a phenomenon because it happens to be present.  We like to say "present for us" but our sense of self and the role of the subject that we play is also present.  The presence of all subject-object interactions, of the whole play of phenomena, is something that cannot be derived from the structure of the phenomena itself.  In other words: yes, phenomena are present, but no, presence is not a phenomenon!  There is a jump, a gap.

Why is there anything at all, why is there this material world that we feel part of?  That is the first question.  And if we start with the givenness of the material world, as science does, there is a second question: why is there consciousness at all, why is the information processing in the brain not just that, complex material interactions -- what is this consciousness that seems to be an altogether different something?  Finally, if we start with the givenness of the play of conscious phenomena, we can again ask the question: why are these phenomena present, and why are we present in observing those phenomena -- can we go beyond the notion of phenomena-given-to-us to a sense of integrated presence of both all that appears, subject and objects together?

In short: why is there matter, why is there consciousness, why is there a sense of presence beyond the subject/object split?

6.6. Two Arrows, Two Mythologies

Science tries to answer these questions in one direction. Starting from the belief that matter as we experience it really exists, science tries to explain how complex material processes give rise to consciousness.  And the question of presence is not really a question: because matters appears in linear time, consciousness that depends on matter is located in linear time as well, and is thus only present in the now of past-present-future time.  This is the mythology of science, in which the explanatory arrow moves from matter to consciousness and stops there.

In contrast, we are exploring here the possibility of moving in the opposite direction.  Let us describe our approach as an alternative mythology, where the explanatory arrow moves in the opposite direction.  Note that we are doing much more than simply reversing the arrow.  Doing so would mean to start with consciousness while trying to explain the presence of the mere appearance of matter that way.  That would be a kind of idealist move, in terms of western philosophy.  Rather, we start at an altogether different point, namely with presence. Only from there do we then follow an arrow to consciousness and another arrow from there to matter.

Starting with the presence of sheer appearance, we can watch how that appearance can freeze into a kind of polarization.  Out of sheer appearance, a tension can arise that seems to form two poles, the subject pole and the object pole.  Identifying with the subject pole, we then take a central seat in our world, while judging all phenomena around us as arising in consciousness -- of course now "our" consciousness.  And once we fall in the trap of taking such a supreme central dictator-like position, we are forced to believe that all those objects around us exist as well, in order to complete the story that we are real, a real center of a real realm.

By this time we have moved firmly (in our belief at least, itself a phenomenon) from sheer appearance via mere appearance to existence.  And for anything to exist, we have to view time as moving from past through present to future.  And existence itself requires matter and energy to move in space and time. So there it all is: a complete package with all the pieces of the puzzle that science starts out with.

6.7. Practicing Presence

Even though our mythology talks in terms of arrows from presence to consciousness to matter, once we view the world in terms of matter, and our experience in terms of consciousness, how can we find our way back into presence?

There are many approaches.  Most traditional forms of religious and spiritual practice were invented for this purpose, to get back in touch with a "paradise lost", with a way of being in the world that does not trade in terms of subject and object, nor in terms of past-present-future time.  Meditation, prayer, chanting, various more body-centered techniques such as yoga or tai chi, all of these are invitations to a heightened appreciation of presence.  Most of these techniques are firmly embedded in a particular culture and world view, and they may require some work to be translated to a different way of looking at the world.  Unless we are interested to move deeply into a particular culture or world view, it may be easier, at least initially, to start with something really simple.

Here is such a simple way to explore an appreciation for presence, as such.  The idea is to start with appearance, and then move onto an appreciation for the presence of appearance. We have tried this before, but hopefully the reflections above have given a bit more context to what it is we started to try to do.  So let's start again, from scratch, in a slightly more structured way.

Spend some time in a relaxed position, while simply watching your thoughts, without applying any of the usual evaluations.  Just watch thoughts come and go.  Can you see how they appear and how they disappear?  Without focusing on the meaning or content of each thought, as we normally do, and without being pulled along with some thoughts and repelled by others, just let them be.  When you get used a bit to just watch the appearing of thoughts, you are in a perfect position to let the watching mature into appreciating.  But given that you have dropped all attempts to "buy into" the messages of the thoughts, all you are left with is the presence of thoughts.

And while you can start with thoughts, soon you may as well take all phenomena, all that appears: feelings, memories, fantasies, sensations in your body, sounds or sights or whatever.  Before long, you naturally find yourself appreciating the presence of all that appears.  Rest in that presence.

And each time you get lost in a story, notice that you got lost, smile, drop the story, take a deep breath, and start from scratch, watching again the coming and going of thoughts.  You won't have to wait long for the first thought or feeling or memory or sound or whatever to appear.  Just follow that, see whether you can watch it coming and going.  You can keep your eyes open or keep them closed, as you wish.  You can do this in a quiet place, or also if you like in a busy or noisy place. It's fun to try both.  In either case, just rest in presence, appreciating that presence, the presence of all that appears together with the presence of you-in-your-world.

And watch your tendency to separate yourself from your world as the knowing subject.  Smile when you see that tendency, as you would smile at a child engaged in a pretend-play.  Look at me, dad, now I'm a dragon, I'm going to eat you!  Look at me, mom, now I'm a subject, I'm going to make you into an object!  Smile, and return to appreciating presence, in timeless time, in which no such subject-object separation has ever occurred.